House Republicans have been trying for years to elimitnate funding for the corporation for public broadcasting which in turn funds PBS and NPR. These are the least biased of any nationwide broadcasters and provide an important service to our children in the form of educational programming like Sesame Street. There are also may areas where we could raise much more money to help balance the budget.
I regularly listen to NPR and find the format of their shows to be much more academic and even-handed than those elsewhere on the radio. Aside from NPR your choices are pretty much Air America for a liberal slant or just about any other AM radio show for a conservative slant on the news, both claim to be unbiased news shows but are basically comparable to the opinion page in the newspaper. Listening to any of these you will hear a host ranting about their side of the issue, papering the guest they agree with, or attacking a guest they don't. The same goes for television but without the liberal slanted outlet. You have a number of networks all more concerned with ratings than portraying an accurate picture of the news. On top of that many of these networks accept pre-recorded press releases from corporations and even our own government and send them out as though they are real news! (See
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3) Public Broadcasting has a long history of integrity and un-biased reporting that no other network can hold a candle to.
Then there are the educational progams: Sesame Street and others. These provide a valuable educations resource for children whose parents can't afford to put them in preschool or even afford cable. These parents can all afford PBS because it is free to them. I know that while I didn't learn my ABCs and 123s from Sesame Street it was certainly instrumental in reinforcing these fundamentals. Sesame street is also not the only educational progam on PBS there are educational programs for both children and adults on subjects ranging from math and science to the arts and history.
We should not balance the budget by taking services from the most poor and needy in our society. The 23% cut will leave the CPB with a budget of around $380 million meaning that they actually cut about $114 million. Compared to the $9 Billion that went missing in Iraq in the hands of contractors hand picked by the Bush administration from a pool of their buddies that's nothing. Or how about cutting the $250 Million bridge in Alaska that will server all of about 50 people.
The problem is that the right sees true unbiased reporting and education of the poor as a threat and they feel that with control of the White House and Congress they feel that they can squash one more program that benefits the poor or educates the masses.
Labels: PBS, politics
This is far and away the worst idea I have heard from an administration that has come up with some whoppers. Someone actually sat down and said "We need a new generation of nuclear (or nucular in the words of our president) weapons" or maybe it was something like "How about we start a new nuclear arms race". Here we find ourselves, involved in a war in Iraq that was apparently started to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction and we are now pursuing more modern weapons of mass destruction for ourselves. We are telling other nations like Iran and North Korea, "You can't have nuclear weapons" while building more ourselves. No wonder the world looks at the US as though we are a bunch of hypocrites and there is widespread distrust of our motives.
