I find it odd, considering some of the vehement opinions often expressed on the subject by many people on these boards, that financially FR operations, in comparison to that of KOS etc, are much like PBS versus commercial television!
Yep, Jim and John Robinson have been even cleverer than PBS in hiding all that taxpayer money they've been getting from the government!
As to fixing the problem - the only thing that comes immediately to mind, assuming we want FR to continue to be the BBC to the liberals CNN,...
Are you sure you really want to make that analogy? First, there's that troublesome matter of government funding of the BBC. Secondly, the BBC and its personnel are even deeper into leftist moonbattery than CNN. Although your current profile doesn't show it I seem to recall that you're in Germany, so perhaps your skewed perspective of the BBC is understandable... /g
... is for us the users of the site to introduce it to more of our friends/relatives/associates, with the idea of expanding the user base, and therefore the donator base.
This last, of course, is an excellent suggestion. Increasing the donor base would be the most helpful thing possible.
I'm afraid I must admit I made the analogy in the knowledge it might get a "rise"! Sorry about that.
Yep, Jim and John Robinson have been even cleverer than PBS in hiding all that taxpayer money they've been getting from the government!
Heh, well I'm not an expert on the operations of PBS, but I would assume they are extremely strapped for cash and are forced to be not too particular as to where it comes from! Of course I know FR is a private organisation. The point I was trying to make is that FR, like PBS, is not reliant on advertising money (and therefore is not beholden to advertiser pressure).
Are you sure you really want to make that analogy? First, there's that troublesome matter of government funding of the BBC. Secondly, the BBC and its personnel are even deeper into leftist moonbattery than CNN. Although your current profile doesn't show it I seem to recall that you're in Germany, so perhaps your skewed perspective of the BBC is understandable... /g
Well actually I'm British, so am a bit more clued up on the Beeb and its operations than a German. Yes I think I do want to make that analogy, principally because the analogy is to do with FR being paid for by voluntary donation rather than advertising. Contrary to popular american opinion, the BBC is NOT funded by the British government. It is funded by an (admittedly) compulsory licence fee (although it also makes quite a lot of money through selling its products abroad, and it also has a very nice sideline in its own record and book labels). The point is that all of the licence fee is all posted to the BBC. The UK government is little more than a clearing house.
As to the comment about the Beeb's left wing moonbattery, in the first place the fact that some of the people who work there live on a different planet from real earth does not invalidate the principle of having a broadcasting system that works by a direct payment from viewers, as opposed to an indirect payment of 2-3cents on everything you buy in the shops, which ultimately is where a commercial broadcasting operation gets its cash from. Its a bit akin to comments from people, (some of them on this site) like "Oh I never watch Television. Its a very bad thing, full of bias/immorality/whatever they don't like". Wrong. Television is wonderful. It's the greatest form of communication existant (although the internet is catching up) and has an enormous potential for informing, educating and entertaining people. It's what's ON television that's the problem! In the same way, I think the principles behind the BBC are great - it's the current way those principles are sometimes applied I have a beef with!
The second point is more involved. What non-Britons often don't realise is that the BBC is very, very departmentally based. The individual departments (current affairs, light entertainment, news, sport, religious affairs and so on) have a lot of autonomy - much more so than in a contemporary commercial broadcaster. So yes, the natural history unit (prop David Attenborough) is full of enviromentalists of varying shades of wackiness, but the light entertainment dept produces "Top Gear", which regularly ridicules the whole concept of AGW and green affairs. In many cases, the departments and individual program makers are often on the side of their own target audiences! So not all the personnel of the BBC are moonbats, not by any stretch of the imagination. It may seem more like that from your perspective, if the only things you see are BBC news (which incidentally is very pro Irish Nationalism - boy were there some arguments with the UK government over that!)