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Newsroom Editors & Contributor Opinions
If enacted, President Bush’s budget proposal to Congress would reduce CPB’s funding for 2009 and 2010 by 56 percent. Specifically, Bush proposes cutting half of the $400 million already appropriated for the CPB’s 2009 budget, cut an additional $220 million slated for the next year, and then eliminate the entire $483 million appropriation for fiscal 2011. The CPB is usually financed three years ahead of time to insulate the system from politics, which, of course, is deeply ironic considering the never-ending game of politics Bush has played with the funding process.
Media Matters For America
March 18, 2008
Washington
Newsroom Magazine
Advocates Increased Support For
The Corporation For Public BroadcastingIn view of
- The need to reset, redefine and stimulate economic recovery
- An urgent need to reward those doing the right things in preference to those still doing the wrong things
- The stability, quality and responsibility in news and public affairs programming provided by The Corporation For Public Broadcasting
- The ongoing collapse of commercial network news divisions
- The developing crisis in newspaper publishing
- The unfolding reality of long-term damage to American institutions, values and culture
Newsroom Magazine calls on the Congress to expand government support for CPB news and public affairs programming. Increased support would be in the public interest by reducing PBS/McNeil/Lerher dependence on institutional grants which have failed to reliably and adequately fund the nation’s most responsible broadcast news operation.
Equally as important, increased CPB funding is good public policy to the degree that public ignorance aided and abetted by failed broadcast journalism served to conceal political, economic and institutional failures that led, or contributed to serious disruptions in American economics, finance, governance, institutions and society.
While commercial broadcast news failed to serve the public interest, convenience and necessity, CPB has consistently delivered relevant, credible and probative news and information about the things that matter most to American interests. We believe this reality needs to be formally acknowledged by the Congress and rewarded by ensuring continued support free of political influence.
In view of CPB service to the nation as the only remaining credible, probative and relevant producer of public affairs programming and news, we ask the Congress to include CPB in the nation’s stimulus funding by increasing CPB support to $1 bln annually for each of the next ten years.
Time To Reward Responsible Adults
It’s time to toss aside politics and focus on what we must do to support those responsible adults who didn’t feed at the public trough. Who did what they promised. Who served the greater public good when those around them traded the public interest for their own miscreant prosperity. There were such people — Americans who stood up to be counted, who kept their promise to deliver, who did not wrongly enrich themselves, who did not seek special personal advantage. Not many, perhaps, but there were some — and none of those people, or organizations, are being encouraged to keep doing so.
Instead, our attention seems focused on making whole the very people who betrayed our confidence, stole our money, destroyed our jobs and now demand that you reimburse them.
Time To Revitalize America’s Public Media
This nation’s public media ( National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting System ) have been in crisis for the last two decades. Due largely to political battles that play on polarized views of government, public media in general, and PBS and NPR in specific, have been made into pawns in a never ending struggle between warring political factions.
While we bail out the bad guys and enrich some of those who made the rest of us poor, both NPR and PBS have delivered wide ranging, penetrating, probative, relevant, credible and timely news, analysis and commentary programming. To do so has required that they pander to organizations, foundations and corporate funding sources. They deserve better — and now is the time to reward them for behaving as responsible adults when commercial broadcasting abandoned their public interest responsibilities in favor of their own financial interests. Media Daily
Robert Butche
Publisher
Newsroom Magazine