Let's Not Let John Boehner And Paul Ryan Kill Sesame Street

But not the Republican one

I'm a member of KCRW, my local public radio affiliate. I listen whenever I'm in the car and every year I send them a check for $365. This week they sent all their members this email:

The bill HR1 is being debated in Congress this week. In this large bill is the total elimination of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that supports public media. For KCRW, that would be a whopping loss of $1 million a year. KCRW and all of public broadcasting needs you now.  

Here's what you can do:

• Connect with 170MillionAmericans.org on Facebook and Twitter

• Call your Representative in the House with your views at 202-225-3121 or 202-224-3121, and ask for your Representative by name. Tell him or her not to cut public broadcasting funding in the Continuing Resolution H.R. 1

• Blumenauer Letter: Ask your Representative to sign on to the Blumenauer letter supporting funding for public broadcasting

To learn more, follow the debate with KCRW's Warren Olney on To The Point. And thank you for believing in public radio.

Largely because Democratic electeds had disappointed the voters who propelled the party to massive wins in 2006 and 2008-- with overwhelming majorities in Congress and with the presidency-- Democratic voters stayed home in 2010, allowing an energized GOP/teabagger base to win huge victories across the country. Now Republicans are grotesquely overplaying their hand. Wisconsin's ultra-right wing Governor Scott Walker's threat to call out the National Guard to prevent protests of his draconian attempt at union busting is just the most flashy over-reaches by power-mad GOP ideologues who managed to slip into power while lame Insider Democrats tried to define themselves too broadly to mean anything.

In New Hampshire, the GOP-dominated legislature wants to take away the right of students to vote. In South Dakota the GOP-dominated legislature wants to pass a law declaring the murder of an abortion doctor "justifiable homicide." In South Carolina the GOP-dominated legislature wants to start issuing its own currency, a precursor to secession. If they go, there's little question Arizona would follow.

And on the national stage, the far right extremists in the GOP-dominated House are talking about shutting down the government by defunding it. More "mainstream" conservatives like Speaker John Boehner and Wall Street's very own Budget Chair Paul Ryan have their sites set on starting the process of taking down Medicare and Social Security, the most popular social programs in America, long-hated by the wealthy classes represented by the Republican Party. Another long-cherished GOP dream that Boehner and Ryan intend to deliver on: dismantling public broadcasting. Ryan's budget proposal zeroes out funding for both NPR and PBS. Why do Republicans, especially Randians like Ryan, hate public broadcasting? They always attack it for "liberal bias"-- it's liberal in the sense that it stands for things such as scientific inquiry and equal access and "the arts," which by their nature are provocative-- and they certainly disdain the independent perspectives being broadcast in a media environment saturated by lowest common-denominator and simplistic formulations by Hate Talk Radio and Fox propagandists like Glenn Beck, Hannity and O'Reilly.

On Tuesday the L.A. Times called the mean-spirited proposals to defund public broadcasting "political, not practical... The money such cuts would save is not meaningful in terms of balancing the budget, and what it would spare any individual taxpayer is literally small change."

It's your small change, fair enough, and you may feel that nothing that PBS or NPR or their affiliates provide is anything you'd miss. We could go back and forth on that all day and never get anywhere. And, admittedly, I'm one who thinks that paying taxes is indeed "patriotic"-- it's the people acting as a body, not just out of highly localized self-interest-- even as I don't support every use toward which they're turned. As it is, public broadcasting is already supported largely by viewer and listener donations and corporate grants, and will not disappear from the face of the nation if Washington turns off the already trickling tap-- at least not in money-rich, big cities like ours, though less well-heeled communities may suffer real losses. Which is just the sort of market inequality that government funding is meant to allay.

New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman spoke up against the GOP efforts to strike out at public broadcasting. "I think unfortunately this is an issue that has more of an ideological bent to it than it does a fiscal conservatism bent to it. I think some particularly here in the Congress on the Republican side feel the CPB is too liberal in its programming and doesn't adequately reflect the more conservative right wing views that they favor and accordingly it has always been a target for them in spending proposals."

Wednesday, the distinctly non-partisan Variety posted a warning: Keep Your Government Hands Off My PBS:

Republicans-- having long since bought into the notion public television is a steaming bastion of left-wing propaganda-- have targeted the Corp. for Public Broadcasting among the entities to be eliminated in their quest to streamline government.

If that sounds familiar, it should, since this same threat has arisen with sporadic regularity over the last 20 years, the thought being that anything more moderate than Rush Limbaugh is unworthy of government funding. And while Republicans have insisted the issue isn't about ideology-- in 2005, Ohio Rep. Ralph Regula characterized funding of public broadcasting as "somewhere between a 'need-to-do' and a 'nice-to-do'" priority-- there's no denying politics has played a part. Newt Gingrich sought to "zero out" PBS in the mid-1990s, and Bush appointee Ken Tomlinson became chairman of CPB in 2003, creating a chill by seeking to ferret out "liberal bias."

PBS and National Public Radio may finally fall victim to the executioner's ax, but don't be so certain of that. Because despite the right's drumbeat, older people who wield inordinate power in elections by voting in disproportionate numbers-- the ones who keep Social Security and Medicare cuts at bay-- are also overrepresented in the public broadcasting audience.
It's not twentysomethings watching Masterpiece and Frontline but their parents and grandparents. A stellar production like the recent early-20th-century miniseries Downton Abbey connects directly with them.

Granted, the need for public TV has appeared to ebb in a digital world of proliferating channels. Commercial alternatives-- from Discovery to BBC America-- offer ambitious documentary programming and British dramas that were once PBS' exclusive province.

Public TV officials have long acknowledged they perform best at the demographic poles-- reaching the very young, who watch Sesame Street and its ilk, and the old, drawn to Ken Burns' documentaries, Nature" or Antiques Roadshow. Efforts to broaden that reach-- including initiatives former CEO Pat Mitchell pushed -- have yielded at best mixed results.

Americans are funny, politically speaking. It seems the only thing they hate as much as higher taxes is reduced government services-- without recognizing the contradiction. As the New York Times' Paul Krugman put it, "They only want to cut spending on other people."

In tough economic times-- with concerns about federal debt and states contemplating bankruptcy-- the argument for sustaining PBS would appear highly vulnerable amid proposed cuts to areas like the Environmental Protection Agency and aid to low-income families.

Nearly a decade ago, Mitchell said to be "vital and viable, (PBS is) going to have to embrace some changes." Toward that end, underwriting promos are now so elaborate that the term "commercial-free" is no longer quite accurate.

PBS has weathered assaults going back to the Nixon administration, as American U. School of Communication professor Patricia Aufderheide told American Prospect in 2005, for a simple reason: "What has saved public television … has been the broad support of American viewers, many of whom are conservative but who like 'quality television,' or don't want 'Masterpiece Theater' taken away, or like 'Nova,' or like 'Big Bird.'"

Echoing this point, The Writers Guild of America East-- citing the 21,000 jobs public broadcasting creates-- issued a "Save PBS" statement saying, "No one wants to read the headline, 'Congress to Big Bird: "Drop Dead."' And Burns insisted the issue is nonpartisan, calling public media more critical than ever "when traditional journalism institutions are collapsing and electronic news divisions are increasingly all talk or all entertainment."

The bottom line is many older people (and a few less consequential young ones) like PBS, and there isn't much on TV aimed at them. If public broadcasting can inspire them to vocalize those sentiments, then it just might survive the latest GOP "death panel" determined to pull the plug on some of grandma's favorite programs.

Tucson Democrat Raúl Grijalva, co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, summed up the GOP initiative best: "PBS and NPR aren’t luxury items or disposable toys to be thrown in the garbage. They’re a fundamental and very permanent reminder of what makes free speech and independent media so valuable. I can’t help but wonder why Republicans are so eagerly cutting jobs and locking up company doors even as they talk about an economic recovery. [If Republicans] “are really willing to end Sesame Street, they’re no more committed to education than they are to job creation. They support continued subsidies for oil and mining companies with record profits but think children’s and public affairs programming deserve to be eliminated.”