-5 Public Broadcasting Compared With Other Broadcasting Systems Public broadcasting's income, adjusted or not, lags far behind that of other major broadcast systems. American commercial broadcasting spent over thirteen dollars for every dollar spent by public broadcasters in 1975 (Table 4). Preliminary data for 1976 indicate that public broadcasting remains financially behind. FCC data indicate that each of the American commercial television networks spent more money for programming alone in 1976 than public broadcasting's income from all sources, at all levels, for both TV and radio. Table 4 U.S. PUBLIC BROADCASTING COMPARED WITH U.S. COMMERCIAL BROADCASTING ($ in millions) Sources: CPB Data; FCC Annual Broadcast Financial Reports. -6 American public broadcasting still receives less support than major foreign non-commercial systems. In 1975, the latest year for which data are available, American public television's per capita income was just over a third the BBC's, under a third of NHK's, and less than one seventh the CBC's (Table 5). Sources: CPB Data; FCC Broadcast Financial Data 1975; CBC Annual Report, 1975-1976; BBC Handbook, 1976; NHK Handbook, -7 In radio, American public broadcasters were even worse off compared to other public systems. NHK spent more than six times as much per capita as American public radio and the BBC more than eight times as much. The CBC, with national services in two languages, spent seventeen times as much on radio as public broadcasting here (Table 6). -8 Allocations In addition to analyzing public broadcasting income, it is important to determine how public broadcasting allocates its resources. Current allocations may be divided into several broad categories of functions performed on both the national and local level (Figure II). These categories then allow comparisons between allocations on the national and local levels (Table 7). |