Cera S. ([info]diony) wrote,
@ 2005-06-15 12:14:00
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Current music:"Escape from the Planet of the Apes [Hidden Track]" by They Might Be Giants

stupid stupid government
Congress is moving to cut all funding for PBS & NPR in the next two years:


A House subcommittee voted yesterday to sharply reduce the federal government's financial support for public broadcasting, including eliminating taxpayer funds that help underwrite such popular children's educational programs as "Sesame Street," "Reading Rainbow," "Arthur" and "Postcards From Buster."

In addition, the subcommittee acted to eliminate within two years all federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- which passes federal funds to public broadcasters -- starting with a 25 percent reduction in CPB's budget for next year, from $400 million to $300 million.


(quotes from: http://www.moveon.org/r?r=745 -- it redirects to a Washington Post article).

http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/ has a convenient online method of sending email to local Congresspeople.

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[info]stretchling
2005-06-15 07:21 pm UTC (link)
What an appropriate track for this post. I'd like to escape from this planet of ignorant apes.

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[info]diony
2005-06-15 07:24 pm UTC (link)
Wow, entirely serendipitous. But I agree.

Failing escape, though, I hope we can make it better.

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[info]rob_donoghue
2005-06-15 08:11 pm UTC (link)
Thankfully, these sort of efforts usually die in the Senate.

Usually.

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[info]rougefatal
2005-06-15 08:33 pm UTC (link)
Stop me if this sounds crazy but, if the government stops funding public broadcasting, then Public Broadcasting stations will have to get more money from donations. This may mean that the stations will have to produce programs that will lean toward the group that will donate the most money, ie. a particular listening/viewing audience. According to the "Gov't" the broadcasts already lean in a liberal direction and therefore liberals view/listen the most. In order to get more donations from liberals, the stations will have to produce more liberal material. This process could make public radio even more liberal than ever!!! (If it actually is liberal in the first place.) Geez, did that even make sense? You totally should have stopped me.

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[info]cija
2005-06-15 08:46 pm UTC (link)
That's a nice thought and it does make sense in theory, but from my many afternoons of lolling around flipping past PBS I can report that when they want to pander to the audience, they show interminable Grateful Dead concert footage, John Denver specials, and hours and hours of self-help program infomercials. You get maybe one decent nature program a week plus the Vienna philharmonic on New Years (and the idea that a 'liberal' station would willingly support those bastards sickens me to the core.) They've been trying to attract mass support ever-more frantically, and the result has been wall-to-wall garbage. I fall into one of the demographics PBS ought to serve and rely on for support - lover of scientific/educational programming & classical music, too poor for cable - and they offer me nothing whatsover of value. I couldn't defend them with a straight face.

But I would be very sorry to see NPR go.

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[info]adrian_turtle
2005-06-15 10:15 pm UTC (link)
And public radio gets a lot of its private donations from businesses, who want to have their name mentioned on the radio at regular intervals, and get a reputation for doing nice things for the community. I doubt they give money to public radio with the intention of controlling what is said...but when they call up and say "I was really disturbed by the liberal bias of yesterday's story on X" (or the anti-corporate bullshit of your series on Y) it can have a lot of influence. "As a longtime supporter of NPR, I expect better," has much more power from a corporate underwriter than from some poor student writing occasional checks for $20.

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whats the point.
[info]angrybuffalo
2005-06-16 08:03 am UTC (link)
All the folks around here all vote the same way. Anyway I don't like goverment controled media outlets.

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