In the wake of the tsunami that devastated south-east Asia at the end of 2004, many philanthropic initiatives have been started to help.
Recently Rupert Murdoch, the head of Fox Corporation donated $1,000,000 dollars to the efforts for that area and it’s people. Not to be left out, NBC has also taken a step to help, except that NBC’s help is much more indirect and comes at much less expense to themselves. NBC has decided to air a telethon during primetime.
Why is Fox better than NBC? Because Fox donated cold hard cash—and quite a bit of it too—which is tangible and has a direct impact. NBC on the other hand has not donated cash—or anything else for that matter—that can be immediately used. Instead, they have donated airtime; airtime that was previously dedicated to an episode of LAX, a show that NBC had already cancelled.
So, what do we have in the end? On the one hand we have Fox who has alreedy donated a whole bunch of cash that can immediately be used. On the other hand we have NBC who is going to donate some airtime that had already been deemed worthless—since the show that was scheduled had such poor ratings that it was cancelled—to run a telethon in hopes of getting other people to donate money. Clearly Fox is better here in it’s philanthropic abilities than NBC.
Of course regardless of any charitable actions, both Fox and NBC are terrible—and crappy, horrible, worthless, !#$%^&*—at broadcasting.