Capitalism only guarantees as much variety as the market can pay for. Case in point: pantom’s radio paradise. NYC can pay for a hell of a lot of variety, so it gets Afro-Cuban beats laid down a few channels away from talkradio drivel a few channels away from cool jazz. Whereas in Havre, my hometown, we get a small handful of country and gospel, one Top 40 Clear Channel station, one AM station that plays brainrot (aka Easy Listening), and a solitary Voice in the Wilderness, the college radio station. Capitalism works as well as the economy will let it.
Socialism only works as well as a bunch of fatcats in office can force it to work, and it is open to abuses exactly like the one told about in the OP.
Can’t everyone get radio stations via the Internet these days? Both of the stations I mentioned above have sites that play their music 24/7. Doesn’t work if you’re in the car of course, but if you’re sittin’ around surfing through the SDMB, it does.
Of course you know that due to new regulations pushed by the RIAA, Internet broadcasting is in a bit of limbo. Internet radio stations- which are often noncommercial enterprises run by individuals- may face fees (retroactive at that) that far exceed what broadcast radio stations pay and would essentially kill noncommercial Internet radio in its infantcy.
That is the funniest thing I have read all day! At least you can say the coverage is fair and balanced
Futureman: I wish BBC America showed lots of Britcoms! Everytime I turn it on, I get greeted by Changing Rooms and all the other home improvement shows that America has already done knockoffs of for TLC, Discovery channel and that stupid Home channel my mom watches incessantly. Once I got lucky and came across an episode of Chef!, but that’s about it. What I wouldn’t give for some Monty Python or Michael Ball show reruns! (Hell, at this point I’d settle for Noel’s House Party as long as Mr. Blobby showed up a lot!) But if I come across one more redecorating show on that channel, I’m going to go postal, I swear! (okay, maybe not postal, but I will go back to watching the History channel, even if it’s another WWII thing)
Oddly enough, there was a huge amount of public pressure here in Israel last year to take CNN International off the air as well. It was considered too left wing and pro-Palestinian, without the redeeming journalistic qualities of BBC or Sky.
The Israeli cabel companies, BTW, responded in two ways: first of all, they blackmailed CNN into lowering ther fees; then they brought in Fox News as a counterpoint (albeit only to digital cable).
You know on my last trip to London a few weeks back, I was booked in a hotel with nothing but Sky. 24 channels of Sky (well maybe 4 or 5, but it seemed like it).
I was appreciative of their page 3 reviews at one point, but … I wondered what evil deal Sky is cutting with hotels.
Those of us who’ve followed the BBC’s coverage of the six counties over the years would disagree with you there.
There seem to be a lot of objections to their Iraq coverage from the British (well, Scottish) anti-war movement as well, but I didn’t watch enough BBC News during the war to have an opinion myself.
I wish we had our municipal cable company back. We used to have three all-news channels to choose from, CNN, BBC World, and Deutsche Welle. (DW offers news in English and Spanish as well as German, by the way.) Now Telenor Avidi, may they rot in hell, has decided we’ll take CNN and like it.
Actually Stjelenor is worthy of its own pit thread, except there’s only hald a dozen of us who would join in the ranting. They dominate the Norwegian telephone, mobile telephone, and cable TV branches, and they suck at all of them. Remind me again why we wanted to save them from Telia…?
And before you ask, Barks’ dog food, if Viasat could offer the Discovery Channel and BBC Prime, we’d sign up in a heartbeat.
