Should the Government Fund the Hottest Technology of 1895?
What do we lose if we lose local public radio?
I’ll try to be objective when writing about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even though I have bad blood with Sesame Street. I worked with the Muppets on this John Oliver piece, and some of the Muppets were lovely, but others were googly-eyed divas who think that the sun shines out of their little felt asshole. There was a lot of big-timing, a lot of “I don’t think my character would say that,” which should be met with “well your character will say that because I wrote it and we’re paying you to say what I wrote” — but you grumble and take it because that’s your job and because that goddamned furball taught you how to read. I’ll do my best to set those feelings aside, and I’ll save the juiciest tidbits for my upcoming book: The Monster Within the Monster: The Sordid Depravity Behind Sesame Street’s Sunny Days.
Republicans want to end federal funding for PBS and NPR. That’s been true for ages; cave paintings in Lascaux, France depict a group of Neanderthals chasing Big Bird with spears while another group fends them off. But Republicans might actually succeed this time, thanks to DOGE having the groundbreaking idea to cut a bunch of stuff that Republicans always try to cut. The “recissions package” moving through Congress is DOGE’s brainchild, and the end product of Silicon Valley geniuses taking an AI-assisted approach to budget management and proposing cuts that Republicans have been trying to make since you could smoke in a neonatal unit.
The argument for ending government funding for PBS and NPR involves philosophical views about the role of government, plus the petty desire to stick it to egghead liberals by cancelling the low-T crap that those poindexters like. The argument for keeping funding involves the value of a media space removed from market pressures and a belief that any entertainment that isn’t bone-crushingly dull is somehow wicked. I won’t fully unpack those arguments here, but I’ll note that the argument for keeping public funding points to two sources of “value”: The value of content freed from market pressures, and the value of a community space for relaying information. In my opinion, the first thing has some validity; I can see an argument for having an alternative to market-driven newstainment that simply repeats the audience’s opinions back to them, except dumber.1 But I also think that the second thing is shockingly antiquated; I think that public funding for radio-based bulletin boards in The Year of Our Lord 233 (2025 for those of you not on the French Republican calendar) is like public funding for whale oil street lamps.