Talk:Struggling Broadcaster

I'm a bit unsure about this addition: Air America.

Two concerns: the entry looks to be merely using this article as a political soapbox (in which right-wing bias in media is fine, but supposed left-wing bias is not) and it also looks to be completely off-topic, if this trope is about a comical, low-budget, shoestring operation being Played For Laughs, WKRP-style, and not merely a list of every station to have ever gone off the air in the history of broadcasting.

Yes, broadcasters fail for many reasons. Some were poorly run, some lost their audience to a more-powerful competitor, some fell victim to the siphoning of content away from free OTA TV by pay TV operators. Some were in markets too small to sustain them, or couldn't get a viable network feed. A few fell prey to the Great Recession of 2008-09; in some cases, this and the digital TV transition landed together as a double whammy. A handful of stations signed on in analogue soon after the turn of the millennium, only to have to go digital by 2009, by which time they were wiped out in the economic recession. Equity Broadcasting (which owned many underpowered UHF terrestrial stations, all fed from a Central Automated Satellite Hub in Little Rock, Arkansas) was one particularly dismal example. Then there are the stations which failed due to flawed policy from broadcast regulators; uhftelevision.com records a long history of failed stations from the 1950s and 60s, for example.

There's a whole graveyard at wikipedia:Category:Defunct broadcasting companies.

And yes, it's possible for a broadcaster to fail after experimenting with deliberate right-wing bias. In Canada, CKXT-DT and its Sun News Network make a prime example - although the CRTC's unwillingness to allow a terrestrial station to simulcast on a speciality channel didn't help.

There are many dead stations, but very few of them are memorable as comic relief. Most of the business failures are just sad - especially if they leave a community with no broadcaster or no OTA TV at all. As such, the majority do not fit this trope - which is about content, not merely the fact that a broadcaster went broke or faded to Dead Air.

The current Air America entry looks like political soapboxing. I just don't see the humour.

What makes it look like political soapboxing? It was pretty open about its affiliations, it didn't make a profit (the reason it eventually shut down) and, as far as I'm aware, those are the only two of its hosts to have done anything of note beyond "was on Air America".

If it's about the broadcaster being played for laughs, that would be cause to strike the entire real life section (which I'm not opposed to) rather than just one selective example.

The stations, real or fictional, which are on this list are here because of the No Budget or Cloudcuckoolander nonsense they transmitted while they were still on the air as struggling broadcasters - usually due to some mixture of incompetence, insanity or lack of funds to do anything more than put the Almighty Janitor on the air "Weird Al" Yankovic style.

For instance, DuMont (as a struggling fourth network in what was largely a two-channel market) was legendary for kludged-together programming on little or no budget. And a commercial station running PBS-style beg breaks on-air because they can't afford to operate? It's not intended as comedy, but the results are laughable in hindsight.

The Air America entry, on the other hand? It doesn't suggest the station (or network, as this was more than sixty stations at its peak) was programming WKRP-style nonsense on no budget. DuMont, on the other hand, was a train wreck from start to finish and what little survives of their on-air content (with a few rare exceptions) reflects this.

This trope is about the station's content, not its political affiliations.

I don't see how you come to that conclusion, Carlb. The very first word in the description is "Usually", not "Always" - there's no requirement for this to be a comedy trope according to the trope description as it's currently written.

The trope is about the content - the presumption being that the No Budget struggling broadcaster is basically an on-air gong show of second rate slapstick "talent" - and not merely a collection listing every station which went out of business. The latter list could be very long, and rather boring.

Finally looked at the entry today, and oh yeah, it wore its politics like a sneer. Not to mention it was technically inaccurate, suggesting that Al Franken and Rachel Maddow were somehow still doing a show on a network that died a decade ago. Rewrote it to something as politically neutral as I could (with a lot more info on just how struggling they were).

I never meant to imply they were. I meant they were the only people that were hosts to remain notable.

I think we can send this one out, too.

No objections, so off it goes into the wild blue wiki.

I'm tempted to remove category:Broadcasting in the United States as this contains multiple non-US examples. There are more of these stateside as US broadcasters tend to be licenced as local, not regional, operators but CITY-TV and Auntie Beeb???

I'd think that the presence of CITY-TV is a reason to add "Category:Broadcasting in Canada", not a reason to remove a category.

BBC is hardly a struggling broadcaster.

Agreed. If we eliminated every category that was too narrow from trope pages, we'd probably eliminate half the categories on the wiki.

Seconded, no reason why it can't fit multiple categories at once.

True. There Is No One True Way to do things.

As this is a trope, this is about its use in fiction, which does not always correspond to reality. Yes, the BBC is a struggling broadcaster in the one Monty Python sketch that chooses to portray her as such. The real world, where Auntie Beeb charges a bit over 150 quid/year for a licence to own a telly at all, is another matter... but in that real world, the analogue U-62 frequency in the Weird Al film doesn't exist either. It was sold to mobile phone operators in 2009.

I can see a few possible results from placing country-specific categories on this page. Oh, look, it's a trope about Broadcasting in the United States - so the Monty Python sketch has to go because it's blimy British. Oh, look, it's a trope about Broadcasting in the United States - so we'd better not add any content about the college FM station in Toronto that lost its licence for broadcasting months of Dead Air. Oh, look, it's a trope about Broadcasting in the United States - so we'd better remove every "colour telly" and replace them all with "COLOR TV" in order to replace PAL with NTSC. And on it goes. And no, I'm not suggesting creating "category:Broadcasting in Canada" and adding it here, as that's still arbitrarily limiting something which was intended to address the trope globally.

If there's a new category created? It should be Category:Broadcasting, not another country-specific category.

If we make a category "Broadcasting by country", we could set "Broadcasting in the United States" and "Broadcasting in Canada" as subcategories of it, and "Broadcasting" as a supercategory to it. (We could also set "Broadcasting" as a supercategory to "Radio".)

That would match what ended up being created after somebody made all those "Turn of the Millennium/(medium)" and "Films of the (decade)" categories - those have "(medium) by decade" as a supercategory, which have the various "(medium)" categories as their supercategories. EDIT: As an example for how these are used, see the category cloud for Snuffy Smith.