What are those reasons?
I don’t believe I stated that PBS should meet my standard but it should at least make some sort of attempt at meeting its own claims of quality. Perhaps you haven’t read the rest of this thread where some wax poetic about the high quality of PBS vs. the awful slop delivered by every other channel on earth. I agree with you on the Iraq war **Fear Itself **and think we need to question whether that is a good place to spend money too.
So you have heard about the genetic experiment that turned all of the inhabtants of Walford into mindless,bad acting Zombies then?
Not that anyone noticed the difference afterwards anyway.
PBS still exists because people like me watch it and support it, the crap programming they air during pledge drives notwithstanding.
I’m aware of that. But it also is funded by “viewers like you!” Don’t forget!!!
You ever hear the phrase, “40-something channels and nothing’s on?” That’s often the case, even with digital. Even the History Channel is all about aliens and reality TV. (At this point, I’d give anything for them to go back to being the Hitler Channel again!) History International is good, but it’s only on digital.
I don’t even watch that much TV anymore, as a result. Which is probably a good thing, but it’s sad that the more channels you have, the more everything sucks.
Yeah, they are great. When they are on. My local PBS (actually there are two of them, but the big one) is conducting more than one pledge drive a month. Sometimes they exempt Antiques Roadshow from interruptions, other times, like last week, it isn’t on at all.
I am beginning to wonder just why they are in business at all unless it is to conduct pledge drives.
Bob
I’m sitting here trying to draw a parallel between PBS and “the public option” re healthcare debate, but the parallel practically draws itself.
Public TV exists as a fail-safe against the idea that for-profit alternatives will always be the best. Sure, right now the caliber of programming on TLC/Science/History/Discovery is about the same as on PBS, but if all of those stations decided to dedicate their entire lineup to promoting the qualities of GE Trivection Ovens, PBS would at least be there as an alternative. If the corporate parents behind Fox News, CBS, and MSNBC decided to use those platforms to spread complete falsehoods, PBS news would (hopefully) be there with some truth.
As a previous poster said, they’re the public libraries to Barns & Nobel. One might think that with libraries lending books for free, bookstores could never exist. One might also think that with bookstores having better environments, seating, more copies of new releases, and flavored coffee beverages, libraries could never exist. Alas, they both exist, keeping the other in check.
Any Ken Burns fans. He was funded by PBS to make " Civil War, Jazz", “Baseball” and others. They would not have happened on regular TV. Commercial Tv is not designed to take risks. It will not program for the few. They are in the business of selling product. TV is not their business but a means to sell.
And yet, not all of the pledge drives are annoying.
I still remember fondly the time when the cast of Red Dwarf was helping a local PBS station in the San Francisco Bay area.
One viewer asked, "who would win in a fight? Data or Kryten? (a fight with the Androids of Star Trek TNG and Red Dwarf)
The guy that played Kryten had the answer right away (Paraphrasing):
“Data would win”.
“You see, Kryten is always so helpful, he would even help Data in the fight! “Please Mr. Data, keep on hitting me until you are… completely satisfied!””
Thanks. I felt it was in the less than 10% range but I couldn’t remember where I got that figure. And just a few months ago a HUGE chunk of our state funding (Missouri) got yanked from PBS, so I suspect 2009 percentages will be even lower.
Oh, I just remembered another very outstanding program: Independent Lens. It’s worth the price of admission all by itself. Of course I feel the same way about anything having to do with Bill Moyers.
Heck, I even like some of the programs shown during the pledge drives. Like Celtic Thunder, mmmm…
Do you get annoyed by commercial TV that takes 20 minutes per hour for commercials? They of course do that year round. You just get used to PBS having uninterrupted programming . When they have pledge drives it just seems out of place.
PBS continues to get partial government funding* because the American people want it to. Whenever the political process considers defunding it, there is a popular outcry. Democracy in action; it’s as simple as that.
What reason could there be to oppose the government funding PBS? We could use the money for other purposes, but the fact that it’s popular contraindicates that. It doesn’t distort the media market; with 500+** channels, it’s only a tiny fraction of available programming. One could complain about its choice of programming, but I don’t think anyone wants the government telling the media what to broadcast. PBS’s programming is a direct reflection of the interests of its contributing viewers–democracy of the market at its best.
*Remember that government funding is only a small fraction of PBS’s sponsorship. This cite says it’s about one sixth.
**People who claim there’s 500+ channels are showing their biases. Only cable subscribers get anything near that many. I get about dozen channels, all over the air.
Do you have a PC with an internet connection? Is that connection relatively speedy? Do you have a DVD player? How about a Netflix subscription or other video club membership? Do you borrow video media from your library?
Even without a cable subscription, you have options for video entertainment and education that are quite broad and that were not available to this considerable degree when PBS was founded. And while I am not against PBS, I would prefer that arguments in favor of it to be based in reality - the notion that this programming isn’t available anywhere else is just false.
Except that the biggest source of PBS’s revenue is fees from the stations. And a lot of the station’s revenue in turn from government sources. Our local PBS station gets 18% of its revenue from the government.
If the amount of funding PBS and its affiliates got from the government was really as small as they claim it is, there would not be a big outcry. Surely they would be happy to be free from even the appearance of being “Government TV” if they would just give up a tiny proportion of their revenue stream. The gain in private fundraising would make it up in a heartbeat, no?
The reality is that there is a lot of matching of expenses and revenues, and there are some parts of PBS that are hugely profitable. Sesame Street and other childrens shows have huge licensing fees. This Old House gets oodles of cash from manufacturers of new materials that they showcase. Popular shows have lots of “sponsorship messages” which is just institutional advertising. I work for a large regional retailer, and we sponsor PBS shows in some of our market areas. Guess which budget these expenditures are charged to, donations or advertising? We used to charge them as donations, but the auditors looked at our decision making process and said that if it walks like a duck…
It is the truly “educational” stuff and the loony lefty programming that needs the government support, and that is what the government support is subsidizing.
I suspect that Benny Hill is not a PBS feed, but a feed that local PBS stations pick up, no doubt because it fills some air time, makes the Anglophiles in their audience base happy, and is dirt cheap.
The programming is not available any where else. After a while commercial TV copies successes on PBS. Sometimes they buy them outright. But much of PBS programming is unique because it does not have to answer to sponsors. Frontline would be impossible on commercial TV. The idea of" this Old House" would not have flown on it. The History Detectives will never get on commercial TV,
You’ll note that my argument is that the diversity of options favors keeping government funding of PBS, because it has such little distortion on the media market.
So, add another 5% (.29*.18) more to the 17% more direct funding to get 22%. That’s still less that one fourth the total funding.
I’m not sure what your point is here. Government funding is a small fraction, but not insignificant. I don’t think anyone claims otherwise.
PBS programming is a reflection of their (non-government) sponsors, just like commercial networks. What alternative method of determining programming do you propose?
I guess my point is that is is difficult to know exactly how much of the cost of your PBS programming is really coming from the government, by the time they are done cross-subsidizing production, distribution and broadcasting. But in any case it is a lot more than the “Less than 10%” that PBS claims (and that is repeated all the time on our local PBS station).
Funny thing is that I am a big fan and small financial supporter of both my local PBS and NPR stations. I am in fact sipping tea right now from my Car Talk mug, and this year refused the “thank-you gift” because I had enough of them from the last ten years.
I just don’t like it when they aren’t straight about their funding. They are obviously using a different definition of their government funding number than you would calculate by looking at their financial statements, just dividing the “government grants” by “total revenue”. So I wonder how honest they are when they say that “Contributions by members constitute the largest source of our income.” Do they include General Motors as a “member”?
I agree with that sentiment. I tried looking up financial reports on the PBS website and could not easily find them. They may be there, but a public entity really needs to be more transparent about its financials.
Guidestar is your friend. My wife (a compulsive giver) is not allowed to touch the checkbook until I have looked over the Form 990s.
There are limits to what you can tell from the 990s. But there was a charity my wife was getting ready to send a check to. The 990 showed that one employee (a lawyer who effectively ran the organization, though she was not on the board or an executive officer) was taking home over $300k in salary, almost 10% of the revenue.
You’re right that many, perhaps even most, people have a lot more alternatives available to them than when PBS first went on the air. And all these things are readily available to anyone who’s middle-class-or-better. Still, I’m glad that the poor kids have access to Sesame Street, in addition to whatever happens to be on commercial TV.