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Save PBS. It makes us safer

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Re: Save PBS. It makes us safer

#71

Post by [deleted] »

massysett wrote: post #25
sushisource wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Care to back up your claim at all instead of just traipsing in and saying "no"? I watch PBS every day and they are most certainly not commercials as your parent comment says. They generally are 10 seconds at most, have maybe two sentences about the company, and show the logo. Usually one of those sentences is "Company xxx is proud to support PBS".

Dictionary.com says a commercial is "a paid advertisement or promotional announcement." Companies pay PBS, they get an announcement promoting the company. It's a commercial. If Company xxx just wanted to do great things, it could easily give money and seek no acknowledgement (the same way that, ahem, viewers give money and get no on-air acknowledgement, not even a flash in crawling text.) But Company xxx wants to be…

[deleted]

Re: Save PBS. It makes us safer

#72

Post by JustSomeNobody »

astrodust wrote: post #42
ahallock wrote: post #20

Why can't people just donate directly? I set up recurring payments for donation-based channels I watch on Youtube, so not sure why this can't be the same.

The people PBS can best serve are often the ones with the least amount of money to donate.

Can't be stated any better than that.

Re: Save PBS. It makes us safer

#73

Post by doktrin »

tptacek wrote: post #63

The President's budget proposal might tell you something about what the Administration is about, but it's not a serious legislating document; the budget is one of a few subjects that is entirely delegated to Congress. Meanwhile, PBS is a rounding error in the non-military discretionary budget (which is itself dwarfed by mandatory entitlement spending). It's been said, most recently I think by John Dickerson, that con…

Without federal funding & stakeholders, what really distinguishes CPB / PBS from any other non-profit?

> conservatives benefit more from having PBS around as an issue than they would by slashing its funding

There's an implication here that if federal funding ceased, the conservative assault on PBS would somehow fizzle - but couldn't the opposite just as easily be true?

Cutting off federal funds is a form of de-legitimization, and we'd hear it cited for years to come as 'proof' that PBS and all its programming is liberal propaganda that can safely be ignored by one and all.

Re: Save PBS. It makes us safer

#74

Post by gingerbread-man »

gavinpc wrote: post #35

To me, anybody who argues that PBS should be cut loses all credibility as a budget hawk (if they had any to begin with). PBS is an incredibly valuable public-private partnership. For every dollar the federal government spends, two or three listeners listeners voluntarily contribute a dollar of their own money, much of which goes to their local community. Other programs should be looking to public broadcasting as a fi…

From an ideological perspective, the idea of any state-run media is pretty dissonant with my views. Being opposed to the very idea of PBS or anything like it is a totally understandable position.

The case for PBS is a pragmatic one: it serves millions of kids everyday and supplies unrivaled public educational programming, for what most would consider a very reasonable public expenditure. I completely agree that other agencies should look to PBS as a financial model to be emulated.[1] But it's unfair to discount the validity of your opponent's argument just because the pragmatic counter-argument is strong.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/penta...

Re: Save PBS. It makes us safer

#75

Post by wilg »

gingerbread-man wrote: post #74
gavinpc wrote: post #35

To me, anybody who argues that PBS should be cut loses all credibility as a budget hawk (if they had any to begin with). PBS is an incredibly valuable public-private partnership. For every dollar the federal government spends, two or three listeners listeners voluntarily contribute a dollar of their own money, much of which goes to their local community. Other programs should be looking to public broadcasting as a fi…

From an ideological perspective, the idea of any state-run media is pretty dissonant with my views. Being opposed to the very idea of PBS or anything like it is a totally understandable position. The case for PBS is a pragmatic one: it serves millions of kids everyday and supplies unrivaled public educational programming, for what most would consider a very reasonable public expenditure. I completely agree that other…

There's an important distinction between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_broadcasting and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_media though. I'm pretty into the former but share your distaste for the latter.

Re: Save PBS. It makes us safer

#76

Post by gingerbread-man »

theparanoid wrote: post #41
gavinpc wrote: post #35

To me, anybody who argues that PBS should be cut loses all credibility as a budget hawk (if they had any to begin with). PBS is an incredibly valuable public-private partnership. For every dollar the federal government spends, two or three listeners listeners voluntarily contribute a dollar of their own money, much of which goes to their local community. Other programs should be looking to public broadcasting as a fi…

PBS is in a dying industry. Television. Perhaps another equally good public-private partnership will arrive. The Khan Academy and Wikipedia are something like that.

The USFG is "an execution company," not an "innovation company." If we had diverted 50% of CPB's budget a decade ago to funding "new technologies for public interest educational programming," it's very unlikely it would have turned into Wikipedia or Khan Academy. PBS is an extremely successful program whose benefits don't show any signs of slowing down. Eventually, it will evolve or be replaced by something better, but there's no reason to get hasty with that. I watch Nova pretty regularly on my appleTV. They don't seem to be anywhere near technological obsolescence just yet.

Re: Save PBS. It makes us safer

#77

Post by bazinga888 »

theparanoid wrote: post #41
gavinpc wrote: post #35

To me, anybody who argues that PBS should be cut loses all credibility as a budget hawk (if they had any to begin with). PBS is an incredibly valuable public-private partnership. For every dollar the federal government spends, two or three listeners listeners voluntarily contribute a dollar of their own money, much of which goes to their local community. Other programs should be looking to public broadcasting as a fi…

PBS is in a dying industry. Television. Perhaps another equally good public-private partnership will arrive. The Khan Academy and Wikipedia are something like that.

Cause it's a stretch for them to freely publish online using the same model?

Cause they're already doing that.

Re: Save PBS. It makes us safer

#78

Post by gingerbread-man »

wilg wrote: post #75
gingerbread-man wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an ideological perspective, the idea of any state-run media is pretty dissonant with my views. Being opposed to the very idea of PBS or anything like it is a totally understandable position. The case for PBS is a pragmatic one: it serves millions of kids everyday and supplies unrivaled public educational programming, for what most would consider a very reasonable public expenditure. I completely agree that other…

There's an important distinction between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_broadcasting and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_media though. I'm pretty into the former but share your distaste for the latter.

From a practical perspective I completely agree, but my nightmare scenario for PBS isn't seeing it defunded, but seeing it lose some or all editorial control. That scenario seems very unlikely at present, but not impossible. I just wanted to point out that it's not a completely unreasonable case to make.

Re: Save PBS. It makes us safer

#79

Post by fullshark »

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #31
fullshark wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that not a commercial? Just because it's not actively annoying?

We can deliberate over the meanings of terms all day, but there is a distinction. The PBS commercials are just "this company supports PBS"; it doesn't even mention the industry the company works in. Commercials elsewhere are "this company makes this product, which does this task that will make you happy and/or surround you with beautiful women".

Do you think these companies would keep giving PBS money if they stopped reporting who was giving it before/after each show?

Also your claim isn't even true, I recall an ad for a European Boat Touring company before Rick Steve's Europe for example. The ad was clearly "this company sells this product."

It's all just another form of lifestyle ad / virtue signaling. "We support PBS and the things you care about, support us too."

Re: Save PBS. It makes us safer

#80

Post by gingerbread-man »

gingerbread-man wrote: post #18

Outline of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's FY2014 budget: http://www.cpb.org/files/aboutcpb/financials/budget/FY2014-O... Out of a total budget of $445m: ~66% (292m) is distributed via direct grants to local public television and radio stations. ~17% (74m) goes to television programming grants. ~7% (30m) goes to radio programming. ~11% (59m) goes to system support and administration.

I'd be curious to hear from someone who has worked at a local public broadcasting affiliate about what their budgets look like. I enjoy state-level public radio, but I don't watch a lot of state or local public television programming.

It seems like a lot of the arguments for funding PBS/CPB have been centered around their national programming, e.g. Nova and Sesame Street. But if the proposed cuts are "across the board," state and local public television programs would bear a greater share of the burden. Maybe we should be talking more about those.

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