Comment by Pfhortune
21 hours ago
What's really horrifying here is that, even if the appetite for funding CPB were to come back in 2026, 2028, or whenever, you can't just spin it up again; those people have moved on, those assets are liquidated. You would have to start up again pretty much from scratch.
That's why this careless crusade against governmental institutions is so horrific. Institutions with decades of history are being destroyed, and it would take years to decades to spin up something even close to equivalent, in an insane political environment where every public institution is framed as horrible socialism.
I guess I just don’t find that as horrifying as you do. The market cannot hold public broadcasting accountable, and this is one of the few levers that we have to do so.
Conservatives have wanted to defund public broadcasting for decades. What made it finally possible was that public broadcasting made their bias obvious and undeniable. Over the past 10 years, the stark shift leftward has been undeniable — they became what they’ve been accused of being for a very long time.