I agree with Mitt Romney on exactly one thing, and I hate that.
During the first presidential debate, which was centered around issues of economics, Romney was detailing his plan to reduce deficit spending and let slip that, if elected president, he would defund public media.
“I’m sorry, Jim, I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you, too. But I’m not going to keep spending money on things, borrowing money from China to pay for it,” the candidate said, immediately setting off a firestorm of Internet comments and memes and elevating the statement to the same level of “did he just say that?” as “Corporations are people, my friend” did.
There’s a lot in that sentence that I take issue with, of course—I think the potshot at both Big Bird and Lehrer, the debate moderator, was uncalled for—but, astonishingly, I agree with Romney.
I think public media should divest from government subsidization.
Now, I don’t have the same reasoning Romney has for defunding—he probably thinks that public radio and television can survive as a solely private enterprise, or if not he wants it gone. I don’t think that’s possible, not with corporate media and entertainment holding so tightly to their hegemony. The “free market” would swallow PBS and NPR whole—not because private networks have better programming, but because they just have more money. And I certainly don’t want public media to disappear.
“So wait,” I can hear you say. “You don’t want the government to help fund public media, and yet you acknowledge that it would die if the government didn’t fund it? What gives?”
As it turns out, the amount of funding public media actually gets through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is quite tiny. For most of the major stations, the total hovers somewhere around 10 percent. The majority of the funds go to local member stations in smaller markets, where they maybe can’t benefit from as much (or any) donation money from the larger nonprofit trusts.
The government is keeping public media alive, sure. But apart from allowing more rural areas access to educational programming (which is definitely a good thing), the money the government gives to public media isn’t exactly helping it grow—and it’s opening it up to attacks from certain elements on the right.
Public media should be voluntarily controlled by the people it effects the most—us. It is a common pool resource, not a function of government or a product of private enterprise.
So yes, we should defund public media as a governmentally-subsidized program. And we should also, voluntarily, as a nation, refund it as a network of independent media, a firm, powerful answer to corporate television and radio.