For almost two months now, the CBC has been involved in, “a labor dispute.” I’m not going to get into the whole mess, nor am I choosing sides. I’m only annoyed that one of the shows I routinely listen to, As It Happens, is affected.

But that got me to thinking…I’ve complained in this space before about the lack of alternatives to NPR when it comes to news programming, and how I believe pubrad stations have abdicated their responsibilities to the organization they created to the point where this organization, by virtue only of its monopoly, can dictate to its member stations way too much. I’ve urged the other organizations to get off their rear ends and start working in this area (The World is a cute start, but why didn’t PRI have the sense to start a morning version last year, The World This Morning, with Bob Edwards, to act as competition to the more shrill NPR morning show?), but all I hear is how expensive it is to mount such a program. (Yeah, yeah, and NPR itself started with as close to nothing as you can possibly get.)

Here, though, is an example of how to start. Why couldn’t PRI, or APM (the distribution arm of Minnesota Public Radio, you know, what PRI used to be back when it was APR?), or even XM Satellite Radio start a similar weekdaily news program? Better idea; why couldn’t XM and one of the major distributors get together, co-produce the show, and share in the profits selling it to terrestrial pubrad stations while airing it on XM?

Hold on a sec, before you think I’m crazy, this isn’t as nutty as it seems. Think about what As It Happens is…it’s a show where the hosts telephone newsmakers. They don’t fly to Outer Mongolia, they call a satellite phone. They don’t travel to California, they call Arnold on his office phone. They don’t use anything but a telephone, a studio, and enough chutzpa to try to talk to newsmakers, both major and minor.

Ok, I admit it…”cheap” is a relative term. Outside of The Bob Edwards Show, for example, XMPR clearly doesn’t have a whole lot of budget; Scott Walterman needs to borrow Steve Karish from Sonic Theater (Channel 163) to executive-produce XM Nation, and the other exclusive, From the Nation’s Capitol was a co-production which seems to have stopped production anyway and is now burried somewhere on the weekend schedule.

Ok, maybe the show I’m talking about here couldn’t be done with the XM Nation budget. But I’d wager with a staff as talented as the one working for The Bob Edwards Show you could do it for the Edwards Show budget, or even less (assume since you’re completely in-studio, you could do the show with five producers instead of eight). Taking As It Happens as a model, you call newsmakers, you call reporters, you call lighter-side feature-type folks (the guy with the biggest ice sculpture, or whatever) - you don’t necessarily need to do breaking news (although WBUR has proved how well it can be done by a local station with a reasonable budget with their newsmagazine, Here and Now, now being distributed by PRI), yet you still have a reasonably-priced current-events program that is more current and important than just Tom Ashbrook constantly interrupting his guests and rephrasing their answers to match what he thinks. And c’mon…the telephone charges for such a show would be insignificant; corporate calling rates aren’t considered serious charges anymore.

It goes without saying that now is the time to produce this show…with AIH off the air for the forseeable future, this would be the perfect replacement for those stations currently running Ideas re-runs, which would then stick with the show once the CBC gets its act together and decides to settle its petty squabbles. If XM and one of the distributors got together, it could air on XMPR during east-coast drive-time (re-run for west-coast drive time, and again overnight instead of hearing the insipid On Point over and over and…), with terrestrial play later in the day/evening (just like AIH is currently played). XMPR gets a serious news program to run against the terrestrial All Things Considered, and gets the bulk of the production costs underwritten by terrestrial pubrad stations. Right now, XMPR has only two real news shows in its entire weekday schedule, the aforementioned Here and Now and the audio feed from the television show, Newshour. No one will ever take XMPR seriously until this ratio increases, and here’s an inexpensive way of doing it.

There’s no loser to this, except maybe for NPR…and lord knows a little competition is long overdue for this unresponsive behemoth.