To borrow an NPR phrase, “The cold hard fact is” that if you are dependent on an entity for money, that entity can use the threat of witholding that money to force you perform as they wish.
My boss sends me a paycheck every week. If I don’t do the work I agreed to, eventually he’ll stop sending me that money. Newspapers have to sell advertising and get subscribers. If they can’t sell advertising any more, if people start to cancel their subscriptions, the newspaper either has to live with the decreased revenue or change to please the advertisers and subscribers. Private TV and radio stations rely entirely on advertising. If the advertisers aren’t happy the programming changes. And what makes advertisers happy? Ratings from the target demographic.
And so, public television. Where does public television get its money? Turns out most of it comes from private donations, but somewhere on the order of 25% of their funding comes from the federal government. What does that mean? That means that congress can threaten to cut that 25% if congress doesn’t like the job public radio is doing. As long as public television accepts public money, that public money will come with strings attached. Neccesarily! After all, we can’t just give away public money without caring what happens to it, congress would be negiligent if they just haned out money without an accounting of how that money is used.
So…public broadcasting must please congress. In a partisan environment, that means pleasing the majority party. Of course that doesn’t neccesarily mean turning NPR into a publicly funded version of the Rush Limbaugh show. But it does mean that public television, by definition, is going be neutered, that it’s going to present itself as bland, non-partisan, one-side-says-X, the other-side-says-Y, safe. “Unbiased”. But unbiased is in the eye of the beholder. Every human being has a point of view, there’s no such thing as robot reporters who just report the facts.
And so we have the latest threat to budget for public broadcasting. Of course you know and I know and the american people know that the budget isn’t actually actually going to be cut. This is just a bargaining position. “Nice public broadcasting network you got here. Be a shame if anything happened to it.” And of course, the opposition to the budget cuts always mentions Sesame Street. Won’t someone think of the Children! They’re kneecapping Big Bird! Neglecting to notice that Sesame Street is a cash cow that requires no public funding.
What this is about is a threat that public broadcasting should be unbiased…from the point of view of a Republican congressman. Now, most of us here on the SDMB are moderates, centrists, libertarians, liberals and (ahem) “progressives”. My view of what would be “unbiased” programming, and your different view of what would be unbiased programming, and Noam Chompsky’s view of what would be unbiased programming is surely going to be different from what that Republicans congressman’s view of what would be unbiased programming.
But as long as you are taking money that is disbursed by that Republican congressman, his views become disproportionately important.