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Jewish World Review
August 3, 2005
/ 27 Tammuz, 5765
GOPers should stop dithering about reducing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's subsidies — and eliminate them altogether
By
John Stossel
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
My cable company made me a remarkable offer: They want to add a
new channel to my cable subscription — and
you will pay for it. The channel will have liberal news, highbrow
entertainment and a variety of educational programming.
Sounds insane, and yet the channel isn't new. It's called PBS.
Public broadcasting is a classic example of welfare for the
well-off. We PBS viewers are 44 percent more likely than other Americans to
make more than $150,000 a year.
I enjoy PBS, but it hardly seems fair that the government
demands you buy it for me. If I want to see opera, I should pay for it
myself. Why should you be taxed to pump "La Boheme" into my living room? It
barely made sense in 1967, when most Americans only had the Big Three
broadcast networks, but now there are hundreds of channels. If there's a
demand for opera or BBC drama, the market will provide it.
Not everything on PBS is for elites only, of course. The network
is justly famous for programs like "Sesame Street." But popular programs are
just that — popular. That means they have other ways to get money. People
already give so much money to PBS that today, it only gets 15 percent of its
funds from the federal government. As David Boaz, author of "Libertarianism:
A Primer," points out, businesses and nonprofits deal with 15 percent
revenue losses all the time. If NPR and PBS lost all their federal money,
they wouldn't disappear."
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Republicans should stop dithering about reducing the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting's subsidies and eliminate them altogether. Of
course, when anyone suggests cutting the PBS budget, people say, "they're
trying to kill 'Sesame Street'!" But "Sesame Street" is big business and
would survive in any environment. "Children's programming that has an
audience does not need taxpayer subsidies," says Jacob Sullum of Reason.
"Noggin, which is more 'commercial-free' than PBS stations, carries 12 hours
of kids' shows (including two different versions of 'Sesame Street') every
day. Parent-acceptable children's programming can also be seen on
Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel and ABC Family."
Some people, who apparently have never watched "20/20" or "60
Minutes," claim we won't have tough journalism on TV unless the public pays
for it. Only PBS will do "honest" documentaries, they say, because PBS isn't
dependent on corporate support. Twenty-five years ago, Ralph Nader
proclaimed that consumer reporting would never appear on commercial TV. It
would only thrive on public TV, he said, because commercial stations would
defer to advertisers.
Today, it's clear that Nader was totally wrong (as he is so
often). PBS carries almost no consumer reporting, probably because the
bureaucrats who run it are too nervous about offending anyone
. By contrast, there is plenty of consumer reporting on commercial
TV. I criticized my employers' most valued customers for years. For heaping
abuse on the people who paid us, I was given promotions.
Why? Because viewers want tough news — even news hostile to big
advertisers. Commercial television provides it because even if sponsors
boycott, the money other sponsors are willing to spend to reach the viewers
the reports attract makes up the loss. The free market serves its customers,
and in the TV business, the customers are viewers.
PBS, on the other hand, is broadcasting by bureaucracy. This is
not a good thing. We should have separation of news and state. "We wouldn't
want the federal government to publish a national newspaper, writes Boaz,
"why should we have a government television network and a government radio
network? If anything should be kept separate from government and politics,
it's the news and public affairs programming that Americans watch. When
government brings us the news — with all the inevitable bias and spin —
the government is putting its thumb on the scales of democracy. It's time
for that to stop."
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JWR contributor John Stossel is co-anchor of ABC News' "20/20." To comment, please click here.
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