He says that like it's a bad thing: "Liberal Filmmaker Ken Burns Gets DRAGGED on Twitter/X for Claiming Rural Americans Won’t Get News Without PBS and NPR".
A) This is a preposterous argument on its face. People would need TV or radio to get news from, respectively, PBS and NPR; so, there are clearly other options (not necessarily good ones, because network news is at least as biased as the taxpayer-subsidized stuff, but PBS/NPR obviously isn't the only game in town). But that's not even the case; most people in rural areas either have cable or satellite access to non-network (and non-PBS) news sources.
B) Is Ken Burns really concerned about the rubes out in the sticks, or is he worried about his gravy train getting derailed?
What Ken Burns fails to mention here is that he has relied on PBS to air his documentary films. He has a vested interest in the success of public broadcasting.
Hey Ken, if your local PBS and NPR go down the tubes, try moving to Australia. Our ABC will look after you! And they've got this hole in the schedule now where QandA used to be.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm stuck out here in the edge of a corn field limited to poor choices like free HDTV over-the-air broadcasting that includes PBS, or 90Mbps fiber optic internet service with countless options of news sources, or satellite service with all that it offers(very little of it I'm interested in paying for), and probably others that I'm not thinking of.
ReplyDeleteActually, what Burns means is that those poor people aren't getting fed the approved propaganda!
I'm Anonymous. I got signed out of google again, somehow. Annoying.
DeleteWhere I live we wait for the Wells Fargo coach to arrive every week with the latest news. Written in cuneiform on clay tablets.
ReplyDeleteI need NPR!
ReplyDeleteOtherwise I'd get my news through teletypes delivered by autogyro.