We Don' Need No Stinkin' TV

Corporation for Public Broadcasting will have appropriations funding cut, maybe, from $400 million FY 2006, to a picayunish amount of $300 million. While I consider myself progressive, defined as moving forward, I'm hard put these days to feel any ire over the matter, for various reasons. Firstly, CPB is another obese bureaucracy waddling and panting along offering the audience peanuts while taking in billions. Government welfare to the CPB is just under 15 percent of CPB revenues, the remainder coming from individual and corporate donors, colleges, foundations, Dept. of Education funds, auctions, and creative fund raising, i.e. soliciting bequests from the living for a dole when they finally die.

The Corporation's revenues for FY2003 was $2.3 billion. By law, 95 percent of this money goes to support local television and radio stations, programming, and improvements to the public broadcasting system as a whole. That's an awful lot of improvements for big birdseed, rabbit food, and Jim Lehrer. Considering CPB's yearly revenue and the amount of Congressional funding, this all looks like another distracting nit for picking. If CPB can't survive 100 million less from 2.3 billion, then they don't need to.

The number of hours worth viewing CPB are too few considering the funding available to them. Reruns, too many. Cartoons, too many. The news shows are too plod-along for a nation of hyperactive attention deficit adults. Local stations can remove programming not to their taste which limits what's available in small town and rural areas. Viewership figures vary depending on location and programming but the average is 3 hours per week per household, and that's the high-end households in cosmopolitan areas. Public broadcasting is for a narrow audience, limited in scope, and overall the majority of America watches little of it. The news programs may be informative, but the internet is better.

The leftwing has adopted the Buster episode, "Postcards from Buster" featuring a cartoon rabbit (Buster) who travels to Vermont to learn about maple sugar farming. While there, he visits two lesbian couples who also happen to be parents. Of course the Christian right is going to raise a stink. What fool doing CPB programming thought the right wouldn't? The left takes an offended posture that the CPB board is infiltrated with rightwingers, which it is, and that the conservative agenda is out to destroy or control, which it is. That's the political beast and nothing new, but rubbing lesbians under their nose isn't going to draw even moderate conservative support.

But what's really going on is the "grant" scam. CPB grants are offered to anyone who thinks they can slurp slop at the trough. Grants are a legal way of obtaining money for a purpose that you've outlined, inflating your proposal costs as much as possible because once you have the funds, your own nest will have new feathers. I.e. while there may be a very livable ceiling amount for administrative salaries in your proposal (usually family and friends), cell phones, SUVs, office cost (with another business you operate), and a laundry list of "perks" are covered. Another public kitchen where ordinary grant recipients cook the books and add a little more meat to their own pot.

Aside from the hanky-panky of grants, funding, and scammers who live on same, no one needs Barney, Big Bird, or a rabbit to teach tolerance and diversity. Like religion, such values should be taught at home. A boob tube to teach children about sex, right/wrong, tolerance or diversity is a very limited tool, and I don't see a need for such snob-appeal social engineering from those who would claim to be televising and teaching moral values, assuming diversity and tolerance are values.

We've had 40 years of televised "diversity and tolerance" and from where I sit, it has made little change in racism, homophobia, and ethnocentricity. You and I can legally drink from the same fountain, but we may not want to, and funding a cartoon or news show to tell us we should want to isn't going to make it so. Dedicated repetitive broadcasting of an idea is brainwashing but bureaucratic funding noise, gay cartoons, or other "tolerance" programs aren't going to convince anyone to embrace diversity and tolerance if those ideas aren't supported and experienced at home. Turn the television off and live your values. PBU24.