Over the weekend.....the former NPR CEO....Vivian Schiller....gave a talk. So in the middle of this....she said.....'people in rural areas rely on public radio and TV to get their information'.
I paused over this. I grew up in a pretty rural region (NW Ala) in the 1960s/1970s. Yeah, we had four channels (ABC, NBC, CBS and public-TV) and just one local paper (usually not more than 24 pages). But radio-wise, there were probably sixteen FM channels, and on a clear evening....I had probably 200 AM channels....some as far away as St Louis.
The perception of Schiller? It's a mystery to me. Even in the 1930s....folks had newspapers and AM radio.
By the 1980s....you had talk radio and extended news features by channels beyond NPR or pubic-TV.
It's like Schiller never got into a car and drove around the country.
