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Comment by AznHisoka | Hacker News Reader

Does this mean the end of PBS?

Probably not. CPB gave funding to rural smaller stations which buy programming from PBS (or NPR).

It will drastically scale back the funding and coverage of public broadcasters, but they should (hopefully) survive.

That said, they effectively cease being public at this point. And ironically enough, they have no reason anymore to pander to wider audiences so if anything they will become more "left leaning" over time.

“Reality has a well known liberal bias”, as they say.

Nowadays they say, "Reality is a social construct."

I've never heard this saying.

No. What's really going to end PBS as we grew up with it is streaming. CPB is an vehicle for distributing public funding to PBS stations; only a small fraction of PBS station funding comes from CPB through the government.

It does for smaller stations that depended on federal funding to operate.

No, but I think it's likely that NPR and PBS will change because of this. A lot of people work there because of its explicit mission to serve the public. As with every other federal institution that's being pointlessly kneecapped, lots of good people will look elsewhere.

No, but it means the end of financial support for many programs on PBS and NPR.

No idea. Anyone have a good source of how much of PBS's funding comes from CPB?

Update: Just confirmed, no. Federal funds only makes up 15% of PBS's funding. [1]

1: https://foundation.pbs.org/ways-to-give/gifts-to-the-pbs-end...

For the last twenty years PBS proponents have been telling me that PBS and NPR are mostly member supported, and that the Federal funds couldn't corrupt the messaging because there just wasn't enough of it to matter.

So if that's true, I guess not. If it was actually a mouthpiece, I guess so

Yah they also took money from the “Archer Daniels Midland” corporation (not that I’d have anything against organic produce, for example) and the Ford and many other biased endowments —so I think it’d be hard to believe their messaging was unaffected. That or they bit the hand that fed it and the hand didn’t mind getting bitten for some reason.

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