The reactionary rabid right Republicans controlling the House appropriations subcommittee have voted to defund PBS and NPR. The counter-campaign has begun, with an ongoing petition at Move On (http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/).
But while saving Sesame Street is a worthy goal and perhaps a broadly effective way to pitch this petition, there are other major reasons for making sure this latest brick isn’t placed in the Orwellian wall of total media control. Like for instance, save Frontline. Save what remains of NPR. They are pretty much all we have left. Fight to get back control of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting before they destroy it.
And this year, the GOPer fanatics are counting on public apathy, because we’ve cried wolf on these subcommittee moves so many times before, and the cutbacks got cut back. But they didn’t get eliminated and they didn’t go away. The wolf took big bites out of public broadcasting every time, and this time they want to finish the kill.
Don’t be deceived—this is not an isolated move. It’s part of a so far successful pattern that goes back to the Reagan years.
There were so many outrages committed by the Reagan administration that one of the most devastating slipped by without much more than a weary finger or two pointing it out. But ending the Fairness Doctrine governing equal time for conflicting political views opened a door that Rupert Murdoch and other GOP partisan moneybags and extremist reactionaries were very ready to bolt through. It led to Fox News, right wing talk radio, and just about the end of legitimate news on TV and radio. Which has just about ended the dream of an informed citizenry electing their leaders, and the media as the dogged check on mendacious power.
Now the Bushies, rolling out one outrage after another, have numbed us to apparently minor changes including one which could be the coup de grace to democracy, and at the very least one of the last hopes for the young of America to ever get a straight answer, a real fact or even another view. And that little matter is the complete de-funding of CPB in two years, with severe cuts immediately, that’s just passed the House subcommittee on appropriations.
Sure, everybody says the subcommittee always does something like this, the committee restores at least some of the cuts, then the Senate restores some more, and PBS and NPR, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, get most of their money. Always a little less, of course. The federal contribution to our “public” media is about 15% of their costs.
But all that has to happen is for people and their congressional reps to fall asleep and these guys will finally do it. Sure, they say it’s about tight budgets, and everybody thinks that’s very funny. And they say, why do we need this, we’ve got all these choices on cable TV. Sure, if you think 3453 channels of the same crap constitutes choice, especially when those 45321 channels are owned by the same few corporations, and they’re all competing to see who can perfect the most effective blend of mesmerizing trivality and political manipulation for the GOPer cause.
The U.S. airwaves without Frontline and NPR would complete the 1984 media takeover. They’ve already installed a right wing ideologue in charge of the Corp for Public Broadcasting, and they got rid of Bill Moyers. Now they want to end it all. A little matter of investigations into some improper payments to GOPer lobbyists may slow them down a bit, but this is really one to DO FOR THE CHILDREN. Not to save Sesame Street for them, as worthy a goal as that might be. But to save Frontline for them. They are really going to need it.
Blogs and the Internet are great, but people, and kids especially, still get most of their information from TV, and they’ve learned how to learn from TV. TV is still the primary culture. And radio is powerful. PBS and NPR aren’t what they could be, but we need what little they give us, and we need the fighting chance to do more.
One of the architects of PBS was Edward R. Murrow. He wanted a place for good journalists to go, if and when they were restricted by commercial networks.
Bill Moyers was the most effective broadcast journalist of recent years, and it’s no coincidence that one of his strongest subjects was corporate and right wing control of the media. They got rid of him. But we can still save Frontline and Nova, as well as Reading Rainbow and Sesame Street.
This is one of those issues that writing your congressional rep can really count. These votes take the public temperature on a subject that doesn’t have a lot of loud-mouthed lobbyists fighting for it, and certainly isn’t going to get much TV time. So do it.
And sign the moveon petition. It’s here: (http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/