Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

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The index case is public television on the US which has endless cloying and annoying fundraisers but you know in the end of the day they care what big sponsors like the Archer Daniels Midland Corporation and the The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation think but not "viewers like you" because of these problems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

Or look at the case of Mozilla which seems to be at least treading water when it comes to browser engineering but in terms of marketing and legitimacy they seem to be doing as little as possible to threaten Chrome but keep plugging along because if Firefox went down then Google might get pulled into antitrust court. (Think how Microsoft funded Apple during the dark years of the 1990s to keep competition alive or how the existence of Android must have a huge value to Apple today in that Apple can claim it has competition -- competition like the heel in pro wrestling)

“Funded by the CPB, a private corporation funded by the American people.”

Of all the interstitials PBS had, this one was by far the oddest.

Public broadcasting in the US is in deep denial about being state media.

This comment is way off topic.

“Funded by a private corporation funded by the American people” is just a euphemism for state funding; the oddness of the euphemism is explained by the fact that it’s a euphemism in the first place.

What part of "this is off topic" do you not understand?

I was directly replying to the comment above me about the oddness of the CPB interstitial by providing an explanation. That might have been tangential but it wasn't off-topic. You're the one having a failure of understanding here, even though I've been patient with you and tried to explain the relevance of my reply.

What baffled me was - why on earth would you just come out and say that? It's kind of hamfisted and not entirely true either (the CPB had a board with members nominated by the President, amongst other government officials, although it's technically true that the CPB is a private institution, much like the Federal Reserve).

Finally found a recording of one of these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL5zcOtwTjg

(This one just had the text, and not the voiceover.)

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