WASHINGTON – "Public" broadcasting is facing financial problems, and the search is on for a new funding formula, especially on the TV side.
Whatever plan that is ultimately implemented might well mean reduced taxpayer subsidies, though not necessarily elimination. Corporation for Public Broadcasting, parent to National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service, is seeking an alternative way of dividing the reliance on foundation grants, tax-exempt contributions and forced subsidies from the taxpayers.
NPR spokeswoman Jenny Lawhorn takes issue with the term “cratering,” which appeared in an MSNBC report on PBS and NPR. In an interview with NewsMax.com, she did acknowledge “concern” over money but said that was not stopping NPR from growing.
PBS spokeswoman Lea Sloan told NewsMax that “there are all kinds of land mines planted on Capitol Hill” for so-called public television. The Senate budget is “fine, it’s great,” she said, but the budget in committee on the House is such that “there are all kinds of ways that this can go badly or off-track in just a few years.”
A House Appropriations subcommittee, with the blessing of the Bush administration, has approved an accounting methodology that Broadcasting & Cable magazine says amounts to a 26 percent cut in operating grants to stations.
A Senate subcommittee, as Sloan indicates, was considerably more lavish. The differences will be worked out in conference this summer.
The “landmines,” “concern” and the search for new funding formulas pose a big question mark, not whether to “assure the future of public television,” but how.
“I think with the billions they make on marketing their products, it is silly to talk about their extinction,” Free Congress Foundation President and conservative icon Paul Weyrich told NewsMax.
The least amount of sympathy for the plight of PBS and NPR is found in conservative political and cultural precincts.
In 1995, the “Contract With America” Congress, spurred on by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, tried to take PBS and NPR off the public dole altogether. Howls of protest from the “liberal” establishment intervened.
Last year, NewsMax spotlighted a controversy over Steven Emerson, author of “American Jihad” and allegations that he was
“Good riddance!” was the reaction of conservative media watchdog Reed Irvine when told the taxpayer might be relieved of having to shovel money into "public" broadcasting.
In an interview with NewsMax, Irvine recalled a 13-part series PBS had aired on the Vietnam War. Twelve of the 13 parts won an award from communist Hanoi, he said.
When Irvine’s Accuracy in Media tried to respond with a two-part documentary narrated by Charlton Heston, the second installment was rejected because PBS “did not accept our thesis” that the U.S. media has contributed to America’s loss in that war, AIM's president said.
Hardly in keeping with PBS’s original directive “to give all points of view,” he observed. This was just one of Irvine’s run-ins with PBS.
It took NPR a year to apologize to Traditional Values Coalition for a smear that hinted involvement in the anthrax letters sent to Capitol Hill in October 2002.
TVC’s Andrea Sheldon Lafferty, apparently not wanting to wade into another full-scale battle with "public" broadcasting, was circumspect when told of CPB's new plight. She observed that government waste, fraud and abuse comes in many forms such as studying “bizarre sexual practices” and funding radio and TV with tax dollars.
In March, PBS commentator and onetime Lyndon Johnson acolyte Bill Moyers received Media Research Center’s “Dishonor Award” for whining about the GOP's success in the 2002 elections. Those pesky scheming voters drove Moyers to imply a sinister “monopoly" was afoot. President Bush’s filibustered judicial nominees could tell you about the “monopoly control” the Republicans “enjoy” on Capitol Hill.
Whatever happens in the effort to devise a new funding formula for "public" broadcasting, many conservative taxpayers would like to be relieved of participation.
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