When what is rational is not what is "right"

It is more like a very poorly worded version of the question, "What have I missed?", that manifested as me attempting to sound wise while in reality sounding foolish.

This is something I'm confused by. Musicians perform on the street for donations. I enjoy this enough that if they played with magical instruments that I could only hear after making a donation. I would gladly pay. And if no one donated, the street musicians would not play. Therefore, by Kantian/timeless considerations, I should donate. But when I go into Kantian/timeless mode, it seems much more important to give that money to the Against Malaria Foundation. Should I donate to street musicians or not?

This is an instance of the more general question of whether I want to apply timeless reasoning to my selfish goals.

An interesting complication is if the radio is supported by large private donations. Then a non-wealthy listener might want to donate so that wealthy listeners would donate. Then the question is how much to donate. If wealthy donors behave like you, you could donate a fraction x of your income such that donations of x of wealthy donors' income would suffice to support the radio. If wealthy donors behave like you in deciding whether or not to donate, but behave differently from you when deciding how much to donate, you could adopt the policy of making a minimum donation in the hopes that wealthy donors will similarly make donations, and that enough of them will decide for their own reasons to donate substantially.

I would define right in this instance as what is required by moral/ethical/etiquette standards. However what is rational is the correct thing to do (assuming we are all on the same page that the rational choice is the correct choice).

Sorry for the ethnocentricity of my post. In the US, most radio stations are private/corporate entities funded by advertising, public radio stations are usually not-for-profit and do not have ads. If you believe their numbers between 50 and 90% of the funding comes from "members", people who donate to the station (the fraction depends on the station). Several times a year they do a pledge drive. For a week or two, they interrupt the usual programming with 5-10 minute pledge breaks, when the radio staff tell you how much they need to raise and what gifts they will give you for donating. Traditionally they have multiple people waiting by phones to take callers who pay over the phone or arrange a monthly payment plan (pledging). Again if you believe their numbers, only 10% of listeners actually pony up and become members. Hope that clears it up.

As a non-American, the way I listen to American public radio is via podcasts. And the programmes that I listen to are, in general, about topics I find interesting.

The factory radio in my vehicle (which is almost as old as me) does not have the capacity to play a podcast and I do not own an mp3 player. Also, the public radio station plays programming which is produced by National Public Radio during my commute (I'm not listening to Wayne's World Radio or the like). This programming is, in my experience, fairly neutral news, which varies from super serious, important news to fascinating fluff pieces.
I find that when left to my own devices for news, I have something akin to confirmation bias, where I only pick news that is really important and interesting to me, which tends to be a fairly narrow picture of the world (mostly science and tech news). NPR's news tends to push my boundaries enough that I get a better picture of what is happening in the world. So if I were to download podcasts of NPR news programming, I would the be getting the same service also without paying. I guess I could contribute directly to NPR instead of local station (which in turn pays NPR for the programming) but if everyone did that, there would be not local stations, which would possibly mean less funding for NPR, which would negatively impact their programming, which I find valuable. It is really the same scenario on a bigger scale.