Tim Robbins, actor, producer and director best known for his roles in "The Shawshank Redemption" and "Bull Durham," gave an extremely entertaining, amusing, sometimes shocking, but always provocative keynote speech yesterday during the NAB Show here in Las Vegas.

Using an ingenious touch of irony and sarcasm combined with a great deal of insight, Robbins made a creative call to action against the homogenization of American media—of radio, news, music, entertainment, talk channels, and the like. (One of his jokes: "Isn't it too bad that we came so close to having one standard playlist for accepted music around the country?")

Robbins has a point, and a good one. He was stressing diversity of political opinion, of course, given some of the controversies he has lived through over the past four or five years. But put another way, he was really making a case for diversity of content. It costs money, of course, to get that diversity—sometimes it's cheaper to consolidate and reduce the number of moving parts. But that diversity is, in the end, the source not just for better political dialogue, but for better choices for everyone in terms of what they watch, see and listen to.