Semi-Public Broadcasting
Jun 30th, 2005 at 1:34 pm by Susie
I read somewhere this morning (I’m pretty sure it was the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby) that we “don’t really need” public broadcasting, what with cable and satellite.
Talk about missing the obvious.
Uh, Jeff, are you aware how many people don’t have cable? The whole point of public broadcasting, I thought, was to provide quality programming to everyone.
Now granted, when you’re a “journalist,” you tend to travel in those urban-elite circles and it’s hard to remember not everyone summers on the Vineyard or has a Blackberry.
But I thought you’d like to know balanced information should be available to everyone - not just the people who can pay extra for it.
Public television needs to be offered, even to those who have cable. Look at who owns the cable channels. It’s basically corporate media…NBC/Universal, CBS/Viacom, Disney/ABC/Time Warner and Newscorp. It’s the same voice over and over, regardless of the programming. So this argument (which must be a talking point since I heard more than one repug mention it) it totally without merit, but anyone who reads you already knows it.
Interestingly, according to the cable industry trade association, there are 73M basic cable subscribers, 66.8% of households. That means there are 33.2% of households which don’t have cable. That’s a whole lot of folks who get just the big four networks plus PBS (if they have television at all, of course). That’s a lot bigger number than I imagined.