A House Appropriations panel on Thursday approved a spending bill that would cut the budget for public television and radio nearly in half and eliminate a $23 million federal program that has provided some money for producing children’s shows that include “Sesame Street,” “Clifford the Big Red Dog,” “Between the Lions” and “Dragon Tales.”
The Republicans, of course, are claiming that this is needed for the sake of “belt tightening.” But considering the fact that they gave several trillion dollars in tax breaks to the very rich, the thought that $400 million a year is needed in order to balance the budget is laughable.
Commercial television is, quite simply, a wasteland. The same is true with commercial radio. For the most part, there are only two places to go for quality programming: public broadcasting, and subscription services such as cable and satellite. However, for the half of the country which does not have access to those subscription services, only public broadcasting is available. And the Republicans are gleefully trying to kill it.
I won’t go into the political and ideological reasons that the Republicans are likely doing this. But it is a shame that they are trying to kill off one of the few places where we can get programming that actually informs rather than dumbs us down.
UPDATE: Here is the information about who to contact to oppose this nonsense.
UPDATE 2: Of course, I had to go and misspell “intelligent” in the title. Duh!
June 11th, 2005 at 7:44 am
U.S. TROOPS ARE ANTICHRISTIAN. A MAJORITY ARE SATANISTS, WICCANS, PAGANS AND ATHEISTS. PROOF POSITIVE AT: HTTP://ANTICHRISTIANTROOPS.BLOGSPOT.COM. DON’T BE AFRAID TO STAND UP TO AMERINAZISM. THE FIRST GENERATION OF NAZIS ONLY LASTED 20 YEARS.
June 11th, 2005 at 10:39 am
“intellegent thought”
couldn’t have said it better, myself.
sorry, just having a laugh at your expense. i agree with the overall sentiment.
June 12th, 2005 at 6:14 am
Interesting post . . . somewhat disturbing. On another note, I wonder if I’m the only who who visited the US troops are antichristian blog (see the first comment to the entry). I can’t help feeling that Mr. Berry has allowed himself to fall in some sordid line of thinking.