The really sad thing is that public broadcasters operate in the same way with regard to content quality. Sure, they have (almost) no ads, a lot less complete garbage ("reality" TV, voyeuristic game shows), but on the whole they make the same clinic dramas, soap operas (and sometimes spend billions for the rights to sport).
For-profit media companies cut shows because they're unprofitable, public broadcasters cut them because of a "lack of demand by the public". Media companies make terrible programming choices because they think it will be profitable, public broadcasters make them for political reasons (no matter their structure, they cannot actually be independent of their funding source, the sovereign that organizes their funding).
It would have been nice to read an analysis like that in TFA, but alas it was published in jacobinmag.