Gunning for PBS
By Sean Aqui | Related entries in General Politics, Money, Partisan HacksThe GOP is hoping to make PBS and NPR DOA as far as federal funding goes in FY2007.
House Republicans yesterday revived their efforts to slash funding for public broadcasting, as a key committee approved a $115 million reduction in the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that could force the elimination of some popular PBS and NPR programs.
There are several points to be made here. But first, some context.
1. Even if enacted these cuts wouldn’t destroy public broadcasting. Most such stations are largely self-supporting. Minnesota Public Radio, for instance, gets 80 percent of its funding from private sources. If federal dollars disappear, there would still be state funding. But even if they both vanished, the resulting 20 percent budget cut would hurt but it wouldn’t be fatal.
2. Some areas would be hurt pretty badly. The cuts would be disproportionately felt in poor and rural areas, where listeners are fewer or have fewer dollars to spare for station support — and thus rely more heavily on government funding.
3. Conservatives have been gunning for public broadcasting for years on ideological grounds, considering the programming to be liberally biased. What’s ironic is that if they succeed it will be the rural areas that will be hit the hardest — areas that are generally more conservative, and thus less likely to schedule programming the conservatives find offensive. The stations they really dislike — large urban operations — will be largely unaffected.
Okay, with that out of the way, let’s look at why the House says it’s trying to cut this funding:
Republicans are looking for ways to save taxpayers’ dollars, amid fiscal conservatives’ concerns over the budget deficit.
“We’ve got to keep our priorities straight,” said Representative Ralph Regula, an Ohio Republican who is chairman of the appropriations panel that approved the cut. “You’re going to choose between giving a little more money to handicapped children versus providing appropriations for public broadcasting.”
Oh, so it’s a tough budget call. We need to get the deficit under control, and it’s either PBS or the handicapped kids.
Give me a break.
We’re talking chicken feed here. $115 million won’t even begin to make a dent in the deficit. Yes, enough small cuts can add up to big cuts. But Republicans aren’t even pretending that this is part of a significant cutback in spending. Maybe, before spending so much time and effort cutting pennies from PBS, they should assemble the $300 billion worth of cuts it will take simply to balance the budget, never mind start paying down the debt.
And trying to frame this as a choice between PBS and handicapped children is breathtakingly cynical in a year when Republicans have led the fight to abolish the estate tax — at a cost to federal coffers of $70 billion per year. And that’s on the heels of $2 trillion or more in previous tax cuts and another $300 billion or so in Iraq-related costs.
You wanna save PBS and help the handicapped kids? Raise taxes by 50 cents per capita. Problem solved.
There are plenty of principled debates one could have about public broadcasting, involving the role of government and whether that role includes funding for the arts. Or, given the recent experience of Italy under Silvio Berlusconi, whether the government should be owning or supporting domestic media outlets at all.
But that’s not the debate that House Republicans are having. Their chosen arguments are cowardly, cynical and intellectually vapid.
Debate public broadcasting on the merits. But don’t try to slit its throat in the dark of night while hiding behind needy children.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 and is filed under General Politics, Money, Partisan Hacks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 8th, 2006 at 11:44 am
Great, In order to balance the budget we’re going to assassinate Big Bird. I’m genuinly curious, what is it about public broadcasting that bugs the Republicans so much? Does anyone tune watch these networks for anything other than the commercial free television geared towards young children? Are they worried that my kids will become Democrats because Elmo doesn’t support the war in Iraq. I don’t get this.
August 8th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
Kevin – it has long been known that PBS likes to show naked boobies, paricularly indigenous naked boobies; Literally a sea of unabashed, bacchanalia booby worship (cleverly couched in anthropology) and for that reason, the Republicans, as defenders of starchy sexual repression must pull-out from this wicked whore and return us to some humble modicum of righteousness.
Funny post on your blog, btw.
August 8th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
I love PBS and NPR. If it weren’t for those two things, I would never ever turn on my radio or television. I’m not sure where the liberal bias is on them, and I am very liberal. If by liberal, you also mean boring, folksy or irrelevant, than yeah, I guess their liberal. (I’m talking about the NPR pieces on things like kitchens from ancient times or recitations of poems about childhood parks, etc. – OR – things on PBS like Antiques Roadshow, which I actually like but admit that I don’t know why).
Compared to ALL other radio stations and television stations, I would have always guessed them to be the most conservative, at least content wise because I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard anything provocative while watching or listening, and that includes all the “boobies” Dos Peros is apparently tuning into on PBS. I must go to bed too early.
I guess if one depends upon these broadcasts for accurate news, as I do, they should automatically be suspected of being liberal.
August 8th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
Maybe I’m thinking of the Discovery Channel. My bag. It is a damn shame that the Republicans have to pick on NPR/PBS — look Sandanista pinko professors really don’t have anything else to do these days and it is unfair to take away their singularly monotone and stupid voice. And like Meredith correctly points out, PBS does provide the world with shows like This Old House – a place were New England hobby carpenters can come together and talk about clam chodder.
August 8th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
In my experience, NPR programming is largely the same in conservative rural GA as it is in liberal Atlanta. It just gets cursed at more in rural GA than in Atlanta. The public stations still play classical music rather than bluegrass or country western and put on “Fresh Air”, the mere mention of which sets the teeth to grinding among my rural relatives.
I doubt it would be much missed in rural America.
August 8th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
I wonder if the growth of satellite radio, which reaches urban and rural areas alike and offers a dizzying array of programming, hasn’t made public radio something of a dinosaur. (Indeed, now there’s even a “public radio” channel on XM itself, run by the Minnesota PR guys.)
August 8th, 2006 at 5:05 pm
You hit the nail right on the head regarding the impact on the small rural stations.
I run the public television station in Harrisonburg VA, the 181st market. We cover a large geographic area and have greater than normal distribution costs (2 transmitter and 5 translators), but have a very rural (and relatively poor) broadcast region, with Harrisonburg (pop. 40,000) being our largest city.
Federal funding is almost 1/3 of our total budget. If our federal funding was eliminated, it’s very unlikely we would continue to exist, and if we could, we certainly would not provide any of the local programming and services we currently provide, but simply be a pass through of PBS programming.
If enough small stations were to then fail, the costs of the system would then be distributed to the remaining stations, which in turn, would make them weaker than they currently are.
It’s a shame that american public television is the worst funded public television system among first world countries. With proper funding, american public television could be the answer to many of today’s problems, from getting children ready to learn when they enter school, to providing extensive and unbiased jouralism.
August 8th, 2006 at 8:57 pm
BrianofAtlanta: If what you say about your relatives is true, I doubt they are NPR listeners. That said, I’m sure some stations are little more than pass-throughs for national programming. But even such minimalist operations exert local control over what programming they pass through. So in general, a station in a conservative region will make more conservative programming choices than a station in a less conservative region. After all, they still get most of their budget from private, local sources.
Bert: Thanks for the inside perspective. The reason PBS and NPR began in the first place was to bring quality, noncommercial programming to areas that didn’t have it, so that someone in the sticks could have access to the same cultural events as someone living in Manhattan. If nothing else that remains a worthy goal.
August 11th, 2006 at 5:42 pm
It’s because Bert and Ernie are, Ahemm, ‘roomates’. The Right just hates that.
June 12th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
NPR is the only talk that I listen to on the radio. Where else can we hear world news? It isn’t idealogues beating us over the head with their anger and half truths. Of course we (the listeners) are smart enough to have several sources of information and think for ourselves. Idealogues hate that!!!