I awoke this morning to the sounds of the clock radio set Public Radio in Mississippi. It has become a habit of keeping it on the same station so that I wake up every morning to the sounds of National Public Radio’s Morning Sedition, I mean Morning Edition. It usually gets my blood boiling before I ever make it to the shower.

This morning the sound was different. Instead of the usual people at NPR talking, most of the talking was being done by the locals in Jackson. You see, it is Drive Time yet again. It was not too long ago that fundraising was done only once a year but now it seems to be a nearly continuous process. I used to give money, back in the good ole days, but I don’t anymore. As part of past budget cuts, they eliminated most of what I really liked to hear, namely the new age “space music” they used to play on Sunday nights. My wife and I used to fall to sleep listening to that most every Sunday night.

Now, they mainly have news and classical music. I like classical music as much as the next guy, okay, maybe more than the next guy given how little the next guy likes classical music, but have more choices available to me now. The news is incredibly biased (to the left that is) but I can usually cut through the bias and see the real story, particularly when I compare it with news from other sources.

But as I listened to the pleas for money, I thought yet again about why do we even have public radio, or public television for that matter, anymore? Not too many years ago, I would not have made this argument, but now, with the myriad of options available, why do we need a public subsidized radio and television network?

If I want to listen to the radio, I have Sirius. One of the individuals they played this morning talked about public radio was all she could get in her part of the country. Well with Sirius she would have her choice of some 120 channels to choose from, all in digital quality with the same signal strength. And the cost, about what the public radio guys would like you to give them. Now let me see, send my money to Jackson for one station, with only one source of news, available only in this state, and they don’t even play all the music I like? Or, send the money to Sirius, get my choice of over 100 stations, more news and talk than I can listen to, available wherever I travel, with digital quality? Sirius will win every time. Perhaps we should have the government cancel public radio support and subsidize Sirius.

Public television has gone much the same route. They used to lay claim to educational programming but there is more educational programming on cable and satellite now than you can imagine. I used to enjoy some of the shows produced by public television but in the last five years or longer, they have been outdone by the likes of Arts & Entertainment, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel, The National Geographic Channel, The Learning Channel, etc.

Do you get my point? There was a time when public radio and public television offered real alternatives and filled niches that were not being filled elsewhere. Now, the private sector has taken hold and produces programming that is greater in volume and in quality than that done by public broadcasting. Does the government still have a niche to fill or should it now step aside and let the free market take over? The argument used a decade ago that educational programming would go away without public broadcasting has obviously been proven false. It is thriving in the free market.