Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, from the United States where firearms are the leading cause of death among children and teens, bravely organized a hearing in March to protect the youth by trying to defund PBS Kids. To Republicans, PBS and NPR disseminated radical leftist propaganda and forced inappropriate content onto children. To Democrats, the hearing was a complete joke, with one representative asking questions about Elmo’s affiliation with the Communist Party and if Cookie Monster silenced “pro-cookie voters.”
Greene is right, national broadcasting services are radical — but they must stay.
Conservative politicians have long attacked PBS and NPR as pointless government spending. However, the original motivation for widespread funding of broadcasting services and infrastructure were quite purposeful — to democratize education. A vast majority of American families owned a radio by the end of World War II, and starting in the late 1940s, educational programs began to emerge and then control radio waves by the 1950s. Universities and colleges began sending tapes of their seminars to radio stations so anyone could be a student for an hour. School children could listen in on stations and learn a school’s day of content from anywhere in the country.
The U.S. proudly proclaims a dream where anyone can achieve greatness regardless of their background, so it is unsurprising that a movement to provide equal access to education quickly took hold.. Making education accessible to everyone supported that dream, and uplifted people in parts of the nation that would not have otherwise had access to high-quality education or education at all.
Radio, particularly educational radio, is a powerful tool, so to ensure that educational content did not fall to corporate interests, educational broadcasters stopped accepting money from business promoters. Since then, state and local governments became the sole funders of educational broadcasts. The radio empowered state governments to issue public announcements, report emergencies and keep their citizens politically informed.
Broadcasters did not force or demand that states fund their programming — states did it because it served their interests. Throughout the country and world, researchers have found a strong relationship between education levels and poverty. Though education is not the only path to stability, it is a well-worn path, and it provides people with a way to exit generational poverty. Bringing education to people who could not otherwise seek it out was not a handout — it was an investment in the future.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act into law in 1967 to guarantee a stream of government funding for public programming. However, the federal government does not uniquely finance these programs; public media relies on donations from listeners, viewers and foundations. This allows PBS and NPR to operate as independent nonprofits, which protects them from becoming mouthpieces of the federal government.
Should Greene’s mission to end federal funding to public broadcasts succeed, affiliated stations will lose their funding to repair and upgrade the tools needed to broadcast their content, from radio transmitters to websites. States will lose emergency programming in times of disaster. PBS and NPR will be forced to layoff employees and cancel shows. Most painfully, people will lose accessible educational content across the country.
In the hearing, Greene pointed to a photo of drag queen Lil Miss Hot Mess who was featured in a production from the WNET Group, a company affiliated with New York’s public television stations, as evidence of radical leftism on television. The video featuring the drag queen was not funded, distributed or aired by PBS, though it was briefly put on the PBS website and then removed. The video in question was Lil Miss Hot Mess reading from her book “This Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish,” which is marketed for children aged three to eight and published by a children’s book publisher. Though PBS did not air or fund the content, even if it had, it is not the place of the federal government to deem that inappropriate for children. As is the case with all media, it is up to parents, guardians and caregivers to regulate what their children watch.
If what Greene feared was children’s safety, she would fight against what hurts children the most. At best, she is misinformed, and at worst, she is using public broadcasting as a scapegoat. The point of public broadcasting is that it informs people outside of political and corporate interests. Whether Greene is conscious of it or not, her fundamental disagreement with the existence of public broadcasting means she values political and corporate interests above the education of the people she is supposed to serve.
In May, President Trump signed an executive order to end federal funding for public broadcasts. PBS sued to block the order, stating that it was unconstitutional. Though it is unclear how this battle will play out, perhaps everyone could take a note from Mr. Fred Rodgers, host of the PBS show “Mr. Rodger’s Neighborhood” from when in 1969, he testified in Congress to prevent halving federal funding for public broadcasting.
He quoted one of his songs that he sang on his show, about how to manage big feelings. The song begins “What do you do with the mad that you feel?” and answers the question: “It’s great to be able to stop when you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong, and be able to do something else instead.”