Funding for Public Television

Re “PBS President Urges Grass-Roots Lobbying Effort,” Jan. 5:

The educational programs offered by public broadcasting channels serve as an excuse for owning a television set. If, as proposed, our government withdraws financial support for these channels, it tosses the entire TV medium up for grabs by advertisers who have provided a steady diet of junk food on this most powerful teaching tool.

Does the Republican Party have a commitment to education, or not?

PAT GREUTERT

Pasadena

* The Times reported Ervin S. Duggan, PBS president, as saying that public TV receives support from moderate Republican business people. That is true; we know some of them. They probably sleep through public-TV documentaries which, when they have a political angle, are usually left-liberal and sometimes even anti-American.

As the Capital Research Center has amply documented, American business has a strange propensity for supporting institutions that are hostile to business and free enterprise democracy.

Lenin said that capitalists would sell the rope used to hang them with. But even Lenin, one of the boldest men of all time, was not bold enough to predict that they would pay for the rope and give it away.

RICHARD A. PERKINS, Secretary

Viewers for Public Television

Accountability

Los Angeles

* Re “Gingrich Vows $2,000 for Barney, Big Bird Network,” Jan. 3:

So House Speaker Newt Gingrich has proposed a “privately funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting”? This is an oxymoron which cannot be allowed to bear fruit. The beauty of public broadcasting is that it is, for the most part, free from the influences of corporate sponsors. The privatization of such educational children’s programs as “Sesame Street” and “Barney” would result in an expansion of advertising to the very impressionable 2- to 4-year-old age group. Advertising within the context of an educational program makes it all the more difficult for children to know when they are the objects of a sales pitch.

What’s next? Perhaps “Sesame Street” will undergo rapid expansion, with the grand opening of a McDonald’s restaurant next door to an orphanage run by Oscar the Grouch!

JOHN LATINO

Los Angeles

* Public broadcasting has outlived the logic that supports it. Program diversity is thriving in the private sector: witness Nickelodeon, Discovery, the Learning Channel, Arts & Entertainment, Bravo, etc. CPB should enter the private sector where it will thrive or perish in competition with the plethora of programming choices available. The quality programs such as “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” and others will survive in the marketplace.

The $285-million tax subsidy CPB receives should be done away with and, with that, America will be that much closer to a balanced budget. Of course the CPB subsidy is but one of many subsidies that have outlived their charter and usefulness. Honey and tobacco are but two others. The horror here is that the taxpayer isn’t even paying for these subsidies. We’re borrowing to pay for these subsidies! This reality means that we are charging our unborn future taxpayers to pay for the television we’re watching today! Stop the insanity!

To paraphrase the late Sen. Everett Dirksen: “A hundred million here, a hundred million there . . . pretty soon it adds up to real money”! Even in a $1.5 trillion budget.

LELAND P. HAMMERSCHMITT

Ojai