[at-l] Re: PBS was THE ATC & Membership therein - a bit longish

[jbullar1 at twcny.rr.com (Jim Bullard)]

At 09:32 AM 6/5/2005 -0400, Bror8588@aol.com wrote:
>The upfront nature of the plea for money by Public Broadcasting is not a 
>quality but an admission that they cannot operate efficiently within their 
>budget.

Wrong. It was set up that way in the beginning to make stations responsible 
to the viewers rather than the advertisers. The public funding was never 
intended to fully support PBS. A local NPR station is a fine example. I 
used to like it because they played classical music (yeah, I know, I'm a 
throw back). It has evolved into almost full time talk radio (think 
non-stop AT-L arguments from 6AM to 3PM every day with a 2 hour break then 
2 hours of news). Why, because the majority of people paying to be members 
want that. On commercial radio/TV the advertisers want programming that is 
a clone of something that 1) has already garnered a majority audience and 
2) doesn't offend their customers. They are not about to sponsor anything 
that appeals to a small audience. Lately they aren't doing so well with 
that formula because cable has siphoned off large chunks of the audience.

More recently public broadcasting has had its public funding repeatedly cut 
thanks to those who feel that it shouldn't be publicly funded. Ironically 
those same people complain about the appeals for contributions. I guess 
they think money grows on microphones. What's even more ironic is that 
although they say would like to see PBS/NPR disappear in favor of all 
commercial broadcasting, they are familiar with the programs and fund 
raising efforts of PBS/NPR. HMMMM? Does that mean they are listening and 
watching?

To bring this back to the AT and hiking (remember the AT?) in a sense PBS 
is in the same situation as ATC. They get a mandate and some money from the 
federal government but they have to get the rest from the public that uses 
the resource they manage and... they have to keep both happy. If you think 
they are rolling in money (either ATC or PBS) check out their budgets 
sometime. In most cases both are doing a huge job for relatively little money.