An Appeal on Behalf of Public Broadcasting

MoveOn.org is sponsoring an online petition against the proposed elimination of funding for public broadcasting (see my previous post about this Republican-led effort). I was forwarded the link to MoveOn's page; I can't find anything else on their site about this issue at the time of this writing. The petition is in the form of an email that gets sent to your senators and representative. This is what I wrote:

Dear Senators and Representative,

Hopefully you or your staff are reading this. I am appealing to you to help prevent the proposed elimination of funding for NPR, PBS and other local stations. These stations provide quality programming, without commercial interference, for people of all ages. I listen to NPR news every day and I believe its superlative programming to be for the most part very balanced—certainly more balanced than the vast majority of commercial stations—and extremely informative. Public broadcasting, like any human endeavor, is not exempt from the occasional insertion of personal bias and opinion in its programming; however I believe these instances are few and far between. I feel that most Americans would agree that the educational benefits of commercial-free broadcasting far outweigh any minor faults in the bias department.

I understand that this funding reduction initiative was brought on in part because of reaction to an episode of 'Postcards From Buster' episode in which Buster the rabbit visited two families in Vermont headed by lesbians. Why is homosexuality such a dangerous topic for children to learn about? The fact is, and we'd better accept it (and soon), that kids growing up in our increasingly pluralistic, complex world are going to be faced with more complicated issues than you or I ever had to deal with as children. Kids need to be educated about, not sheltered from, these issues, and public broadcasting is a viable medium for this. Are you going to bend to the will of a cadre of old-fashioned, narrow-minded evangelical conservatives on this issue?

I want to ask you to use your imagination for a moment...

Imagine living in a world in which your children have no choice but to be inundated by the manipulations of commercial TV. Imagine a world in which the lines between honest, objective news and monolithic corporate agendas have so blurred that one can hardly see through the ad-laced fog of sensationalistic headline news, brain-dead sitcoms and *completely unnecessary* reality shows. Imagine a world in which, unless you choose to live in a cave, oblivious to what's happening in our planet, there is absolutely no escape from advertising at any time. That thought simply disgusts me as a human being. It's bad enough going to the movies any more, what with their front-loaded advertisements and relentless in-movie product placements.

Public broadcasting is the last bastion of pure, unadulterated entertainment, information and education in the realm of radio and television. Let's keep it around.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Jon Worth

I hope that anyone reading this will sign the petition as well.