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Usually [[Played For Laughs]] in comedy, the '''Struggling Broadcaster''' is a station with heart, but with no ratings to speak of and usually a [[No Budget|low or nonexistent budget]]. It's run by a skeleton crew whose antics are more fun than a barrel of monkeys; every one at the station wishes you'd tune in but the deck is stacked against them for any of a number of possible reasons:
* The station is broke or going bankrupt. The paycheques are bouncing, the announcers are begging for donations on-air in a telethon just to keep the show alive. If it's a non-profit educational outlet, the scoreboard during a [[PBS]]-style pledge break might actually show a negative number (perhaps to reflect the station spent money it doesn't have just to rent the board for the donation drive).
* The station is a low-budget independent, while its competitors are on better spots on the dial and backed by the stronger programming resources of the major networks. With limited resources and no budget to acquire
* The station is on a high UHF channel in an era before manufacturers were legally required to include UHF tuners on every TV set. Of the first hundred pioneering [[American Television Stations]] who took a chance on UHF 14-83 soon after the US FCC opened these over-the-air channels in late 1952, eighty went broke – most within the first year. Many others were licenced but never built. [[Morton's Fork|Without any viewers, they couldn't get the network affiliation or the advertisers; without the network's programming, they couldn't get the viewers.]] If they had managed to get a network feed, they lost that affiliation to the first competitor to launch a VHF station. If no one could see the station, no one noticed when it silently went dark and never came back.
* The station is underpowered. On the medium-wave AM radio band, it may on a "daytime" frequency on which it has to drop power or go completely off the air at sundown to protect a distant broadcaster on the same frequency. On FM or TV, it may have acquired the licence by buying an existing low-power "repeater", "rebroadcaster" or "translator" (which normally just provides a fill-in signal where there are gaps in a full-service main station's coverage) and re-purposing that allocation for an originating station.
* The station is licenced to serve a tiny or distant village, from which it can barely reach the larger city as a "rimshot", but isn't taken seriously as the announcers, the listeners or both are ''[[Hee Haw]]''-style hillbillies.
* The [[Executive Meddling|station's management]] may be dishonest, or actively harming the operation in some manner. Maybe they're alcoholics. Maybe they're mentally ill. Maybe they're using the station's finances to launder mob cash. Somehow, the staff tries to stay on the air and beneath the radar of the national broadcast regulator even though the entire operation is too dysfunctional to be viable.
* The station may be on the air just to keep the licence active, or so that the money it loses can be written off against taxable income from some unrelated venture. For local cable access television channels, the content has to exist as a condition of the parent CATV operator's licence, but the owner likely does not care that no one is watching.
* The station is badly short-staffed, either on a permanent basis (due to lack of funds) or temporarily (it's in a mountain community and none of the regular announcers made it in through an exceptionally-harsh blizzard, so as an unexpected one-person show the only one to arrive is expected to fill an entire thirty-minute time slot pretty much ad-lib).
* The station is staffed by people who are simply incompetent.
* Some combination of any (or ''all'') of the above.
Invariably, in the finest traditions of ''[[Captain Video]]'' and the long-defunct [[DuMont]] Television Network, all of this [[No Budget]] content goes out live – warts and all. The inevitable [[Show Within a Show]] segments are pure nonsense, but anything is better than [[Dead Air]].
Evidently, the [[Struggling Broadcaster]] has to be strong enough to be originating content (instead of merely rebroadcasting another station, or playing audio or video unattended using broadcast automation) for the trope to work. Among local originating stations, though, this one will invariably be in last place - and likely have been there, unnoticed, for years. Eventually, someone decides that there is [[No Such Thing as Bad Publicity]] and having audiences laugh at the station's expense is somehow better than going silently off the air and into the night.
Compare [[Buccaneer Broadcaster]], who may always be operating on a shoestring, but not care as long as the signal goes out.
{{examples}}
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== [[Film]] ==
* ''[[UHF]]'' (1989) is a [["Weird Al" Yankovic]] comedy about a lad whose uncle wins an underpowered, low-budget independent local UHF station, channel 62,
* ''[[Videodrome]]'' (1983) follows the CEO of a small independent UHF station (CIVIC-TV 83, as presumably a parody of CITY-TV 79 Toronto) who stumbles upon a satellite signal that is broadcasting extremely violent and horrific things. He makes the mistake of rebroadcasting the content, which harms the local community.
* ''[[Wayne's World]]'' (1992) is a comedy film, based on a ''[[Saturday Night Live]]'' routine, about the hosts of an Aurora, Illinois-based cable access television show who attempt to do their jobs despite [[Executive Meddling]] by corrupt higher-ups in the organisation.
== [[Literature]] ==
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== [[Live-Action TV]] ==
* ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]'' had an episode depicting the [[BBC]] running out of money. Characters appearing in comedy sketches were begged on-air not to speak because a speaking part gets paid more; someone utters one word and it's "oh dear, that's fifteen shillings out of the budget" that poor auntie Beeb can't afford. The credits were written on scraps of paper and the heat was turned off in the flat they were renting as a studio.
* ''[[Mork and Mindy]]'' has title character Mindy McConnell as an inexperienced new hire at a television station owned by an intoxicated old man whose local farm report was getting unprecedentedly poor ratings until he tried
* ''[[WKRP in Cincinnati]]'' is based around an AM radio station which was dead last in ratings after playing endless elevator music for years. In desperation, and to listeners' disbelief, the station abruptly changes format to start blaring [[Rock and Roll]]. Not the first
== [[Music]] ==
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[[Category:Broadcasting in the United States]]
[[Category:Television]]
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