Begging on the radio

(Director David Lynch broadcasts the weather every morning from his balcony, for Indie 103.1.)

When you are American, you take it for granted that the radio and television stations will have ads. But my children aren't all that American and it really annoys them. They grew up in places where everyone with a television is required to pay a television license fee to the government, which then provides programming. In England, they even have people whose job it is to go around spying on people who don't pay the fee to see if they have a television on.

"Television must be responsible: it has a didactic role," a teacher of German announced to my Goethe Institut class many years ago. The Americans all snickered. He was obviously unacquainted with American TV! That probably explained why on a German Friday night at prime time the only thing on would be a documentary on Romanian politics.

However, in France the subsidy for the arts creates a lot of things I love. It's hard for me not to approve. In Paris, I listened to Radio France Info and Radio Classique. I believe these are both subsidized, if not fully funded, by the French government. (C'est vrai, les français?)

In America, the radio stations are alone in the world and have to make their own way.  Most of them seem to do it with car and insurance ads.

Only a few days after I arrived, I hit the button for the second classical music station I had programmed, and heard country western music instead. I found out that the classical station did not have enough listeners, and had to go to AM-- a fate worse than death for music quality. (I love the country station though. Its weekend DJ Whitney Allen is irresistible.)

In the U.S., the classical and public radio stations have to raise their own money in interminable campaigns that interrupt the programming every few minutes, once or twice or three times a year, for a month at a time, to beg listeners to send in cash. Even if you become a "subscriber" (and get a free CD or a carry bag with a station logo on it)  you still have to listen to all the begging.

Everything is privatized here. I'd forgotten that. It does make it clear who is paying for things, but it also makes everything just that much less pleasant.

Comments

[laurence]

Radio France and its multiple channels are definitely subsidizied thanks to the redevance audiovisuelle you used to pay.
The big deal for their audience is that they find it hard to stand that ad made their way even on the Radio France channel (something like a 10 second-advertising sentence for sweaters right before the weather report, in other words, between 10 sec an hour to 20 seconds an hour at the peak time)

[Ken]

I think Radio Classique is private. I looked at the web site. But France Info, France Inter, France Musique, France Culture, FIP, and all the regional Radio Bleue stations are state-owned, "public" radio stations.