roundtable: Re: universal service and non profit amendments....

roundtable: Re: universal service and non profit amendments....

Re: universal service and non profit amendments....

Gary O. Larson (glarson@tmn.com)
Thu, 24 Mar 94 00:10:55 EST 

Date: Thu, 24 Mar 94 00:10:55 EST
From: glarson@tmn.com (Gary O. Larson)
Message-Id: <9403240510.AA07134@tmn.com>
To: roundtable@cni.org
Subject: Re: universal service and non profit amendments....


I'm not certain what Mary Gardner Jones means by "pseudo non profits,"
although the Rev. Wildmon's American Family Association springs to mind.
Nor, for that matter, is a blanket term such as "non-commercial
programming" very clear.  Does this imply public-affairs programming,
amateur soccer matches, Spanish lessons, nature shows, home movies, 
revival meetings, ballet?  All of the above?

In any case, the one-size-fits-all approach that Jamie Love advocates,
based solely on something as chimerical as membership size, strikes me 
as a recipe for an abundance of lowest-common-denominator programming.  
Is an organization that charges dues, or has certification requirements, 
the same as one that collects names at the shopping mall?

Curiously, *commercial* programming, which we're all agreed leaves a lot
to be desired, is based on "membership size"--as determined by Arbitron 
and Nielsen, et al.  Surely we can come up with a better system than that.
Peer review comes to mind, but only after we've collectively arrived at
some definitions of what we're really talking about when we refer to
"noncommercial programming."  Sometimes I think we get so wrapped up in
discussing the pipeline (how wide it'll be, who'll control it, how fast
it'll be, etc.) that we lose sight of what we'd like to see actually
flowing through those pipes.  Neither public-interest generalities, nor
health-education-welfare platitudes, gets us very far.  Perhaps next 
week's summit conference will begin to fill in some of these blanks.

Gary O. Larson
<glarson@tmn.com>

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