What does Sup Forums think of PBS?

I used to work for a local PBS station, it was a mixed bag, lot of passion for the work and education but also a lot of people that would be unemployed if they had to compete in commercial media.

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youtube.com/watch?v=rAmGsM4Dids
theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/12/us-taxpayers-subsidising-worlds-biggest-fossil-fuel-companies
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

youtube.com/watch?v=rAmGsM4Dids

Watching Mystery reruns with my grandma growing up was the comfiest thing ever. I appreciate most of the things they show. There's definitely something quaint about it all.

/slg/ scary logos general?

>comfiest
Even the station I worked at was comfy. It was an old 1950's TV station that had been donated to PBS by its original operator. Steam heated and wood paneled with all the Fallout-esque vintage broadcasting gear hanging around.

They also started buying the other buildings on their block with donor money and connecting them in a haphazard way, which led to a weird amalgam that looked like something dreamed up by Miyazaki.

That's pretty cool, user, and pretty much what I picture a PBS station would look like. Something between a branch library and an old college radio station.
What was the average age of people working there? Was this a large operation or pretty makeshift?

80 ish person staff. The operation itself was pretty solid, all the equipment actually in use was up to date, there was just a lot of old gear hanging around.

The executives and department heads had their shit together and were actually pretty corporate, but it was hard to fire people (state law + PBS 'ethics') so a lot of losers and drones managed to cling to the organization.

The stations are all independent though, they pay for the rights to use the PBS brand and programming. So quality and management styles vary wildly, and a lot are part of universities and so are run more like academic departments. My station was not part of a university and was run like a small corporation. CEO, CFO, COO, board of directors, etc.

Wealthy private donors play a huge role in the funding, much more so than it appears. Member pledges make up less than half of the $$$. A lot of old white women love to donate their dead husbands fortunes to PBS.

When I was in college the local PBS was operated on our campus and partnered with the media school.
I've always liked PBS and I think it's an important counter balance to commercial media.
Yeah, it's not pure or perfect but it's a hell of a lot less sensationalistic.
And it's the last haven of local programming these days.

PBS is amazing. I prefer it to even the BBC.

Yeah the BBC always rubbed me the wrong way because of license paying. PBS has to beg individuals and foundations for like 90% of their budget which introduces a welcome degree of humility.

KNME represent. New Mexico is pretty fucking poor, so not too many donors, so they will pretty much film anything. It does makes for some wildly entertaining programing during the late hours of the night.

Big fan. I watch the Newshour most nights on youtube and try to ignore as much of the other television news coverage as possible. It's so refreshingly... informative, instead of feeling narrative-based.
Plus programs like Nova and Masterpiece Theatre are great.

I've lived all over the western US and the variety of programming is one of the things I love about PBS.

new york WLIW master race

aaaaaah frightening

>When a Ken Burns documentary starts playing
As a dumb kid I hated how boring and quiet PBS seemed (aside the cartoons which were top notch) but as an adult I can appreciate that sort of feel.

It's too bad IMO that the cartoons have really declined. They're totally CGI now and not good CGI either.

Frontline is pretty great as well.

Taught me about anal sex and sexual emergencies

Did they actually have content about at the national level or was it a local channel going full retard

Funded by literal theft. I don't want to pay for this fucking TV station. How dare people insist that I do.

I liked Mr. Rogers and Bob Ross, but that's all my experience with PBS.

NPR should not receive federal funding. Public radio my ass. Their post-election day coverage was absolutely hysterical. You could hear Terry Gross and others crying on air

Honestly, and this is from somebody who listens to NPR everyday and worked for PBS (I'm the OP) they shouldn't receive federal funding. The good NPR and PBS affiliates are already pretty much self-sustaining (state moneys less than 20% of budget).

However, the Federal funding does include a mandate to at least attempt to be fair. They fail but they do try. I shudder to think how far left NPR especially would go if the fairness requirement was stripped.

No TV or radio stations should receive public tax dollars. It's disgusting.

my experience as a kid was that PBS had the only real educational television around. everything else was commercial garbage in comparison. but the quality of the programming has gone down, they started getting really fucked by the Republicans around Bush 2 with ad placement and shows that are designed for toy licenses. the death of Jim Henson really hurt them.
oh fuck off, NPR is miles above any other radio news source and listener education surveys confirm that

It made more sense when there were only three over the air channels and no internet. An argument could be made that having exclusively corporate, ad revenue driven fiction and journalism on the air was deleterious.

With the internet and cable, there's no longer enough public need for tax dollars to go to it.

it allows for content that isn't beholden to commercial sponsors. state funding for the arts is important, and the lack of it is part of why american culture is so crass

>, they started getting really fucked by the Republicans around Bush 2 with ad placement and shows that are designed for toy licenses.
As somebody who worked there at that time, it was less about Republican funding cuts and more about trying to compete with cable and making more $$$ so the content could be more polished. At this point the average large to medium market PBS station is about as commercialized as it can be and still remain a non-profit licensee. They produce content that they then sell to other PBS stations, for a profit that they then roll back in to making more content.

>It allows for content to be made that barely anybody enjoys

I don't fucking care. You pay for it, I don't want to.

on the contrary, there's more need now than ever, corporate media has become completely blatant about its agenda to the point where noise drowns out information. compare election coverage from pbs news hour to fox or CNN. for world affairs, PBS and NPR are the best thing short of print media

I watch Newshour when I can, but most of the time I stick to the Create offshoot channel. WVIA represent.

I agree. Like I said I worked there and I still have friends that work there. It would suck for me personally (and for the country) if the PBS went under, but what I'm saying is that pulling their fed funding (which is paltry element of the budget of most well run stations) wouldn't be the end of them or their mission.

I don't mean funding cuts, Bush 2 changed out a lot of the management iirc. that's when NPR coverage started to skew more hawkish

with the tax dollars come some goverment control. if they cut that off, it's only a matter of time before the capitalists come in and buy out the whole operation (which they're already trying). just look at what happens to other nonprofits in this country

>it's only a matter of time before the capitalists come in and buy out the whole operation
At fucking last.

You said the quality of the programming went down, that's why I thought you were referring to funding.

Anyway, the President doesn't have the power to change out NPR management. It's a private organization that headhunts for management the same way any corporation does. The only power the Feds have over NPR or PBS is the power of the purse. Now, it's entirely possible that the Administration suggested to NPR that they'd better get behind the war or face funding cuts, but they didn't reshuffle anybody directly.

As a non-burger European that's watched CNN and FOX lately I wholeheartedly agree.
>inb4 commie

I've always had this crazy fever dream where the budgets for public broadcasting and the military get swapped. The production value would be incredible.

people do enjoy highbrow content if it's available. just look at the wild success of bbc programming in the USA. sesame street, bill nye, mr rogers were popular programs that had a lasting cultural impact.

There's no reason to buy out NPR/PBS. All the broadcast spectrum they own is legally required to be used for non-commercial purposes. If, say, Coca-Cola came in and bought out PBS it be legally impossible for them to change the format away from public service.

And now Sesame Street is on HBO, funded by the free market, as it should be. If people enjoy the content, then they can pay for it. Or people can donate to keep it free, but they should receive no public money.

"White privlidge exists" - Ari (((Shapiro)))

yeah I don't know the details, I didn't work there or anything
capitalists in nonprofits are a bad thing, they are literally incompatible

That's literally what is happening. The station I worked for is in a red state. They lost the vast majority of their tax funding and are fucking thriving via private donors.

That's good. I live in a state full of communists who love to waste my money on shit we don't need.

>capitalists in nonprofits are a bad thing,
Hardly. The best administrators in the PBS system have a fairly capitalistic attitude. All non-profits are subject to market powers, donors replace consumers but the pressures are very similar. If they were 100% tax funded that would be different but the reality is this:

The PBS stations with money and market conscious executives and managements teams, patterning themselves after for-profit new and old media orgs, do better than the whimsical "art for arts sake" old guard.

do you have any justification for this position apart from a blind faith that free markets create the best of all possible worlds? And do you have any awareness that television viewers are not patrons of the arts funding content that they desire, but a product to be sold to the advertisers?

>do you have any justification for this position
Yes. I don't want to pay for PBS, and a free market would create the best possible outcome, me not paying for PBS.

the first thing they will do is lobby to change those laws. or it would have been twenty years ago, now it's more and more a moot point because everything's moving to the internet

YouTube channels raking in $250,000
+ a year for one man low budget operations and the entire ad-free, cable channel model (HBO, etc.) disagree.

so if nobody had to pay any taxes at all, that would better?

Take comfort in the fact that at this point you're paying for almost none of it. The content you actually see when you tune in is maybe 1/60th tax funded.

I think we should pay for stuff we need, like police, military, salaries for the president, congressmen, judges. Personally, I'm not sure I even support public schools, but I'm okay with them being funded on the local level with tax dollars. We should not have a federal department of education however.

Oil companies get billions in federal funding, even though they are the most profitable business in the history of man.

theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/12/us-taxpayers-subsidising-worlds-biggest-fossil-fuel-companies

I'm not really arguing with you so consider this more a friendly question.

Franklin and other founding fathers, all of whom are were pretty fucking staunch supporters of limited government, were amenable to the idea of things like public libraries. Couldn't the argument be made that things like PBS are extensions of that? Not in their current politically biased form, but in concept.

youtube channels are being reigned in, most are completely dependent on advertiser support at this point and the content quality (e.g. reaction videos) reflects that
hbo isn't really the shining example people make it out to be. it derives most of its viewership from showing tits and gore. and the ROI for the average viewer is much lower. hbo production budgets are gargantuan compared to PBS

The ostensible reason for that is that a robust fossil fuel extraction system is absolutely necessary for national defense - the entire military is dependent on fuel on a massive scale.

this is nonsense argument, you don't "need" any of those things in an absolute sense, they are required for your personal vision of society. my vision of society includes state sponsorship of the arts.

I understand that position, but I disagree with it. I just can't really come around to the idea of forcing people to pay for optional stuff. Public money is such a tiny amount of PBS's budget anyway, I'm sure they could survive without it, so why not just cut it entirely?

>why not just cut it entirely?
>forcing people to pay for optional stuff
you mean, like the development of a global positioning system for navigation? or the internet? wake up, government is literally people pooling their resources together for the common good.

I'm actually the guy that's been arguing for that above.

My point is that even in the most idealized limited government version of America there was some funding for public information.

Now, if we're talking about minarchism, etc, and not American convervatism/libertarianism then that goes out the window.

>government is literally people pooling their resources together for the common good.
In a few democracies under certain conditions. Governments have done, and are doing some pretty horrific shit. Within living memory American tax dollars have paid for the enforcement of Jim Crow laws, and even in Socialist Sweden, tax moneys went to fund (in the '70s) forced sterilizations and other abuses.

Skepticism about the size,, behavior, and role of government is healthy.

Yeah, I'm just not really sure I see the need for it. Maybe at one point, but not today. Especially PBS doesn't need public money.

>skepticism is healthy
absolutely. but it is ridiculous to argue that every tax expenditure that you like is necessary but every one you don't like is highway robbery
and it is worth mentioning the only reason we DON'T have jim crow laws today is aggressive action by a strong federal government

>the entire military is dependent on fuel on a massive scale.
Speaking of waste of money.

I grew up watching a lot of PBS. Its gotten progressively worse in a political and literal sense.

Their news is CNN tier but I like the crafts specials and history detectives

Yes, but you were argument for Government as something inherently good, in the same way that people argue that the free market is inherently good.

On a historical scale of more than about 50 years, government has been in the wrong as much or more than it has been in the right.

here's my proposal for PBS. Prohibit sponsor advertising of any kind and licensing deals with commercial companies. increase state funding. then you have a renaissance of the golden age, from which PBS derives its most valuable properties. a show like Mr Rogers could not be produced in the current climate.

no I was not arguing that government is inherently good, or at least I did not mean to. what I'm saying is government is a social contract where people pool their resources together with the AIM of the common good. obviously it doesn't worj out that way. but the point is, the question of whether something is "necessary" isn't material to this social contract (I propose it's not even MEANINGFUL) -- it's a canard introduced by small-government fanatics

>government is a social contract where people pool their resources together with the AIM of the common good.
In modern day Europe and parts of Asia and North America, fair enough. In most of the rest of the world it's self serving and maintained by force.

in a government maintained by force, the citizen's opinion on how his tax dollars ought to be spent is pretty irrelevant, no?

>grow up watching Justin Wilson, Yan Can Cook, and Norm on The New Yankee Workshop on PBS

good times