A "highbrow" news organization -- possible?

[Mr Skeptic]

In order to sell that commercial air time, its product has to be good.

 

I'm going to have to disagree with that. It's product has to be popular not good, to get the audience to attract advertising bucks. Also cheap, to make a profit. And just like we fill our food with salt, sugar, fats, preservatives, artificial colors, artificial flavors, substitutes, etc that make the product cheaper or more popular, but not necessarily better, I expect the same would be true with broadcasting. The profit motive is all well and good when the objective is profit, but what about when it is not? As pointed out, a lot of the alternatives to NPR are other publicly funded sources.

[Pangloss]

While we're at it let's make radio astronomers pay for their spectrum, too, or auction it off if they can't ante up.

 

That's not a valid comparison, and seems to be another attempt to use ridicule as an argument.

 

I do not support or advocate charging beneficial services for their airspace. I'm saying that IF we decide that NPR and public radio are no longer beneficial, which I believe is supported by some pretty good arguments, we would have the added benefit of being able to sell off the airwaves for some pretty good cash which we could apply to the debt.

 

But the underlying purpose of managing frequency access is avoiding crosstalk, which obviously doesn't apply to radio astronomy, which only receives signals rather than transmitting them, except for the odd experiment here and there.

 

I'm going to have to disagree with that. It's product has to be popular not good, to get the audience to attract advertising bucks. Also cheap, to make a profit. And just like we fill our food with salt, sugar, fats, preservatives, artificial colors, artificial flavors, substitutes, etc that make the product cheaper or more popular, but not necessarily better, I expect the same would be true with broadcasting. The profit motive is all well and good when the objective is profit, but what about when it is not? As pointed out, a lot of the alternatives to NPR are other publicly funded sources.

 

Prove that NPR is "good", and not just popular with a certain audience. Seems like the same problem to me.

[swansont]

That's not a valid comparison, and seems to be another attempt to use ridicule as an argument.

 

I do not support or advocate charging beneficial services for their airspace. I'm saying that IF we decide that NPR and public radio are no longer beneficial, which I believe is supported by some pretty good arguments, we would have the added benefit of being able to sell off the airwaves for some pretty good cash which we could apply to the debt.

 

But the underlying purpose of managing frequency access is avoiding crosstalk, which obviously doesn't apply to radio astronomy, which only receives signals rather than transmitting them, except for the odd experiment here and there.

 

What are the arguments that public radio is no longer beneficial? I've only seen monetary/competition arguments here, which must presume that the existing services have value. If they didn't, there would be no potential commercial product, and no whining by the author about government funding affecting competition.

 

 

Contamination (minimizing noise) is the reason you have sections of the spectrum set aside.

[Pangloss]

Are you going to respond to what I just said?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

There's plenty of frequency bands reserved for radio astronomy that cannot be used for commercial purposes. (Far more than is reserved for public radio broadcasting, for example.) They're reserved to prevent interference with astronomical observations.

[Pangloss]

On another note, two-time Pulitzer winner and former Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll had this to say about the subject a couple of days ago:

 

When the British Broadcasting Corporation recently came under conservative criticism for allegedly tilting to the left, its managers conducted a review. They concluded that the BBC's reporting of particular stories was not typically biased against conservatives but that news subjects of concern to the right, such as immigration and business, were disproportionately neglected. A course correction broadened the BBC's audience and political support. NPR might benefit from a similar self-examination.

 

He's mainly focused on why increasing NPR's funding would be a good idea, but I thought the above quote was an interesting take on the bias issue. At any rate, the whole article is worth a read:

 

Why Fox News should help fund NPR