----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I'm going to take Jeremy's cue and try and tone things down a bit. At the risk of keeping this a single-issue discussion area - or, worse yet, a lone panelist's panel discussion - I'd like to query Mr. Jarvik. He represents a perspective very different from most represented here and I want to try and understand it. On 5 Feb., you wrote: >Replying to Dr. Hargrove's points in the simplest way: We don't have a Church >of England or a Monarch, we don't have and Official Secrets Act, and we don't >have a BBC. They don't have a First Amendment or a written Constitution which >bans titles of nobility, among other things. ... It's >comparing apples and oranges.1776 and all that... I wonder if you saw the first edition of the current series "Inside the FBI" and, if so, would care to comment on the program. The series is a co-production of WETA and Britain's Channel Four and, I think, touchs on an interesting phenomenon regarding American and British broadcasters. I have noticed a curious sybiotic relationship between British broadcasters and their American counterparts. British journalists and filmmakers find in the Freedom of Information Act a resource for exploring recent history not available to them at home. I've been told by several British filmmakers that in the U.S. they legally have access to kinds of information they would never get from their own government and, through exploring the recent history of U.S. institutions, hope to point their viewers toward parallels that exist within the United Kingdom. I suspect public broadcasters take a fair amount of flak for the quantities of British programming they carry. Yet the British documentary tradition is one which has, to some extent, grown more and more vital in their national discourse while, here at home, the television documentary has - with some notable exceptions - whithered under commercial pressures. It could even be said that the infusion of British vitality - through co-productions, acquisition, etc. - has helped sustain whatever tradition survives in the United States, but it should also be noted that American themes and audiences sustain the British tradition as well. In this sense, I would suggest that the two systems are not entirely "apples and oranges" but, rather, part of a larger organism. I realize your focus is mainly on systemic questions. Yet, throughout this debate I find myself having to pull back from pure economic theories of government involvement in broadcasting and look at the reality of the situation as it exists now. Would you care to comment on what you perceive to be the value of the information this organism produces? Regards, Stephen McCarthy Boston, MA