What would an American BBC be like?

Thande

Donor
I know that both geography and economics tend to make it less likely than its British counterpart, but what if the United States had created a BBC-like radio (and later TV) broadcaster in the 1920s as well? State-funded, but editorially independent, with a charter commitment to inform and educate as well as entertain. What sort of programmes might such an organisation produce?
 
I think it would be similar in many ways to NPR, but, obviously, on TV. So a combination of programming between NPR, PBS, and BBC, plus a dash of C-SPAN.
 
the kind of country that has that would also have national healthcare, a more consistently robust consumer-protection agency, better schools, colonies on the moon and mars, and several brands of domestically-manufactured supersonic airliner.

other butterflies include smoother and easier progress on civil rights and Ralph Nader feeling comfortable with being a good litigation attorney.
 
If we're going for a hard analogy here than it'd be something akin to the bastard child of CNN, SyFy, and Discovery.
 
I imagine it would exist in a more federalised format. Probably rather than having 4 national TV channels and 6 national radio ones, it becomes 1 nat TV and 2 nat Radio with the others being statewide and only the national segment of the news being universally broadcast.
 
The 20's would have to be a LOT different for something like that to be funded by the federal government- Harding and Coolidge were pretty libertarian guys.
 
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