If you look at the history of broadcasting, what you find is the National Association of Broadcasters is a trade association whose mission is to protect the interests of the commercial broadcasters.

The notion that journalism can regularly produce a product that violates the fundamental interests of media owners and advertisers ... is absurd.

The cost of congressional and presidential campaigns has been leaping every two or four years. I think this year it will be 60 percent more than 1996; well over twice as much as in 1992 in the presidential and congressional races.

The relationship between the media owner, their relationship isn't strictly with people and audiences. It's also with advertisers, and that's the most relationship in radio; in fact it pays the bills.

One survey that I saw that was published I think in Variety or Electronic Media within the last three weeks says that now the average hour of radio in the United States has 18 minutes of commercials.

But having said that, what's happening with campaign finance reform and our political culture is devastating.

In the US, commercial interests stole the airwaves early on, before public broadcasters could get a stab at it. And the deal that was made with public broadcasting was, "Okay, we'll allow there to be a handful of public stations to do the educational programming that commercial broadcasters don't want to do, but the deal is they can't do anything that can generate an audience, anything that's commercially viable." Anything they do that could be commercially viable could be considered unfair competition to commercial interests and should only be on the commercial stations.