You can make a great pro-socialist argument just by asking anyone whose experienced both publicly funded and privately funded radio to compare the listening experiences.

With publicly funded radio, everything the station broadcasts (music, sports, talk shows, news) is centered around optimizing the experience for the listener. So the radio just functions like nice little box that gives you what you need. It's primary function is to be USEFUL.

Private radio, on the other hand, is always a compromised experience. If you want to listen to music, you are going to have to sit through a bunch of intrusive ads. If you want to listen to people talk, all the talking is going to be based around personality and not topics.

The reason the programming is personality based is because each station is competing with other radio stations. So every radio station wants to make the listener fall in love with their programing. The reason for the ads is because that's what their business model centers around.

When playing private stations, the radio is grabbing for your attention all the time and trying to get you to buy things. This makes the radio less good at its intended job (which is providing accompaniment to whatever else you are doing), and makes listening inherently stressful

The success of streaming services and subscription based podcasts proves that people are willing to pay for quality audio of content, but in countries like the U.K. and Canada, that was already happening for years.

The public options were not universally approved of, but they were loved by many people who were happy to pay for them with their taxes. I loved CBC radio as a kid. There was quality, ad free, comedy programming I looked forward to listening to and would try to not miss.

Nobody LOVES private radio. It's just something you put on if you want to listen to music, but it always gets annoying after awhile. The whole thing is a shitty, compromised experience, because making the listener happy is secondary to the goal of making the listener spend money.

Private Radio is the closest we've ever gotten to some absurdist, Ayn Rand nightmare, device like a mailbox that you have to pay to open or a subscription based gun that charges your credit card every time you shoot. It's really no less stupid or horrific than either of those.

It is inarguably true that capitalism ruins the aesthetic of a great many things. It ruins the function of a great many things. It turned the radio, a fantastic invention, into a gross thing that most americans kept turned off 90% of the time.

When someone tells you "oh, socialized version of X will never work; private is the only way to go" think of how much morning zoo crews suck. Think about how much it sucks to finish listening to a song, be excited for another one, and then hear an ad for a car dealership instead.

Think about how maybe this person doesn't see the flaws in their system. They don't see how private radio sucks, because they have nothing to compare it to. Think about how maybe they haven't fully thought their perspective through. Think about how maybe they're making stuff up.

P.S.

Before everyone goes "ha, public radio. Everybody knows NPR is terrible, left wing, art school nonsense," let me say that NPR is not publicly funded radio; not really. It's not a crown corporation; it's not some american equivalent of the BBC or CBC. It's not that at all.

Also, I meant to type "who has" and not "whose," and there is a random "of" in one of the tweets as well. Really wished the typos had been further day in the thread. I blame the fancy private school that I went to as a teen.