Then again...

In considering my last post, there's obviously a price that consumers pay (at least in the current model) for their public sphere. That is, aside from cable and satellite, consumers still pay for a public sphere in respect to the prices they pay for consumable goods. This has been said before, but I'll repeat it again: advertising dollars spent to support the public sphere drives up consumer prices.

The converse argument of that is that not enough people would know about products to buy them without advertising. That's probably just a crock of shit, though. The larger the ad dollars, the wider the distribution of products (which is global), the smaller and harder it is to have strong local economies. I don't care how much "jobs" Wal-mart might provide...which are generally very poorly paid jobs with little to no benefits.

The point is that in an ideal world, the public sphere would be truly public without intrusion of advertisements. So, would a truly public sphere be supported solely by tax-payer dollars?

The one "benefit" (if we can call it that) to a somewhat private system is that there's no monolithic state-funded public sphere. In other words, no state propaganda system. Of course, what we have today is essentially a state propaganda system as the large media conglomerates that transmit over both the public and private spheres have highly vested interests in the workings of government. Just look at our past two presidential elections: The media is soooo good at simply acting as the president's loudspeaker.

Too bad we don't have a system like England, where the president has to defend himself at public hearings.