PUBLIC BROADCASTING and ACCOUNTABILITY

It's amusing that the process of fighting for ratings and concomitantly, for profits, forces a discipline on the networks that occasionally persuades them to abandon their ideologically driven attempts at filtering and spinning the news for fear of being 'scooped'. Occasionally, something resembling accountability actually happens.

Sadly, such a discipline is absent and therefore does not exert any influence on 'public' news like the BBC and PBS. They filter and spin the news to their ideologically driven heart's content.

It's worse in the UK. There, you're assessed approximately the pound equivalent of $75 per year for EVERY TV SET YOU OWN (less for B & W sets than for color) to support BBC. This is not optional. You are FORCED to pay.

We don't know how they enforce the per TV assessment for the BBC in the UK. Maybe they have a TV Inquisition with TV auditors and/or inquisitors who come to each house in the middle of the night or the wee morning hours on random dates, break down the doors, count the TVs, and bill the owners accordingly (NO one expects the TV Inquisition!!).

Then again, maybe people know in advance that the auditors are coming and hide all their TVs in the basement or under their beds or bury them in their back yards.

Maybe they have TV catacombs where they secretly gather to watch TV on uncounted (and therefore illegal) TV sets.

Yet another possibility is that the Brits are 'sheeple' and basically pay up without complaining (others say the same thing about our voluntary compliance with the IRS).

Of course you can't opt out of paying for PBS via your taxes over here either... you just don't know the exact amount of your personal 'TAX HIT' for PBS.

Fortunately, we don't have the UK's highly visible 'flat TV tax' and its intrusive collection system here, though it's somehow doubtful that the usual 'screeching hyenas' who take it upon themselves to champion privacy issues, would raise much of a yelp if we did. After all according to them, unlike National Security, privacy intrusions 'for a good cause' like Public Broadcasting are 'justified'.

In the USA, PBS tax support is stealthily extracted from general revenues. Supposedly, it's not all that much, but we don't know for sure (in the UK you at least know exactly how much the BBC is costing you personally). How public is public? No one knows precisely.

The second source (representing the bulk of the money) consists of corporate sponsors who contribute lavishly to PBS, only to have PBS trash them and capitalism at every programming opportunity.

Then there is the third source of revenue, the beggars. On TV, the PBS panhandling sessions are infinitely more annoying than commercials. Some commercials can at least be funny or entertaining or informative.

It sometimes appears that the 'idle rich' volunteers with nothing better to do with their time are manning the phones and doing all this begging. Perhaps these same begging skills explain how they got to be rich in the first place. It's their 15 minutes of 'fame'.

A somewhat different scenario emerges with PBS in smaller markets. There seems to be considerable evidence that in smaller markets, the big contributors to Public Broadcasting (they tend to be leftists) who respond to the panhandling drives, pretty much get (buy themselves?) the opportunity to have a say (at minimum, a veto) in the local station's programming content.

It's like renting air time for themselves and their ideological predilections at substantially less than commercial ad rates. The result is an even more leftward skew in the programming of such stations than for PBS as a whole. That's substantially more ego gratifying for them than a mere 15 minutes of 'fame'.

Consider the following oxymoron:

"Conservative commentator for NPR".

In spite of this, shows like the "Lehrer News Hour" still insist on the fantasy that somehow they present 'professional and unbiased news' (unlike National Public Radio, Public TV's Lehrer program actually has the occasional conservative commentator, but the totality of his show's information flow is still egregiously leftward biased).

In the midst of all this, it's amazing that occasionally good programming still gets to see the light of day on PBS. Be that as it may, at least we have choices here (the BBC has a near monopoly in England, and choices are much more limited).

In the USA, we can 'Vote with our Remote'!

Having this kind of empowerment as a result of having choices is more than enough to counteract whatever we may not like about commercial broadcasting. If we don't like what we see on a particular channel, we can push that button on our remote and go elsewhere.
When enough people push the button that gets them away from a particular channel on a consistent basis, that channel will eventually 'get the message' (in spite of exceptions like Dan Rather).

It brings about a kind of accountability and democracy that's not available in government imposed 'one size fits all' information monopolies, or information oligopolies like the three networks had 20 years ago.

* MEDIA BIAS AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH ISSUES
http://members.fortunecity.com/veritas1/aopedix1.html#media