Bloomfield Hills, Mich. — If you’ve been listening to the radio, you are likely to be aware that this is one of those many dreaded times of year when your local public radio station is doing fund-raising.

And if you’ve been listening to the buzz in some Jewish circles, you know that a lot of us are deeply offended by the way those stations accept the National Public Radio news reports that give a lot more attention to the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of the IDF than they do to the agonies of Israeli civilians wounded and killed by Palestinian terrorists.

You may even have heard discussion of a proposal to encourage Jewish Americans to withhold their usual generous support of those local stations until NPR cleans up its act on reporting from Jerusalem.

It’s a dumb idea, unworthy of an intelligent audience that has a much more effective way of calling attention to NPR’s factual errors and omissions in its Mideast coverage. What we should be doing is sending our regular checks to those local stations along with a letter to the news director asking him or her to help us persuade NPR to clean up its act.

We need to be clear on the distinction between the 680 local NPR-affiliate stations, many of which are owned or operated by non-profits like a university, and the network itself, a part of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which includes the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television network.

Overall, the corporation gets about a third of its nearly $2.5 billion from federal, state and local taxes, with 18 percent from business sponsors and 25 percent from individual listeners whose contributions go primarily to the local stations, which, in turn, buy programming from the network.

Cutting off our funds to the local station is much more likely to affect the quality of local programming — music, talk, local news and the like — than it is to convince Mike Shuster or Linda Gradstein to do more balanced research or more sharply question their incessant stream of pro-Palestinian guests.

Further, most of us don’t want to throw out the whole barrel of good apples — “Fresh Air” interviews, “Car Talk,” “Prairie Home Companion” and the like — because we find that parts of “All Things Considered” or “Weekend Edition” are way off base.

At a time when some Jewish benefactors are reportedly looking for ways to help provide a liberal media voice that would offset the occasional excesses of right-wing talk radio, we should appreciate the generally intelligent and informed NPR programs. All we want to do is to fix the broken bits of anti-Israel slant.

The failings of NPR coverage when it comes to Mideast coverage are documented in convincing detail by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA — www.camera.org) as are the repeated lack of balance, fairness and historical context in other media outlets such as the Cable News Network or the Chicago Tribune and Philadelphia Inquirer. But local station directors who might persuade the network editors to deal with the problem likely haven’t taken the time to review CAMERA’s insightful presentations.

Fund-raising appeals are when our station heads really pay attention to us; we can actually get them on the phone when we are calling in our pledge amounts. Let’s make it plain to them both how much we support the public broadcasting system as a vital, thoughtful alternative to commercial channels and how much we are offended by the reportorial bias against the Jewish state. They’ll get the message.