PBS Beats Out Private Networks

Accord­ing to PPP’s TV News Trust Poll, which this year included PBS for the first time:

Out­let Trust/​Distrust Net 2010 Num­bers Shift from 2010
PBS 50⁄30 +20 Not Included Not Applic­a­ble
NBC 41⁄41 0 35/​44 (-9) +9
CNN 40⁄43 –3 39/​41 (-2) –1
Fox News 42⁄46 –4 49/​37 (+12) –16
CBS 36⁄43 –7 32/​46 (-14) +7
ABC 35⁄43 –8 31/​46 (-15) +7

This is one of the bet­ter exam­ples of an indus­try where pub­lic own­er­ship and man­age­ment is a really good idea. It costs noth­ing to air a show to one more viewer once it’s already been recorded. When there is a profit motive, one way to be a finan­cially suc­cess­ful net­work is to aim your con­tent at the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor in order to max­i­mize view­er­ship and thereby increase the value of com­mer­cial time. When profit max­i­miza­tion is not a con­cern, you can focus on actu­ally mak­ing qual­ity pro­gram­ming. It turns out that PBS has been very suc­cess­ful at doing just that in com­par­i­son with privately-​​owned net­works; in most other coun­tries the role of the pub­lic media is even larger. Think BBC, although Ger­many has the largest pub­lic broad­caster in the world with an annual bud­get of $8.5 bil­lion, com­pared to a mea­ger $400 mil­lion for PBS. Don’t Amer­i­cans deserve more good programming?

26 January 2011 – 5:58 pm | By Benjamin Daniels | Posted in Public or Collective Ownership | Comments (177)