Petition for saving the budget of Hawaii PBS

[Rob Tucker]

I signed. Way too much value for the cost....

http://protectmypublicmedia.org/

[TomK]

Thanks Rob, I signed. It's most definitely a worthy cause.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Thanks for the link Rob. Signed it.
Saw a great movie about the Bronte sisters (poets & novelists), and Great Depression photographer Dorothea Lange last week.

You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

[Lodestone]

Me too. I watch Nova, Nature, American Experience, and Globe Trekker and will miss them. And kids need to know how to get to Sesame Street.

[TomK]

For me, every Wednesday evening is PBS night when work allows, although once in a while they replace Nature and Nova with some music shows, but I can live with that. Sunday evening is Masterpiece Theatre night, but right now clashes with MeTV and the last series of Columbo episodes - most of which I've never seen. It's a quandary.

It'll be terrible if we lose PBS. Commercial stations aren't interested in education, science or great acting, it's whatever makes them money, so PBS is kind of a last resort.

[Kenney]

PBS is the best for entertainment and education. No PBS, no need tv..
Thanks for making it so easy to sign Rob.

[randomq]

This came up a few years back, and I think PBS only gets about 15% of its budget from the federal government. Playing devil's advocate, perhaps having no federal funding would actually provide them more freedom in their news and programming?

In any case, it's an obscene waste of time cutting their funding until we cut a few billion dollars in subsidies for oil companies and tax loopholes for multinationals and hedge funds. None of which are based in Hawaii to my knowledge, so maybe our politicians will actually do something useful!

[Tyler65]

signe

[TomK]

randomq - I briefly tried to check on how much PBS Hawaii money gets from the government compared to private sources (e.g., donations from the public), and found it's more complicated than I hoped. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting gets nearly all its money from the government (according to Wikipedia - https://goo.gl/nYd65L) which it then distributes to the various PBS stations in the US. The individual stations then have various other sources contributing to their income including donations.

Not being a trained accountant I didn't spend much time trying to fully understand this, but maybe someone can - it's the annual financial report for PBS Hawaii in 2016:

http://pbshawaii.org/wordpress/wp-conten...FY2016.pdf

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

PBS receives a pittance from the overall annual federal budget. It's a scapegoat for people who are not good with numbers. For comparison:

PBS - $445.5 million
President's Marching Band - $437 million

Here's a few more budget crushers that are always mentioned when the fat needs to be trimmed:
National Endowment for the Arts: $148 million
National Endowment for the Humanities: $148 million

For comparison this is what one F-35 jet costs:
Air Force version - $148 million
Marine Corps version - $251 million
Navy version - $337 million

You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.