Who Needs PBS?

That's a question I've been asking for years. Only now I'm being echoed by...the Los Angeles Times???

The growing controversy over the Bush Administration’s attempts to alter the "perceived" [my quotes] liberal bias in PBS programming has led one media insider to urge: Consider pulling the plug on the network.

In his Media Matters column in the Los Angeles Times, David Shaw asks, "Do we really want or need PBS anymore?"

Just so there's no mistaking the echo syndrome, my contention since the advent and proliferation of cable TV service a quarter century ago has been that, with the diversity of channels available in the current media-dominated age - something that was not the case when PBS was conceived in the left-wing heyday of LBJ's great society forty years ago - the very idea of state-run television, abhorrent on principle, is also redundant on content. There's nothing that one can watch on PBS that can't be found on A&E, Discovery, TLC, the History Channel, the Travel Channel, etc. PBS is a dunsel, a superfluity, an entity that serves no useful purpose.

Now we rejoin Mr. Shaw's comments:

[W]hen PBS’s parent, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was created in 1967, television was largely dominated by three commercial networks, while today we live in a "500-channel universe."

That covers content; now we get to the principle of the matter:

But politics, not the availability of more alternatives, is the primary reason to question the continued viability of PBS.

PBS has become a political football, and in our increasingly polarized and poisonous political climate, that is not likely to change.

It has become "a political football" because the Bush Administration is actually questioning, and challenging, the entrenched left-wing bias that permeates the very concept of "public" broadcasting. And the libs, in the former of Donk congressmen John Dingell and David Obey, are reacting to the jeopardy of one of its few remaining redoubts with the usual hysterical projections, demanding an investigation of Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Ken Tomlinson (a Bush appointee, of course) for - brace yourselves - "political interference at PBS."

Next is where the echo syndrome subsides, as Shaw reveals his own lib bias, as well as a surprising defeatism:

It’s not surprising that if the federal government is going to help finance public broadcasting, it may occasionally demand a say in the programming, even if public broadcasting is supposed to have editorial independence. [heh]

It’s that cliché come to TV life – let the governmental camel stick its nose inside the broadcast tent, and the entire camel, foul smell and all, may follow.

So maybe it’s time to get rid of this particular tent and the camel as well, to do away with PBS and its unhappy status as a political football and political target.

Kind of a Samson complex, really: "Better to pull the plug on PBS altogether than let the Republicans 'politicize' it." As though a public entity created by politicians to be operated for political ends should somehow be absolved from both politics and public accountability. A very revealing picture of how the left views itself, its ideology, and politics and government in general - rather like a child who steals his friends' toys, stashes them in a padlocked toy chest, and then throws a tantrum when his parents come to return the toys to their rightful owners, accusing them of what amounts to "stealing them back."

PBS is a useless appendage in any case. But the fact that libs like David Shaw, even recognizing this fact, would sooner inter public broadcasting (or, rather, federal funding for it) out of an inability to bear the spectre of their lefty piss-pot undergoing the introduction of editorial and programming balance is one I can certainly live with if it means that the federal government will exit the broadcasting business once and for all.

A case, to employ another "cliché coming to TV life," of the ends most definitely justifying the means.