I watch KQED out of San Francisco. I can’t remember when it was NOT on a pledge “break”. It’s been at least a year when every week there are days of nothing but “Hits of the 60s” or “Rick Steve’s Marathon” or something else involving pledging.
I send in a generous check every year because I enjoy PBS and usually watch it a lot, but at this point I’m almost at the “fuck it” stage.
Feeling the same way. Watching WTVS in Detroit, pledge week programming seems to be every third or fourth week, and it’s often very old and very lightweight, as in old concerts or motivational speaker/ health woo.
It’s making me rethink my “sustaining” monthly contributions.
I agree. It certainly doesn’t make me inclined to give any more.
Why can’t they just keep the regular programming and insert a request for pledges. Why do they have to use the “telethon” format with special programs that pre-empt the regular favorites?
there is more to pay for.
i think many stations are running 2 or 3 subchannels. even with lots of repeats stations have to pay for more shows than they did before.
stations are also doing a greater web presence. streaming also.
i don’t know about the payback for all the costs for the digital transition. maybe more costs for more new equipment and loans needing to get paid off.
NPR is getting to be almost as bad. Or at least the local station is, but I assume it is a national trend. It used to be they had a one week pledge drive in the spring, and another in the fall. Now they’re having a couple extra 2-3 day “mini” drives throughout the year.
I think of them as “Beg-a-thons”. And they do seem to be occurring more often.
Each station sets its own pledge schedule. Where I work, we only two two major drives a year, in the spring and December. The other biggie for the rest of the PBS system is August, which we don’t do. We occasionally have isolated, program-specific fundraisers, but they aren’t very frequent.
Rest assured, we hate them too.
This is because the US has the most outrageously underfunded public broadcasting system in the entire civilized world. Having critical infrastructure like public broadcasting begging for voluntary contributions is the equivalent of having a medical system where your doctor has to spend half his time standing on a street corner with a monkey selling pencils.
A bridge is “critical infrastructure”. Public broadcasting is a nice thing to have.
Yeah, we’re the most worstest country there is!!
PBS is programming for rich, white folks. I don’t see any reason to subsidize their viewing habits.
This leads us into deep waters well outside the scope of CS. I’ll just say this. A bridge is part of a critical transportation infrastructure. Public broadcasting, in my view, is part of the critical broadcast media infrastructure necessary for a vibrant democracy, as opposed to commercial for-profit broadcasters increasingly under the concentrated ownership of a small number of self-serving owners and their sponsors. This is why nations fund public broadcasting. It’s an investment in the commonwealth, to use the word in its most generic sense.
I used to donate to PBS, until I found that they seemed to use the majority of my donation to ask for more donations. I like PBS, I watch a lot of PBS, but just because I give money, don’t use that as an excuse to ask for more. Continuously.
I made that mistake once with CARE. Instead of my money going to feed poor kids, I think it just funded their ability to junk-mail me for the next five years asking for more money.
They do seem to be doing it a lot more often than they used to.
PBS did not exist until 1970. Are you really suggesting we didn’t have a “vibrant democracy” up until that time?
PBS does not have a news department. Some of its programming fits under the heading of news/analysis, but a great deal of it is entertainment. Given the explosion of cable and satellite TV channels, it has a lot of competition in both areas.
I hope those who value PBS and NPR continue to donate to fund it. They provide programming I occasionally enjoy (NPR more than PBS) and sometimes even value. But it is difficult to argue that they comprise “critical infrastructure” without which the country would stagnate into a nightmare Clear Channel/Koch Bros. monopoly.
Though that scenario does make for a good fundraising appeal. 
American public television (and radio) is for rich white folks because it financed by the donations of rich white folks. Its elitist, excessively “worthy,” (and frequently sucky) character is an effect or result, not a cause or justification, of the way it is financed. In other countries with different ways of financing their public broadcasting systems, the result is a much broader range of fare appealing to a much wider range of the population. (The BBC is exhibit A here, although, of course, if an American’s experience of the BBC’s output derives mostly from PBS, NPR and BBC America, they may obtain a very false impression of its true scope.)
I’ll have it be known that this non-rich black folk enjoys a good Antiques Roadshow marathon from time to time.
Yes, the very manifest and serious problems of American ‘democracy’ (and civil society in general), its long-standing systemic corruption for one thing, the way government is almost entirely dominated by monied interests, to the detriment of the interests of the vast majority of the American people, and its more recent partisan gridlock and reactionary posturing, have a great deal to do with the almost exclusively commercial nature of America’s mass media. You are right, of course, that the creation of PBS did virtually nothing to ameliorate these deep seated problems, but that is because PBS is a tiny, shoestring operation (compared to the massive commercial media corporations), built upon an absolutely terrible funding model (the fact that it does not actually provide much money, and leads to large proportions of the available air-time being given over to tedious and alienating pledge drives being amongst the least terrible aspects of it - see my previous post). If America were to have a proper public broadcasting system, as other countries do, instead of this ridiculous, half-assed and ill conceived sop, then that might actually do the country some real good.