Re: 1. Is PBS/NPR still an important part of the brCPoadcasting landscape?
exmagic said:
Jeff, that one line sums up your argument so clearly and succinctly that it deserves reposting:
"Take public money - swear off money for commercials. Take money from businesses, swear off public funds."
I, too, admire the simplicity of Jeff's line of thought here. And if we could roll back the clock to, oh, 1927 or so and rebuild the entire broadcasting model in the U.S. from scratch, it might even work. '
Unfortunately, there's been eight decades of entanglements in the meantime, on both sides of the divide.
Some history? As far back as the late twenties, commercial broadcasters - aided and abetted by the Federal Radio Commission and then by the FCC and paid for by your tax dollars (well, grandpa's tax dollars, anyway) - worked diligently to make sure that colleges, universities, high schools, religious groups, municipalities and anyone else interested in using radio for non-profit purposes got shoved to the far edges of the radio dial, forced to share time on unfavorable terms, or simply lost their licenses outright.
Even playing field? Quick - how many of the 25 class I-A clear channels (allocated in the late 20s/early 30s) went to noncommercial operators? None. And how much did those commercial operators (and the hundreds of others who got prime regional fulltime AM channels) pay for the privilege of using those prime facilities, which even today are worth many tens of millions of dollars and have allowed them to generate untold billions of dollars in revenues over the years? (Money which can be and is taken out of those businesses for the benefit of the owners, something a nonprofit organization can't do.)
Right again - they got 'em for free. From the government. And most of those same operators went on to get - again, for free - the choicest of high-powered VHF TV channels and high-class FM facilities in the fifties and sixties, while noncommercial broadcasters, what few were left, were largely shuffled off to less-favorable UHF channels and the FM ghetto at the bottom of the band. (This, again, by the same government that's allegedly tilting the playing field in favor of commercial broadcasters.)
The formation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967 was meant to tilt a balance that by then had been tipped very strongly in favor of commercial broadcasting interests for...well, for the entire history of American radio and TV up until then.
Here's where it starts to get interesting and a little weird. While "public broadcasting" in other countries involved state-controlled radio and TV monoliths, often with a monopoly on all broadcasting (there was, for instance, no commercial radio in Britain until 1973!), the new "public broadcasting" in the US was a patchwork of local stations controlled by a variety of licensees. There were some public universities, especially in the midwest, that had already been operating "educational" stations on shoestring budgets. There were some newly-formed community groups (like the one that put WVIA on the air). There were some states (especially down south, but also including New Jersey) that went into the broadcasting business, often but not always by way of the state university as a means of extending its educational outreach.
And because our government chose to fund its new public broadcasting system minimally - to the tune of only a couple of dollars per taxpayer per year at the peak of federal funding, and less than half that today - those new broadcasters never had a prayer of operating a viable station solely with government funding. (Compare this to the UK, where the mandatory per-household license fees that fully fund the BBC now total several HUNDRED dollars per year, or Canada, where the CBC is funded by the government to the tune of several dozen dollars per taxpayer per year.)
That's how we ended up with the goofy system of funding we now have for public broadcasting: for stations operating on a shoestring in the late sixties and early seventies, which was nearly all of them, it was scrape or die. All the aspects of public broadcasting that we now take for granted - pledge drives, business underwriting, even the humble NPR tote bag - came out of this era, as stations scrambled to keep the lights on so they could meet their educational missions, which were never fully (or even close to fully) funded by the feds.
Here's where it
really starts to get interesting: Because these things don't happen in a vacuum, public radio, which was quite literally an ill-defined, last-second afterthought in the TV-centric act that created CPB in 1967, slowly started to do a lot of things that commercial radio used to do and had stopped doing in the rush to conglomeration. (A rush, once again, significantly aided by government actions that hugely enriched large commercial radio operators by allowing them to escape expensive public-service obligations and to acquire ever-larger clusters of stations.)
Classical music? Dead now on commercial radio, with a handful of stragglers - but public radio took over that role, and whatever audience went with it. Long-form newscasts? Ditto. Weekend variety and quiz shows? Long gone from commercial network radio, but alive and well on public radio.
It's quite true that in all of those roles, public radio competes - avidly, even - for the same audience and even the same advertising/underwriting dollars that commercial radio does. But I think it's also true that these are all roles (and ultimately ears and ad dollars) that commercial radio, with its 50-year head start on public radio at the national level,
chose to walk away from. Here in Rochester, WXXI didn't set out to end up with the largest local radio news staff. It ended up that way by default as most of the commercial stations in town took advantage of looser FCC rules on public service and shuttered their newsrooms entirely. (And we're lucky, as markets go these days - our lone remaining commercial radio newsroom still originates most of its newscasts locally, unlike a lot of Clear Channel markets where the hourly "local" news is now coming from hundreds of miles away.)
Again, none of those more recent roles are being funded by public dollars. But because of the way the public broadcasting system has evolved haphazardly over the last half-century, organizations like WVIA and WITF and WHYY play multiple roles: they're drawing growing audiences (and listener and underwriter support) for some of their radio programming even as they continue to hew to their original missions of providing the sort of educational and other niche programming that no other medium will provide.
In an ideal world, it might be nice to separate those roles - to put the NPR programming under a completely separate umbrella free of any association with public funding, while providing full public funding (likely at greater expense than present) for the niche stuff like homework call-ins and radio reading services.
We do not live in an ideal world, and never have. The playing field in broadcasting was far from level when "public radio" as we know it began four decades ago, and any fair reckoning of the situation has to acknowledge the many ways in which government action has tilted matters unevenly in
both directions over the years. How many commercial station sales over the next few years will be made possible by lending institutions propped up by federal TARP money? What, for that matter, of the $1 billion in federal bailout money - more than twice the entire $400 million CPB operating budget for 2009 - that just went to Lincoln Financial, parent company of for-profit broadcaster Lincoln Financial Media? That's "taking public money," right - so should those stations therefore be barred from selling commercials?
Or would you argue (as I would) that the bailout money is going to a completely separate arm of Lincoln from the broadcasting unit? And if so, how is that any different from the multiple roles played by public broadcasters these days?
One last thought before I call it quits for the night: there is, I think, a big difference between the public broadcasting system, which was designed from the start to be funded incompletely by government dollars, and the bailouts of failed for-profit companies such as GM and Chrysler, to which Jeff seeks to make a comparison. But if you're going to insist on the comparison, I'd maintain that there's a gray area even there. As I read it, some of the strongest opposition to the infusion of government money into GM/Chrysler came from the senators and House members representing the (largely southern) states where companies like Honda and BMW and Nissan have set up newer auto plants. But those plants didn't get there by accident - they, too, were the recipients of lots of public money at their inception, thanks to the massive tax breaks those states provided to lure them there. The "level playing field" was never quite so level there, either...and if there's a solution, I don't think it can be summed up in one line.
