Every One of Those [artificially scarce] Late Night Stations/Playing Songs Bringing Tears to My Eyes
Brian Doherty | January 24, 2008, 3:17pm
Wondering why radio sucks in its Feburary "Why Things Suck" cover package, Wired reporter Brendan Koerner goes to the expert: our own Jesse Walker. An excerpt:
The sad decline of conventional radio is an Econ 101 lesson in the consequences of artificial scarcity — and a B-school case study on the limits of scientific management. The scarcity is the fault of the Federal Communications Commission, which decided in the mid-1940s to confine FM broadcasting to its current frequency range, roughly between 88 and 108 MHz. The FCC's spectrum-allocation rules, designed to prevent station signals from interfering with one another, further limited the number of broadcasting licenses it granted in any one market.
By the '70s, thanks to a fecund period in popular music, a generation of audacious DJs, and cheap radios, FM had become wildly popular. That made stations valuable properties — so valuable, in fact, that only large companies could afford to buy and manage them. "The legal cost alone of getting on the air is enormous," says Jesse Walker, author of the radio history Rebels on the Air. The government could have eased this situation by allocating more spectrum for radio use and increasing the number of licenses, Walker argues.
And read his Rebels in the Air.
Ventifact | January 25, 2008, 4:12am | #
e,
I must first of all concede that I have no scientific evidence to back my claim that jazz and classical audiences skew to higher incomes over popular music stations.
If I might maintain for sake of discussion the premise that NPR is listened to by higher-income folks, I have to say that I don't want to enact any "wedge argument to dismantle the public and non-profit sector and turn over everything to the evil corporations like Clear Channel." I made no suggestions for improving the radio system, although I think making legal obstacles to broadcasting cheaper and expanding the available FM spectrum would be good moves.
As for your good question 'Who [am I] trying to convince with [my] arguments about "eliminate public radio because it is only for yuppies"?' I must say that I
am in part appealing to libertarian values, as I understand them, and also to political sensibilities I think most people have. It just seems unfair for everyone to subsidize the lifestyle of the affluent.
Now, maybe I'm wrong in thinking that line of reasoning has any bearing on libertarianism, but I am under the impression that one of the reasons someone might be mostly against government spending is because government spending is often manipulated in the names of good causes (and I would say "the arts" are a good cause, without meaning that I think they do or don't need a certain source of funding) such that it ends up benefiting those who are not in need anyway. Libertarians often get accused of shilling for corporate domination, but libertarians are strongly against corporate welfare and I do think part of this sentiment is the unfairness of giving an advantage to those already ahead (and for counter-consideration, note that many self-identified libertarians acknowledge the desirability of some governmental social safety net for those hitting on hard times).
But I'm not attempting to promote a line of thinking you offer that says "hm, this isn't fair - let's cut funding for classical and jazz because only those damn yuppies listen to it and [we of lower income] hate them." I detest such identity clashes as much as I suspect you do. The line of thinking I'm suggesting is "Hmm, this isn't fair -- let's cut funding for music the affluent can afford to provide themselves with since we're all paying for it but we don't care about it." (Now, there's a lot of folks who might say the same about NASA...)
You see me as being "dishonest" for relying on the premise "government funding for the arts should be fairly distributed," which you don't think I, in fact, believe. I believe the best role of government is definitely for services where the benefit can be said to be fairly distributed. This can be hard to pin down, and it's true enough that in a sense highbrow music broadcasts are evenly distributed because anyone can tune in, i.e. all people have been given the option to listen. But it's a little akin to spending tax money to maintain a registration system of alexandrite values according to stone characteristics -- anyone might make use of it (indeed it would be exceedingly valuable for e.g. a poor person who inherited or won alexandrite jewelry and didn't have an objective source to learn the stuff's value), but naturally the system would end up providing most of its service to the wealthy. Whether I think the government should fund
art at all is really beside the point, even if libertarians are not generally keen on the government funding art regardless of considerations for the funding's "fairness".
By the way, I listen to a buttload of public radio, both news and music. I'm not saying they don't do good stuff, by many standards.
