Theater of the Mind: Like to make up stuff? Seems so. You have no clue. So, an auto mechanic offering free advice on the radio or an attorney answering questions free on the radio is garbage in your mind? That foreign language program that runs each week for the community of 10,000 throughout the city is garbage in your mind? How about the Texas Polish Polka program on Saturday entertaining and preserving an almost lost music form? Certainly you are clueless and I take offense at you deciding I'm a crappy radio operator because I sell time. You should apologize.
I have no problem with foreign language programming that serves its audience well. i realize that for most programmers, leasing time is the only way to get on the air and in general, I'm supportive of that. However if a station owner doesn't understand the language, how would he know whether the organization he's leasing time to is broadcasting hate speech, inciting radicalism, promoting violence or anti-American views? If you learned you were leasing to an organization like that, would you pull their programming? My guess is no. From what we've seen, most owners of these types of stations would keep cashing the checks and look the other way.
In fact, we're seeing almost this exact scenario play out right now with stations brokering Radio Sputik, Putin's state media organization. Except in that case it's not even in a foreign language, it's pure Russian propaganda being broadcast in English, in plain view, by an American adversary who is quite possibly even our biggest enemy. Yet there are people in the field and on this forum who still defend it as just business, and their god given right to make money by broadcasting it.
What I'm mainly talking about, though, is the notion that we should all be on board with stations that broker infomercials most, if not all day long. This is simply the lowest form of broadcasting and contributes nothing to society or the radio landscape. If you want to be a bottom-feeding purveyor of that sort of garbage, much of which is peddling scammy products and services if not outright fraud, then sure it's your legal right. That doesn't make you a good person or upstanding businessman, though. And I don't have to like it or suppress my opinion about how I feel about it. To me, that is not how an honest broadcaster with any kind of integrity conducts business. And it contributes to a negative impression of radio by the public, which is something the industry does not need.
