Re: [Swprograms] Protest cutting funding for public broadcasting

[John Figliozzi <jfiglio1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Your argument would hold more water if the level of government funding 
was significant.  It's somewhere in the neighborhood of 15% of the 
average station's budget.  Most goes to program production and 
development for PBS.  Where the money to develop programs would come 
from otherwise would be the same place it comes from on commercial 
tv--the corporate world.  Public broadcasting should be different, I 
think; and it won't be if the private sector pays for it. The stations 
that will feel this the hardest, btw, are the ones serving rural and 
outlying areas...Alaska, e.g.--not the ones in the DC area.

The right wing is creating all this smoke because the public 
broadcasting sector is the one segment of the media that hasn't 
knuckled under to them.  They won't be happy until it either echoes Fox 
News or is completely dismantled.

And your argument, my friend Joe, plays right into their hands.

The day we stop paying for public media as taxpayers should be the same 
day I can opt out of sending my hard earned money to Iraq or flying the 
President back to DC to sign a bill to keep a brain dead woman on life 
support.  Enough is enough of these fascists.

John Figliozzi


On Jun 18, 2005, at 11:27 PM, Joseph Buch wrote:

> The government has been subsidizing public broadcasting for about 40 
> years.  Enough already.  On the one hand the feds want to meddle in 
> the content of NPR and PBS programming because they help fund that 
> programming.  On the other hand the feds want to cut funding to help 
> balance the budget.
>
> I say let's drop all government funding of public broadcasting and get 
> the government's influence out of the program content.  Let the people 
> who value PBS and NPR pay for what they get.  If NPR and PBS were 
> solely funded by the people who value the programming, they would be 
> more responsive to their audience's desires.  I say let's put the 
> "public" back in public broadcasting and tell the bureaucrats to 
> bugger off.  Many folks will not contribute to public stations because 
> they feel they already support public broadcasting via their tax 
> dollars.  Eliminating that excuse may actually help public 
> broadcasters' bottom lines.
>
> The current system of feeding at the government trough has resulted in 
> stations expanding to the point where they now overlap coverage with 
> the same program material.  One of the most flagrant examples is the 
> situation in Washington DC where WAMU-FM and WETA-FM cover nearly 
> identical service areas with prime drive-time programming that is the 
> same Morning Edition and All Things Considered programs on both 
> stations.  On the Delmarva peninsula, these programs are aired by 
> three stations, WESM, WSCL and WSDL which have about 80% of their 
> coverage areas overlapping.  This is a waste.  If the government money 
> was not there to support this waste, the stations would be forced to 
> diversify their products in the hope of garnering a larger loyal 
> audience attuned to a particular type of program material.  The 
> programming would be more diverse and the people would stand a better 
> chance of getting the type of programming they want.
>
> Government has done its job of providing the seed money to get the 
> public broadcasters up and running.  It is now time to back off and 
> let public broadcasting learn how to swim without water wings.
> Joe Buch
>
>
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