Maybe, in the management of PBS affiliates, we can see the impact of not paying station management a good wage. There is an awful lot of wonkiness with our local affiliate.
I'm not talking about some random PBS affiliate. I'm talking about (literally) world-renown WGBH Boston. They give the world This Old House, NOVA, Frontline, The Victory Garden, American Experience ... oh! and going back a bit, they gave the world a little show called The French Chef.
However, that hasn't prevented a comedy of oopsies over the years. For example, they added an HD channel very early on, carrying the PBS HD network feed directly, but the never got around to actually equipping their own operation for HD. Comes time to switch to their own facilities and oopsie! they don't have any HD recording equipment. So for almost a year, their HD channel was presenting everything as a postage stamp! Black bars all around every program, above, below, to the right and to the left. Essentially that converted a 32" diagonal screen into 24" diagonal screen -- leaving 44% of the screen empty. Their explanation was that they didn't have the money. This is despite the fact that they just moved into a big new headquarters building right on the Mass Pike, complete with 5 story high video screen which very effectively distracted drivers on the highway.
That was a really big one, but they do things like this all the time. This coming week they're preempting regular program History Detectives, just about the only original programming on the channel in first run at this time of year. This isn't just a regular preemption like you'd expect with a normal station, when the network is simply not providing a new episode that week. There is a new episode that the network is providing. WGBH is simply not presenting it on their HD channel.
Ooopsie!