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...
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.
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".
'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. '