I don't watch TV and I don't listen to the radio.  That's why the brouhaha over PBS inserting what amounts to commercial breaks into prime programming like Nature and Nova doesn't really bug me.  I mean, for me public broadcasting is a little like Yosemite or Yellowstone Park.  I rarely visit it, but it's nice to know it's there.  And while I wouldn't want to see the roads through Yellowstone lined with billboards, corporate interests are everywhere.

But these days they are somehow nowhere more apparent than on public TV and radio.  And it's not just any corporations that are funding programming and in many cases running epic sponsor spots, it's corporations like BP, Dow Chemical and, yes, Fox Broadcasting.


It seems a far cry from the PBS I was weaned on. 

Truth is I was never actually much of a television fan.  I grew up surreptitiously listening to our local NPR affiliate at night under the covers, like it was Radio Free Europe and I was waiting for the liberators to parachute from the sky and rescue me from the humdrummery of a suburban childhood. 

Waiting like that is a funny thing, especially from a very early age.  I don't know how or why I first found our NPR affiliate on the radio dial.  My folks were not big public radio fans, it was never on at home or in the car (where we had a hot little 8-track player) that I recall.  I suspect radio became my refuge because my parents didn't want to spring for a TV for my room.   Thank goodness they didn't mind springing for a clock radio with an FM dial.  (Can you imagine if I'd grown up listening to AM talk radio?)

How children develop their own tastes, especially in relative isolation is an interesting question.  My parents were actually very indulgent with me — they never hesitated to buy me books I chose myself — so long as it meant I would be out of their hair while absorbed in them.  And I made good on my end of the bargain. 

And it meant tremendous intellectual freedom at a very young age, but with very little actual adult guidance.  (Not so different from what's going on with the internet these days, I don't imagine, though a little higher minded).  A budding Anglophile (a particular philia I managed to overcome in adulthood), anything in an English accent immediately captured and held my attention.

Yes, NPR contributed to my early-adopter Madonna accent.

It probably helped that there wasn't much to watch on TV in those days, there were no cell phones, no internets — no facebook, no pointless chat, no porn at your fingertips — and even video games were pretty boring — who could stay up all night playing Pong?

So for me it was radio, public radio.  NPR introduced me to oddball artists like Tom Waits (through the still marvelous Nighthawks at the Diner) and to blues greats like Louis Jordan (word-play in tunes like "Three Handed Woman" were right up my alley).  I listened to the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy straight from the BBC, and wonderful dramatic adaptations of everything from Willa Cather's The Sculptor's Funeral to James Thurber's Thirteen Clocks. 

Yes, you could definitely say that I would be a very different person today without the "civilizing influence" of NPR in my early life. 

But it's no longer a refuge.  To me — when I tune in — it's not about art anymore, but about how we fund art.  It's not about literature, drama and music, but about how much it costs to produce it.  You have to endure a thicket of pleas and product placements before you get to anything of substance — and by the time you do it seems much less substantial. 

How we pay for the magic is certainly a part of the reality of making it, but even the Catholic Church only passes the plate once per Mass.  There's not enough time to let the magic happen anymore. 

PBS says viewers are never more than a minute and forty seconds from programming, but now they're never more than fourteen-and-a-half minutes from a commercial either.  That's not enough time to do what public TV used to do so well — give the mind a vista free of billboards, a clearing to let the art you're working so hard to make happen actually happen.

Would I like to see PBS draw a line in the sand, stand up for longer attention spans and stop taking money from unscrupulous funders?  Would that be unreasonable?

No matter.  Television is dead to me.  Yeah, tuning in at this point is like driving through Yellowstone and not being able to see Old Faithful for all the billboards advertising diuretics, but it's not like I do it every day.