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Comment by nikkinana | Hacker News Reader

I love government sponsored content for free, that's where I get all of my news and stuff.

Except, wait, what, PBS isn't free? Don't we already pay taxes?

PBS is kind of a hybrid, with partial public funding, but with the majority of its funding coming from other revenue sources. It gets around 15% of its budget through grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which in turn is funded by the federal government), the rest through a mix of fundraising and subscriptions. Some local PBS affiliates also get state/local support, or are hosted by a public entity like a university. That seems to have been Congress's intent, that it would be supported in part by federal funding, but not be a fully publicly run organization like the BBC.

PBS accepts large amounts from #bigAg, #bigPharma and various oligarch 'foundations'. The worry is that these huge entities shape the messaging. You won't ever hear monopolist Bill Gates critiqued on PBS or NPR for example...

That's certainly not true. NPR criticizes Bill Gates often as part of the "celebrity billionaire" group, and recently had a story about his affair with an employee.

'NPR’s funding from Gates “was not a factor in why or how we did the story,” reporter Pam Fessler says, adding that her reporting went beyond the voices quoted in her article. The story, nevertheless, is one of hundreds NPR has reported about the Gates Foundation or the work it funds, including myriad favorable pieces written from the perspective of Gates or its grantees.' https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-fu...

When you donate billions, you help lots of people who may then be honest about that.

What is surprising to you that beneficiaries of philanthropy are happy to report and promote philanthropy?

It's not like they try to cover up his "sins", or that the channel doesn't report on the latest gossip about his marriage just because it's "news".

It's a great article, did you read it?

'Twenty years ago, journalists scrutinized Bill Gates’s initial foray into philanthropy as a vehicle to enrich his software company, or a PR exercise to salvage his battered reputation following Microsoft’s bruising antitrust battle with the Department of Justice. Today, the foundation is most often the subject of soft profiles and glowing editorials describing its good works. '

It is fair to say that funder bias is a significant concern in the not-for-profit world, including in public broadcasting.

There's been open mainstream speculation of that "PBS sold its soul" to the Koch Brothers:

As David Sirota, the author of the PandoDaily expose, wrote in its aftermath, PBS doesn’t stand for “Public Broadcasting Service” anymore. As it becomes more addicted to big-bucks donors, it risks becoming the Plutocrat Broadcasting Service.

https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-xpm-2014-feb-17-...

Tiny Spark is the podcast of Nonprofits Quarterly, and has dedicated numerous episodes to the question of funder influence.

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/podcasts/

Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, and Robert W. McChesney are voices on the left who have called out corporate / fundraiser bias on the part of PBS, NPR, CPB, and other public broadcasters in the US. McChesney notes:

Public broadcasting today is really a system of nonprofit commercial broadcasting, serving a sliver of the population. What we need is a system of real public broadcasting, with no advertising, one that accepts no grants from corporations or private bodies, one that serves the entire population, not merely those who have high-brow tastes and disposable income to contribute during pledge drives.

https://www.lehigh.edu/~jl0d/J246-02/oligopoly.html

If the US government paid $1 in total to PBS, would you be surprised that PBS couldn't provide its service for free? The US pays about 4% of what the UK pays per capita for public broadcasting.

https://site-cbc.radio-canada.ca/documents/impact-and-accoun...

Members, corporate underwriting, and distribution fees each provide a bigger percentage of its revenue than the federal government https://publiceditor.bento-live.pbs.org/publiceditor/blogs/p...

>The US pays about 4% of what the UK pays per capita for public broadcasting.

This can't be mentioned without also mentioning that the UK enforces a yearly license (so, a tax) on anyone who watches OTA TV, and they're known to be a bit scummy and heavy-handed about it.

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