Someone should sell protective pads to be worn between the eyes and scalp, for those moments when you slap your forehead while reading spectacularly stupid conneries by people on your own side.

For example, your correspondent let out a force ten D’oh! and nearly concussed himself at Margaret Pomeranz’s assertion that the current turmoil at SBS amounted to “cultural genocide”.

No Margaret. Genocide, cultural or otherwise, is the wiping out of a way of life and the people with it. The term is overused with reference to actual violence, let alone to changes in a 25-year-old broadcasting experiment, and the comparison is not only a tad insensitive, but tends to confirm the accusation of a certain degree of self-importance.

Indeed it illustrates the perennial problem of those who support institutions like SBS – that its most vocal advocates simply assert rather than actively try to convince people of its value.

For in a world very different from the one into which it was born in 1980, one has to seriously ask the question – what is SBS for?

This is a cultural problem across the West at the moment. Witness the difficulties of the UK’s Channel Four, established in 1980 to run difficult and challenging material – Derek Jarman’s film of Terry Eagleton’s script of the life of Wittgenstein for example – and which now (still subsidised) subsists on dreck like Celeb Big Brother and endless repeats of Friends.

Digital, online and DVD delivery of content took away a lot of Four’s remit to be a “channel” through which these things would come – there are no channels through a world of networks – but what really changed it was the collapse in a belief in the value of high culture and difficult uncompromising challenging works.

The right usually blames this on “cultural studies” and “deconstruction”, which is like blaming the diagnostician for the disease. What really punched high culture in the guts was the “anti-elitist” populism that went along with the market revolutions, beginning with Thatcher’s in the 80s.

The Iron Lady thought that once the market was freed up, eternal “Victorian” values would spring up spontaneously. Instead she created a society in which the nihilism of the market (everything is valued only in terms of anything else, via money) reshaped culture and personality.

To a lesser degree Howard and Costello’s “capitalism with a human smirk” has hastened a similar process here – but it one that is a matter much larger than particular governments.

SBS began almost as a community channel (remember all those broadcasts of ethnic dances in church halls?). When that remit became less necessary, it became a place where “difficult” material – not enough of it produced in Australia – could be shown.

Recently, the tame board has allowed it to be taken over by unashamed pseudo-commercial network runners, as a way of wrecking its legitimicy, and thus nobbling perceived political and cultural opposition. 

Resisting that involves more than just a lament. It involves making explicit arguments as to why public funds should support work that most people won’t have much use for. Because a culture only lives when people are taking apart its deepest assumptions publicly.

Because mass culture is better when its makers are stimulated by new ways of thinking “upstream” (you wouldn’t have Seachange the way it was if you didn’t have the novels of Tim Winton, for example). Because culture is not just about people getting what they want – it’s about surprising with something they didn’t know they wanted till they saw it (Pizza being a good recent SBS example).

Because for all the brandishing of Shakespeare as a commercial high-cultural producer, most of our heritage – Milton, Bach, Michelangelo and beyond – was produced by public institutions or benefactors throwing money at something they thought just had to be.

The expanded market of post-broadcasting media may well produce some of that. But the ultimate effect of a purely-market driven culture is circular – it reflects itself like a hall of mirrors, a vast illusory emptiness.

Those who want SBS as an uncompromising stablemate to an ABC with a broader brief are going to have to connect with the vast cultural changes over the last thirty years.

Otherwise it’ll be a massacre. D’oh!