Where I live they have pledges at least 4 times a year. I suspect it is more. So at least 1 month of the year is devoted to pledge drive begging. In addition, most of the shows have at least one sponsor that is announced at the beginning / end / before or after traffic. Traffic is always brought to me by Fram or Angie's list. If they just had a one minute commercial every fifteen minutes, it would probably bring in the same amount of money as the drives, and be 100 times less annoying.

While I like shows like TAL, especially when they explain financial markets and meltdowns, when they have their more typical segments they often ignore facts to scrupulously present both sides of an issue, and appear to have not done enough research to question statements offered by the people they are interviewing that are clearly untrue.