No, this isn’t a pledge drive where Betty White and Fred Rogers chase after you in the PBS van to claim the money you pledged. This is far more serious. President Bush is proposing close to a 25% CUT in funding allocated to The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which I believe to be a very bad thing. Just like community access or public access is a dieing venue for people to share their views on the TV, I fear the same might happen to PBS. We cannot let huge corporations with their agendas dominate what we see and hear. We need to start filling the airwaves with our agendas too, hell its out right.
If any of you have or have not heard of the news program Frontline, I strongly urge you to check it out. It is in my opinion one of the best investigative news shows on the television today. Frontline’s coverage of important news stories seems real compared to the fluff broadcast and cable news spit out “on the our, every hour”. Frontline’s true journalistic integrity is something that is fading in the politically charged, commercially sponsored news that too many people accept today.
Any what about Sesame Street and Mr Rogers Neighborhood. These are not trashy cartoons filled with 10 minutes of commercials for toys or candy. These are truly educational programs that air without continual bombardment of commercial messages trying to turn young children into mindless consumers of mouth rotting, mind numbing garbage.
I urge you all to take interest in public programming before it is completely gone and all our children have left to watch is McDonald’s Brand Chicken Nuggets teach the ABC’s. I am sure glad that the internet is ushering in a new era for video broadcast and is opening doors for small companies to bring truly beneficial programming to today’s youth. Now we can only hope that the cable companies (also the people that provide access to the internet) don’t close the door before we get our feet in and block “certain video programs” that might undercut their revenue streams from advertisers. What happens when small broadcasters try to use the cable companies pipes to distribute video over the web that takes viewers away from the cable company’s programming? I hope nothing, but realistically know that probably won’t be the case.
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