Public broadcasting funding

[Garrett Wollman <wollman>]

<<On Mon, 15 Jan 2001 14:39:35 -0500, Dave Faneuf <tklaundry@juno.com> said:

> Are you proposing something like [Britain's TV tax] for NPR and PBS?

No, I think it has insurmountable legal difficulties.  (There *could*
easily be a Federal excise tax on televisions, but it would not
collect nearly enough money to do any good -- people don't buy a new
TV every year.)

What I think could work would be a sales tax on advertising.  Stations
that accepted such funding would be subject to much stricter limits on
the sort of underwriting they can engage in, which should keep them
from competing unfairly with the commercial broadcasters.  I also
believe that there should be a national programming organization,
which would allow program producers to sell their programs directly to
public broadcasting; as things stand now, producers must funnel their
programs through a Member Station middleman, which increases the
ultimate cost to other stations and gives some stations (WGBH, WNET,
WPBT, WETA, WTTW, KCET, and KQED on the TV side; WGBH, WBUR, WHYY,
WETA, and KNOW on the radio side) far too much control over the other
members.  (When people complain about the alleged ``liberal bias'' of
public broadcasting, what they are really complaining about is the
fact that most programming available to public broadcasting reflects
the biases of stations in Boston, New York, and Washington.)

-GAWollman