Warning! This touches on political issues so if you want to skip it I’ll understand. See you tomorrow.
I’m a writer and would like to make a living with it. And yeah, it is unlikely I’ll ever get to be on the same level as say Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, or Brandon Sanderson. If I do get there, great. Not going to turn it down. But if it makes me enough every month to pay all my bills, get some books, see some movies, and have some leftover so that I can keep writing, that works for me.
As a writer, I’m generally in favor of free speech and generally opposed to censorship. You should be able to talk about anything, including a lot of topics I’d really rather not know about, or believe should be discussed. Telling other people what they can’t read, listen to, or see, is fine as long as you make it clear that it is your opinion and you don’t actively prevent them from doing so.
Recently, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting lost all Federal funding. A recent press release explains that CPB will be shutting down now that they’ve lost the funding. Since 1967 when it was established, CPB has helped fund regional public broadcasting stations, providing educational content to the masses. I remember watching Mystery, Nova, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Monty Python, The Prisoner, and any number of other programs on my local PBS station. I listed to The Best Of Our Knowledge, This American Life, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, A Prairie Home Companion, and others on the local National Public Radio station. I’d say that most of those programs were better what was on the three main TV broadcast channels. (Yes, this was way back before cable and Internet broadcasting, and even quite a lot after those came about.)
It seems that the move to cut funding came about from a Trump administration plan to cut approximately $9 billion ($9,000,000,000) in previously allocated funds, including $1.1 billion for public broadcasting and almost $7 aid. Congress voted 216-t-213 in favor of the cuts, and then President Trump signed the bill. From a press release by The White Hous which said “NPR and PBS have fueled partisanship and left-wing propaganda with taxpayer dollars, which is highly inappropriate and an improper use of taxpayers’ money, as President Trump has stated.”
Well, bias in reporting has been around since man first started communicating. The last great newscaster we had was Walter Cronkite, who did his best to just report the facts and tried to be unbiased.
But everything that Trump puts out is also biased. So, he’s mad that CPB gets tax money to report their ‘bias’ and he doesn’t?
In my opinion, CPB should get the funding they need. If Trump wants to create his own media empire to broadcast things with his bias, more power to him. Actually he has PragerU to do that for him.
I suppose now that all the folks who believe in public broadcasting will have to put in more of their own money during pledge drives to keep it afloat. If the system can’t be supported that way, and it shuts down, I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t as valuable to people as I think it should be. But then it seems I’m an aberration. I like learning stuff and will continue to try and learn as much as I can (usually from books these days rather than media) as I can.
What about you, my Hordeling? Do you think closing off Federal funding to CPB is a good move or a detriment to society. Leave a comment and let me know.
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