CSotD: Of pledge breaks, city folks and the public interest
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Yesterday, the House pushed through a bill defunding public broadcasting, in an effort to make a grandstanding ploy to energize their nutbase. The bill probably won't even get a vote in the Senate, much less pass.
I can relate to today's Knight Life strip, though, because we just went through another pledge drive here. Yet another time when the flow of news is interrupted by chitchat and groveling and, no, we don't need more of it.
The dreariness of pledge week aside, I don't resent the fact that users help pay for public broadcasting. In fact, my problem at the moment is that freelance writers don't have a lot of extra anything, and while I make a donation each year, I really can't make one each drive without dividing my gift into genuinely humiliating amounts, so I end up listening to the breaks and getting really guilted out because I can't pick up the phone and call. (We're talking radio here; I spend so little time watching PBS that I feel nothing but annoyance when I see something interesting on the schedule and realize it's most assuredly a fundraising trap.)
The problem with defunding public radio, however, is that, while its true that NPR itself gets only a small percentage of funding from the government, that's not the case for rural stations, where the local public station may be the only one with any newsgathering resources and the only station in the area with actual, physical staff capable of cutting in when there is an ice storm or other natural disaster. I've lived a couple of places where, when something critical happens, all the commercial stations go on happily playing preprogrammed music from satellites and only the public station can tell you what roads are open, where you can get needed supplies or just what, in general, is going on.
And, day to day, it's often the only source of regional news. If you want to know what's going on in the state legislature, public radio is where you find out, aside from a two minute sound bite at 6 and 11 p.m. on local TV, newspapers often having shut down their state capital news staffs and gone to minimal coverage from the wire.
These rural communities, which rely on NPR stations that not only have news staffs to pay but a need to maintain the numerous additional transmission towers that serve their farflung listeners, are not often in the best financial position to begin with, and would be hard-pressed to fund all the costs of that broadcast lifeline on their own.
It's no surprise that the conservatives talk about market forces and supply-and-demand and how public broadcasting should be self-supporting like commercial broadcasting. The fact that broadcasting was founded on the principal that the airwaves belong to the public is lost on people whose grasp of history is so nebulous that they can't tell New Hampshire from Massachusetts and think Abraham Lincoln was one of the Founding Fathers.
Whatever they know or don't know, commercial radio stopped serving the public a couple of decades ago. But if this debate is going to be carried on by residents of the Boston/DC megalopolis, along with folks from Chicago and LA, those of us out in the hinterlands are just not going to be heard.
It's the same-old same-old. (see diagram at right) People in rural Africa have better cellphone coverage than people in rural America because the Africans, for all the corruption in many of their governments, maintain some sense of a social contract that includes everyone, not just the people in the urban centers.
Senator Olympia Snowe has compared extending cell coverage to rural Maine with the REA extending electricity to farms in the 1930s – not a nicety but an economic necessity and a matter of public safety. I hope she feels the same way about public broadcasting, because there are a lot of people on the other side of the aisle who should be sympathetic but who live in Saul Steinberg land and just don't get it.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned nutbase doesn't mind that the action in the House is largely a bunch of grandstanding that will produce nothing of substance. But the same true believers who give the House a pass on wasting everyone's time are going coocoo for Coco Puffs over the fact that the president took time to fill out his bracket for the NCAA tournament, which they apparently feel was an activity that kept him from doing anything else for, I dunno, several days or something. That he sat down in the morning and said, "Let's see … Japan, Libya, basketball … I can only think about ONE."
Of course, they're still pining for this genial old duffer:
Addendum: And this will probably be all over Facebook anyway, but …
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