Why not? It’s no different from commercial stations broadcasting specials and stuff during sweeps months to boost viewership.
Lawrence Welk and Britcoms make up one night of programming where I live. I don’t watch WITF on that night.
Children’s programming like Clifford, Sesame Street, and so forth, make up a full eleven hours per day, from about 7:00 in the morning, until 6:00 in the evening, with breaks from 1-2 p.m. when they show cooking and crafts shows. They re-run Sesame Street at 7, after NewsHour. Starting at 8, they get into more adult-oriented programming with Nova, National Geographic, Nature, Antiques Roadshow, and that sort of stuff. My local station also has a one-hour community-affairs program on Thursday nights.
I’d suggest that you look at the TV listings for your local public station before you accuse them of showing crap.
They show Are You Being Served? every night, they’ve also refused to air such programs as POV, interrupted opera performances to show city council meetings (Remember back when PBS was airing the complete Der Ring Cycle? Yeah, Nashville didn’t get to see all of it, because the local station had to air the city council meeting. They didn’t bother to air the portion that we missed at some other time.), and filled the airwaves with hunting and fishing shows, instead of decent shows. I’d suggest you not assume all local PBS affiliates have identical programming schedules as yours does.
Admittedly, they’ve stopped doing that fairly recently, but up until a couple of years ago they did it. It was part of the deal because they were ran by the Nashville school board. Why they also didn’t choose to air the school board meetings as well, I don’t know.
You want The Ten Tenors, Andre Rieux, and a night full of disco at other times, too? :eek: At least they currently isolate this crap during the begathons.
My local NPR station pushes online pledging so while PBS’s pledge periods get longer and more often the NPR pledge periods get shorter and less often, all while budgets go up and government participation goes down. And NPR mostly keeps to the regular programming during its pledges, figuring that’s why people tune in.
I read an interesting article a while back on these musical nostalgia fundraiser programs. They’re the brainchild of a guy who started out working for a local PBS station (somewhere, I don’t recall where) and whose job responsibilities included helping out on the fundraising-programming side of things. He was, IIRC, still in his mid-20’s when he put together a program of do-wop acts – again, for the local drive. It was a tremendous success, raising a record amount of money – and, since it cost very little to produce, also represented a fantastic return on the money spent for the program, to boot.
The program was licensed to other PBS stations. The guy quit his job and formed a production company, and has been churning out the musical-nostalgia fundraiser concerts ever since, and they’ve remained a reliably successful fundraising tool.
Personally, I say the more power to him. Even if you don’t care for them, you have to admit that these shows don’t dominate the regular programming – which this kind of fundraising helps to pay for.
One more thing: anyone who loves music is going to have at least one Achilles’ Heel regarding these shows. If that dude ever puts together a dream-team lineup of punk/post-punk/New Wave/art rock acts, I would probably deplete my bank account to support PBS in a fit of fan-girl gratitude.
Actually, I think there’s enough material out there to support at least two such shows: punk and post-punk, and the New Wave/art rock scene… or four, if you divvy each category into US and UK/Euro categories…
Hey, I didn’t say I didn’t WATCH them! Where else can you see some (most) of those people these days? Though I’m glad Herb has found a slightly more age-appropriate Peaches for the Disco show. On the Soul show he was singing “Reunited” with a girl who looked about fifteen. Young enough to be his great-granddaughter. Plus he’s so creepy looking to begin with. I was grossed out.
The difference is that I can choose whether or not to continue my involvement with the sponsor of the program, by buying or not buying their product. If I attempt to discontinue my involvement with the sponsor of PBS, they’ll throw my ass in jail. Think about it.
I’ve got your weird disco shit hangin’ right here…
Yesterday we were teleconferencing with our Amsterdam office and they were telling us about the company Christmas party there. One of the events was getting everybody in a large room with a disco ball, turning out the lights and having everyone dance to disco. But the thing is everyone had their own headphones and they were all playing different disco songs. No one was listening to the same thing.
Who thought this would be a good idea… that you and your coworks would all disco dance in a darkened room together with the bonus being that everyone would stay out of sync with each other?
If I’m reading this correctly, in 2001, the federal government’s contribution to PBS was only 20¢/person. Even if you’re paying way more than your share of the tax burden, that hardly seems worth complaining about.
Yeah, when appropriations time comes around, PBS goes crying poormouth to the Congress, claiming that, if they don’t get more money, they’ll have to cancel “Sesame Street”. But when pledge time comes around, its, “Oh, we get hardly anything from the government, so you have to cough it up or the only thing your kids will have to watch will be WWF.”
I suppose it is technically possible to reconcile the two positions, but it sure looks like playing one off against the other.
Do you get the idea I’m not a big fan of PBS?
The latest figures are for 2000, so this is probably outdated. Public TV had a budget of $1.6 billion. We’re going to ignore state and local and university funding, because that is a YMMV thing. All Americans pay federal taxes, so we’ll stick with that.
16.4 percent of $1.6 billion is $262,400,000. This means that, with 294,975,221 people (according to the Census Bureau), every American pays about ninety cents per year for all of public television.
I think more tax money goes to pay for toilet paper for office buildings than goes to support public broadcasting.
