On Feb 24, 6:30 pm, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 8:04 AM, Mark J. <[email protected]> wrote: > > The problem is that THE PUBLIC DOESN'T WANT SERIOUS NEWS. > > > Serious news on television is only successful when it has no > > competition. (SNIP) > > Yes but...this should not matter. The New York Times would make more > money if they published nothing but horoscopes and photos of naked > women, but that is not an excuse for them to do so. Unlike Disney > Corp, ABC News should be in the business of reporting the news, not > the business of making money.
I agree with you, but in this atmosphere, it's not going to happen. If the FCC started requiring that every broadcast station's news programs had to contain serious and purposeful journalism determined by the people in charge, the cries of "CENSORSHIP!" would be far and wide and Fox News would be livid. (That, of course, would be if the FCC was allowed to monitor non-broadcast content, as the regulators do everywhere else.) In the end, if we want serious news from our broadcast sources in this country, the only way to get it is from not-for-profit sources. In a perfect world, NPR and PBS would be one company and have a BBC-sized news operation--but of course, this country let the businessmen call the shots from the beginning and shut out and put in the poorhouse public broadcasting for the first five decades of American broadcasting, where it's had to play catchup ever since, without the steady and dependable funding that the BBC has. I would gladly an annual license fee on my TV set to fund a public broadcasting system that served the public with both mass and class and a top-drawer news operation, as the Beeb does--but unfortunately, the right-wing would be screaming "TAX!" and so public broadcasting continues to have to rattle the tin cup and run the Suze Orman infomercials and doo-wop concerts to pay the bills. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
