jabba17 said:
I've never quite understood these religious operations that seek to cover every square inch of the country with a signal that may or may not be listenable with programming that may or may not be listenable.
Toccoa Falls has been doing it since Marconi was a boy, and Moody tried it for a while. I don't begrudge a church running their one little LPFM to reach their local community, but how many repeaters, translators, and LPFMs does it take before you wind up blowing a fortune?
I understand the Great Commission, but is covering an area with a crazy quilt of signals the most efficient way to do that?
This post could be a whole new thread on its own. Like trying to have an intelligent thread on how radio deals with political content broadcasting (a.k.a. Talk Radio), trying to nurture this thread along may be like riding herd over the crusades. ;D
I suspect you and I share a concept here: Religious broadcasters get the mechanics of broadcasting and the mechanics of "spreading the faith" all tangled up... so it appears.
It is interesting to observe that Catholic broadcasting is on the increase. I don't pick up one of their stations here so I don't know what is their typical content. But almost all other religious broadcasting is carried out by Christian groups that are Evangelical, focused on delivering a "transaction based faith" to the masses.
Well, Duh! you say. But the second half of that thought is seldom stated or pondered by people interested in broadcasting. The Christian groups that are..... what can we use to describe them?... Mainline, traditional, liberal, social-action oriented.... take your choice... have pretty much no, nada, zilch interest in putting money or time or energy into radio broadcasting. They would not be opposed to making some use of the medium, but it is way, way, way down on the priority list.
There does seem to be some variety in religious radio broadcasting, and that is built around interpretation of the religious message, but they all come out of the evangelical mold. And most Evangelicals are not keen on listening to another Evangelical with a different version of the story. And the non-evangelicals have little or no interest in ANY form of the Evangelical story.
So. If you and I and 10 of our close friends were invited to sit down with the FCC or some study committee within the FCC and try to work out a broadcasting policy on what is a reasonable regulatory way to "divvy" up a certain amount of the spectrum for religious broadcasting, what would be our contribution to the conversation?
How much spectrum should be devoted to religious programming. Since our form of government from the get-go was ordered to keep its hands off "established religion", what non-governmental entity is going to play referee and decide when on stream of faith-tradition is hogging to much spectrum at the expense of other streams.... and what is the missing faith-stream has no players that want to form a team?
Religious radio currently works under "The Golden Rule":
They who can scratch up the gold to buy the time will be heard.
