GOP Kills Big Bird .:. grubbykid.com

GOP Kills Big Bird

Home Alone II -Starring Ernie & Big Bird, originally uploaded by Beezy.

Today the House of Representatives will be voting to cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) which funds PBS and NPR. Not only did the House GOP drop funding by $100 million, they zeroed it out in the near-future. Who owns Congress? The Republicans do - so this is their bill. Especially troubling is Corporation for Public Broadcasting stooge Tomlinson's consultation with the White House - when the CPB was set up precisely so that politics wouldn't interfere with Public Broadcasting. Tomlinson is obviously a political hack who's real fealty is to the White House, not to Public Broadcastion, and not to the people.

Why is this important? Why should the government fund media? A nice free-market trope is that we shouldn't "fund entertainment." Well, the market doesn't solve everything, or we obviously wouldn't have cases like Enron, or the like.

Don't believe that the market can bring good programming - or even programming that isn't "liberal?" How about The American Experience, perhaps the best program which showcases American people and history. History which is a profoundly (small-c) conservative issue. One of the best recent programs was Victory in the Pacific, about the US Pacific Theatre in WWII - we wrote about the Yalta Conference in the context of the Pacific Theatre before.

You can't tell me that any single corporate television station would produce any of these programs - that isn't their job according to stockholders. Corporate media's job is to make money - which is great (I like making money). They even come along and make interesting, and sometimes informative shows. But public television is distinctly different than stockholder-directed television: public television's sole purpose is to inform the American public - and they do a fantastic job of that through shows like The American Experience, NOVA, Charlie Rose, etc. If informing the public is liberal, then let us all be liberal.

But this isn't about some lofty theory about how should government interact with media. This is about muzzling an uncontrolled media outlet. If the GOP really wanted to save some money in the budget, then either raising taxes or cutting the military budget or medicaid or social security would be the place to do it. These areas comprise over 3/4 of the budget of around $2.338 trillion and CPB is around .008% of the total budget - not even a speck. Trying to cheap out by cutting $100 million out of PBS is a political play to silence uncontrolled media.

Comments

sweetchuck says:

Shouldn't it be "Killing Big Bird" or "Attemting to Kill". If I was skimmming headlines I'd think they already did it.

Also, NOVA and Scientific American Frontiers kick arse.

Posted by: sweetchuck at June 23, 2005 1:09 PM #

Dad says:

Let's see...the cost of the War in Iraq is estimated to be $207.5 billion by the end of this fiscal year--9/30/05...Do ya think we could borrow $100 million from the Defense Department?