shakran

But people WANT to know what's going on. I just checked the program listings for my TV for 10p tonight. Subtracting the news channels (my station, our 3 competitors, and the cable news nets), and not counting shopping or religious channels that no one watches anyway, there are 84 channels they COULD be watching, and yet hundreds of thousands watch my station, the three other stations, and millions watch the cable news channels. Why? They WANT to know what's going on.

It's our job to tell them what's REALLY going on, not a bunch of sensationalist bullshit. And I think if we gave it to them, they'd tune in. Look at NPR news. Ratings for NPR are excellent, they have so many people throwing them money every pledge drive that many NPR affilliates have THE nicest broadcast facilities in town by FAR. Minnesota Public Radio is a great example (they're one of the biggest state public radio systems). Look in that town at the rock stations and they've pretty much got the DJ stuffed into a closet. MPR's studios look like something out of a movie. Curved glass studios, state of the art equipment - it's a broadcasters paradise. They don't give you a bunch of sensationalist bullshit either. They file good reports, and despite what the conservatives would have you believe, are not a bunch of wingnut liberals who make shit up.

In other words, people WANT to consume good news. It's just very hard for them to find a good source for it. NPR is great but for much of the country it's not listenable. You can hear it all over Minnesota but if you cross the border to Wisconsin, many of the WPR stations are time-shared college setups with a 20-50 mile range. So the poor schmuck who's in a non-college town might not be able to tune in NPR. And even the guy IN the college town might only get NPR programming in the morning - the students then take over until midnight or later. If the TV stations give these people real news, I still believe they'll tune in.

The American people are stupid and ignorant because the media encourages it. And in a vicious cycle, they then encourage the media to keep putting stupid shit on the air because they don't have any other examples of what to demand.

Put it another way. If you grew up eating only meatloaf and carrots, you wouldn't run around demanding filet mignon EVEN though it's more sophisticated, and tastes better, because you wouldn't know what you were missing. BUT if someone started feeding you the good stuff, you'd usually choose it over "lowbrow" meatloaf.

I think it's the same with media. Sure, people would still from time to time tune out the news in order to watch Family Guy, but the drive to know what's going on in the world is large, and I think people would want to get their information from the best source possible. Currently, all sources are, despite what their promotions departments would have you believe, largely the same.

Regarding the BBC, first off, they're screwing up. That TV license fee should go to the BBC. No question. The government should not have the power to take that money away from them. The laws of the land should also specify that JOURNALISTS operate BBC. That would keep the BBC from doing nothing but air colorbars and collect the money.

Second, the fact that they're now having to compete for viewers isn't necesarilly such a bad thing. What IS a bad thing is that media execs are scared the public won't watch real programming. So they move the real stuff to a less-familiar channel and put "viewer magnets" on the old channels. Moving a show around is a sure way to lose viewers. And what's a worse thing is that the BBC is setting up to compete with ITSELF for viewers. That's just stupid. If one BBC station is airing news at a given time, all of them should air it. It's STUPID to make an important public trust compete with itself.