Posted on 03/14/2011 6:12:01 PM PDT by La Lydia
If it feels as though Suze Orman and the cast of Les Misérables have taken over your local public television station, youre not dreaming. The current pledge drive comes to an official end on March 20...and the baby boomer concerts, Laugh-In retrospective, doo-wop groups and self-help gurus will go on hiatus. But in a few short months, those programs and similar ones will be back.
Since 2005, the average amount of time PBS member stations devote to on-air pledge drives has increased by 9 percent...Some stations now devote a full 10 weeks a year to the special shows. Driving the expansion is the same theme weaving through much of public television: money. Financially troubled state governments are rapidly cutting and sometimes eliminating subsidies for public media.
In Washington, the threat of losing federal funding looms large, with last weeks turmoil at NPR, PBSs public radio counterpart, only adding to opponents ammunition. The economic downturn crippled many foundations that traditionally support public media, and corporations have cut back underwriting.
That leaves stations turning to viewers...While many viewers grumble when they cannot find their staples of Masterpiece Theater or Frontline, there is another pool of viewers who like the concerts....
National pledge drives date to the early days of public broadcasting, in the mid-1970s, when they were called festivals. ... Even then, the drives had their critics; an early festival featured Nashvilles Grand Ole Opry, which some stations believed was beneath them, Mr. Grossman said. That program did phenomenally well, he recalled...
Some stations have cut back on pledge drives or changed the way in which they conduct them since complaints about the drives reached their peak a few years back. A few stations have shunned the special concerts and are asking viewers to support regular shows....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Blechhh!!!!
♪If I had a hammer ♫ I'd hammer all morning ♪ Hammer my TV all over this land!
Yep, they take off the show you actually want to see, put on a Doo Wop thing, then ask you to give them money for crap you don’t want to watch in the first place.
Irritates the crap out of me!
We need a montage of all the times PBS says “they are going to cut our funding”
Then we use that in DC to defund PBS.
I’ve got about 10 years of those behind me either in the studio or all those playbacks during those breaks.
The best thing for me was the assortement of catered goodies in the spring begathon and the rotation of Hardees between burgers, dogs, and roastie-beefie during winter begathon.
Hopefully Nikki H. will carry through on her proposal to axe ETV here in SC. The funny part was that ETV carried her state of the state address live when she said it. I would love to have a recording of all the shrieks over the headsets.
“3 hours with Peter, Paul & Mary”
Yeah, three hours with two convicted child molesters and a blond helmet-head lefty who made Fonda look pro-American. Go hammer me a lemon tree in the land of Honel-Li.
PBS begfests are so awful. Do they still give out tote bags for a $25 pledge? And when it’s over, back to the homosexual penguin couples raising transgendered chicks with ADD. Followed by, “East Germany: The Stasi Reconsidered”. Introduced by Nina Totenberg.
I did enjoy The Red Green shown and Are you Being Served ? not sure even if PBS airs those show anymore.
LoL!
They still show them here.
Along with “Allo Allo”,”Keeping Up Appearances” and “Up All Hours”
Keeping Up With Appearances is great !
Ya, they really screwed up the cooking shows this weekend.
PBS pledge drives are the worst. “For your gift of $250, you can receive a CD of the music you’re hearing during this broadcast. For $600, you can get the CD AND a DVD of this concert!”.
They could hold fund raising 100% of the time for all I care. The overwhelming amount of their shows are boring.
I think they do hold pledge drives 100% of the time because the few times I tune in they are always having a pledge drive and that’s the only time they ever have any decent programming but they mess it up by showing a few minutes of the show and then begging for money, commercials even though they claim to be commercial free. A cable channel could do PBS better than PBS, maybe a cable channel should compete and do PBS almost exactly and see who wins. But I think it’s been determined that PBS is so boring that it can’t survive without government bailouts, it would go under otherwise (just like the Post Office, although the Post Office actually does provide some kind of service at least). A documentary is OK once in a while but too many of them, especially leftist propaganda documentaries, are not only boring but annoying. Old war footage is interesting but the anti-American commentary is sickening. And there is an obsession with Nazi, Third Reich and Hitler, which sometimes makes me wonder if there is leftist admiration of the guy. Leftists would certainly do what Hitler did if they could.
I notice that during these drives the few programs PBS carries worth watching, like “This Old House Hour”, get displaced and canceled, but the Friday lefty news programs show up anyhow, and tonight some show called “DuSable to Obama:Chicago’s Black Metropolis - History of Blacks in Chicago” went on as scheduled in the TV listings - more reasons not to contribute.....
Even better than that, go to youtube and look up “Keeping up Appearances Bloopers & Outtakes”.
FWIW, that was the only British comedy I really liked. And as someone pointed out, PBS not only devotes most of its airtime to begfests, most of the begfest is plugging, phones ringing in the background, rather than features.
Kind of like the old “Tea Time Movie” spoofs with Johnny Carson as Art Fern.
And if PBS wants to air Hitler footage, the History Channel has them skinned a mile. In fact, PBS seems to have forgotten they are no longer the `fourth channel’ anymore.
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