The Case for Publicly Funded Media and Innovation
I had to chuckle when reading the comments to this story in the New York Times: “Conservatives Get the PBS and NPR Cuts They’ve Wanted for Decades”
A reader wrote the comment:
In response to a letter to my Congressman Chuck Edwards, supporting continued federal funding of CBP, I received the following:
“today broadcasters face strong competition from commercial media. Commercial broadcasters now offer quality educational, world and local news and entertainment programming".
OK, Congressman show me that programming that compares to PBS, resides in one place and is free.
What commercial media is offering the quality of educational, world, and local news of public media? None of them. Has Mr. Edwards watched or listened to world/local news on public broadcasting? I expect not. Educational programming? Who is even doing educational programming in the commercial space?
Commercial television is circling the drain right now. In fairness I’m not speaking of streaming services as those aren’t free. I’m talking about the major free (i.e. non-subscription) TV broadcasters like ABC, Fox, etc.
Interestingly this same situation is playing out in the mobile game space as well. Today The Verge wrote about the circling of the drain in mobile gaming with respect to the quality of games coming out on the platforms of Netflix and Apple. In the case of Apple they should be ashamed. They have more money than God and can easily afford to put out high quality games that might only attract smaller audiences.
Circling back to public broadcasting...
Public media puts out higher-risk entertainment exactly because it’s funded by viewers/listeners with some help from the government. For example look at daily news coverage. PBS can afford to do in-depth news reporting that simply won’t wash on commercial television (compare the Newshour on PBS to something like ABC World News Tonight which is a commercial-fest interrupted by over-the-top delivery of a few news stories. Yes that’s right, there is no comparison).
This has a direct corollary in other industries as well. Commercial entities aren’t going to do risky things without government funding, most of them anyhow. There is no payback for it. SpaceX or Starlink exist because of government funding. Let’s not even mention the number of innovations that came out of the space program starting in the 1960s - again paid for by taxpayer dollars.
I get that people have issues with government. God knows there are plenty of reasons but killing funding of things like public broadcasting doesn’t do any of us any good nor does it save us much money. We’re in a race to the bottom thanks to a Congress who had abdicated their duties to govern and an uninformed public who doesn’t seem to know any better.
