Taking on Big Bird again

June 8, 2006

In the mid-’90s, Gingrich & Co. thought there would be minimal political backlash if they tried to slash funding for PBS. They were wrong, the public rallied behind [tag]Sesame Street[/tag] characters (Save [tag]Big Bird[/tag]!), and the GOP backed off.

Ten years later, conservatives in the House have decided to give this another shot.

House [tag]Republicans[/tag] yesterday revived their efforts to [tag]slash[/tag] [tag]funding[/tag] for public broadcasting, as a key committee approved a $115 million reduction in the [tag]budget[/tag] for the [tag]Corporation for Public Broadcasting[/tag] that could force the elimination of some popular [tag]PBS[/tag] and [tag]NPR[/tag] programs.

On a party-line vote, the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees health and education funding approved the cut to the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes money to the [tag]Public Broadcasting Service[/tag] and [tag]National Public Radio[/tag]. It would reduce the corporation’s budget by 23 percent next year, to $380 million, in a cut that Republicans said was necessary to rein in government spending.

The reduction, which would come in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, must be approved by the full Appropriations Committee, and then the full House and Senate, before it could take effect. Democrats and public broadcasting advocates began planning efforts to reverse the cut.

Republicans tried this last year, too, but ran into quite a bit of opposition before quietly pulling the measure.

The Boston Globe reported, “Republicans say they remain adamant that public broadcasting cannot receive funding at the expense of healthcare and education programs.” That’s an interesting spin — not only are Republican lawmakers cutting millions for PBS while trying to repeal the estate tax at a cost of tens of billions, but Republicans are prepared to boost spending in healthcare and education?

…but the super-wealthy shouldn’t have to pay their share of the tax burden…

  • Of course they are trying to cut funding for NPR and PBS. These are the last two bastions of ‘liberal media’. Everything else (except lefty blogs like this one 😉 ) are now tools of the corporate elite.

    But their method is incredibly stupid. They should pony up the funds to get all the PBS stations upgraded to High Definition TV, than drop them all the next year. If anything the Bushites have demonstrated is that giving money through the CPB will lead to partisan interference, because Boy George II and his minions have NO SHAME.

    So really, I’m for cutting off funding to the CPB, NEA, and NEH. Why do we need National Endowments? Let them get money from the super rich whose tax burdens are disappearing.

  • It’s just amazing to me that, with all the waste in the federal budget, conservative republicants continue to go after popular programs because they have the reputation of being “liberal” (NPR, PBS) or are products if the New Deal (social security). If they had any sense, or weren’t so blindly partisan and ideological, they’d go after real wastful spending.

  • smiley-
    More than likely that “wasteful spending” is going to their cronies.
    And that’s the end of that chapter

  • Would one of those poor underfunded health-care programs be the multi-trillion dollar medicare drug benefit? $115 million wouldn’t even cover half of the bridge to nowhere. These chuckleheads wouldn’t recognize Fiscal Responsibility if it introduced itself at a posh campaign fundraiser.

  • in a cut that Republicans said was necessary to rein in government spending.

    Such blatant and obvious bullshit coming from the mouths of the same legislators who just raised the debt ceiling yet again a few months ago.

  • If the CPB programs are popular, then they will acquire sponsors. Currently, my local PBS radio station spends a lot of time on commercials for its “underwriters” in addition to spending time touting how great a station it is.

  • This is part of their Radical Republican Agenda.

    1) Give huge tax cuts to the people who need it the least without a plan or way to pay for them,

    2) Spend like drunken sailors for YEARS, raise deficit to historical levels,

    3) Suddenly, in the name of fiscal responsibility, impose dramatic cuts to all the programs you wanted to gut in the first place– but now you can say you *have* to. Claim that anyone who stands in your way is fiscally irresponsible.

    Fuckers.

  • My local PBS station has taken to preempting regular programming to air fundraising efforts. It has gotten to the point where they actually stopped Sesame Street yesterday morning for about 10-15 minutes while talking heads kept on asking for money. Needless to say, my children didn’t like that and whined to me when Sesame Street was coming on.

    I will NEVER EVER pledge any money to PBS because of the incessant fundraising efforts, both day and night, that serve to needlessly annoy and alienate its viewers.

    To PBS — go fuck yourself and find yourself some new marketing hacks.

  • But if they have to solicit sponsors, they will lose their independence, which was the whole point behind PBS. When a journalistic show is being funded by Merck, how certain can you be their reporting isn’t slanted toward Merck?

  • Fallenwoman is right in one aspect: PBS has lots of commericials already.

    Apparently there are three things you can’t escape in this country:

    Death, taxes, and the commericialization of every square inch of bandwidth and piece of property (public and private).

    It’s disgusting.

    8 trillion dollars in debt and we can’t even fund one decent shit-free television station.

    NOT THAT’S A STATEMENT OF VALUES.

  • Re: #9: WTF?

    Will O’The Wisp, take a breath, and think about it for a second. Do you think they like preempting their programming? Do you think they are swimming in pools of cash and love cash so much they are asking you to give them more?

    1) PBS stations do on-air fundraising because they don’t have money, because their government funding is constantly under attack by GOPers like this

    2) In the absense of government grants, public donations is what keeps them afloat and independent. Otherwise, they are forced to start down the slippery slope to corporate investor ownership, which means just another CNN or Fox on the airwaves.

    If you think they should be getting their money by some other method, then please enlighten us. As far as I can tell, you expect them to receive it by osmosis. If you just don’t like publically-funding broadcasting to begin with, say so. Then we can have an honest discussion. But I don’t think these attacks that are based on the presumption that public broadcasting doesn’t need to conduct on-air promotions is the least bit fair.

  • $115 MM? That is such a pointless amount of savings in light of the size of the budget. This is not in any way an attempt to do anything but cut funding for public broadcasting. I am repeatedly amazed by these guys. God forbid there is one channel of the hundreds on radio and TV that is publically funded and that may not spew Bush lover crap 24/7. I hope to god this does not work. Since my wages are stagnant against inflation I really could use the money I will be giving to public broadcasting to keep the on the air.

    Jackasses!

  • “….a cut that Republicans said was necessary to rein in government spending.”

    So, they’re going to spend that $115 million on increased care for Iraq vets and upgrading the VA hospitals? Important matters in the Long War since we’re going to be generating large numbers of wounded (physically, psychologically) veterans?

    Naaaaahh – it all goes to the Walton family who would be bankrupted if they had to pay the “death tax” on their $100 billion.

    Republicans: the party of keeping priorities responsibly.

  • The culture wars really are trying to kill off culture in the U.S. Slashing social programs breaks the the ties of reliance and trust we have in each other as a society and now this is an attack on the soul of the nation through battling the arts. PBS and HBO are about the only two channels worth watching anymore and they’re trying to kill off PBS. I though seeing Mara Liasson and Juan Williams on Fox would have fed the beast but obviously any reasonably non-biased news source must be eliminated. I’m waiting for them to privatize PBS and sell it to Rupert Murdoch under the guise of easing the national debt.

    Just like Bush is willing to spend political capital (you invest capital not spend it you trust fund idiot), likewise he’s willing to divist us of our social capital (asshole.)

  • A few more viewers like Will o’ the Wisp and PBS will only have 15 minutes of actual content and the rest will have to be fundraising content. Granted, pre-empting Sesame Street isn’t the wisest of choices as your average toddler is not much of a charitable giver.

  • Damn straight that pitching a fundraiser at a toddler doesn’t rake in the cash.

    My point — as a longtime PBS viewer and, gasp, actually a donor — it is getting to the point where every other night I seem to be getting pitched fundraisers showing “specials” that I don’t give a good crap and preempted shows that I do give a good crap. This practice is alienating regular viewers.

    I don’t profess to know the solution to PBS funding woes, but I do know that incessantly rattling the tin cup is NOT the solution. Do you think that PBS will be saved by talking heads peddling 10 cent ball point pens with teh PBS logo or DVD collections for obscure UK shows? I think not.

  • “Rattling the cup” may be irritating but it may also be an embarrassing survival strategy until a less hostile environment for “commercial free” public TV comes into being. Without the $115M cut, they are costing the taxpayers $495M. I don’t think it’s perfectly spent but we get more return on that money than we do for a hell of a lot of other expenditures. I’m much more contemptuous of RepubCo acting as if cutting $115M is going to make some difference in the cancerous debt. $115M goes down the rabbit hole in Shruby’s America like every couple of seconds. Where is this contrived cut going to have more impact? On the overall budget or on PBS by reducing it’s gov’t stipend by 1/3?

    PBS doesn’t have to go F’ itself. It’s getting screwed plenty from without. Current donor’s telling PBS to “go f’ itself” is music to their pointy little ears. It sounds like their marketing is working just fine in certain quarters. And marketing hacks aren’t near as effective as RepubCo party hacks who would be happy to see Public Broadcasting disappear all together. If it wasn’t for what public outcry did occur it would be gone already.

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