Pubcasting Battle: Government Shutdown Edition

The entire public broadcasting budget remains on the chopping block in Republican budget proposals as the two parties face down Friday's impending government shutdown. Here are notable pieces from this week in my continuing series examining the defunding debate:

• Save NPR! But please put PBS out of its misery—Slate, which has been following the public broadcasting story with a series of sharp opinion pieces, offers this analysis by Mark Oppenheimer of why PBS feels increasingly low-rent while public radio is surging.
• Forget Me Elmo—Hey, wait a minute, says Eliza Gray in The New Republic. While "yuppie elites" fret about NPR's fate, the more egalitarian PBS would be disproportionately harmed by budget cuts.
  
• Public Broadcasting is a Vital Public Service—American Public Media CEO Bill Kling addresses The Hill's policymaker audience with the argument that, given partisan polarization, "there is an increasingly important role for public media to serve as a centering institution for this country."
• Poll: Americans Way Off on Public Broadcasting Funding—Politico reports on a much-discussed CNN poll revealing that most of the 1000+ respondents thought that CPB receives a share of 1 percent or more of the federal government's budget (the reality is closer to .00014 percent), and what's more, a majority thought CPB should continue to receive the same amount of funding or more.
• GOP Completely Fixes Economy By Canceling Funding for NPR— The Onion snarks: "by eliminating funds for NPR, the deficit has been slashed by 0.000004 percent and a newly thriving middle class once again has cause to believe in the American dream."
• Right Seeks Edge in "Oppo" Wars—the Seattle PI puts the NPR sting video in context of a larger effort by conservatives to use investigative reporting techniques to incriminate liberal politicians and organizations.
• Just a Couple of More Things About NPR—Bill Moyers and Michael Winship continue their series of articles on the public broadcasting debate with another look at the bias question. "So what do conservatives really mean when they accuse NPR of being 'liberal?' They mean it’s not accountable to their worldview as conservatives and partisans. They mean it reflects too great a regard for evidence and is too open to reporting different points of views of the same event or idea or issue." 

Catch up on this series of posts tracking different cases being made for and against public broadcasting:

• March 30: Pubcasting Battle: Sifting Through the Evidence
• March 23: Pubcasting Battle: Top Five Pieces this Week
• March 17: Pubcasting Battle: Highlights and Low Blows from the Past Week 
• March 9: Pubcasting Battle: Breaking Responses to Schiller's Ouster
• March 8: Pubcasting Battle: Now it Gets Ugly
• March 3: Pubcasting Battle: A Slight Reprieve, and a Push for Reform
• February 22: Defend or Defund? Advocacy Ramps up as House Nixes Pubmedia Budget
• February 14: Public Broadcasting Faces Harsh Congressional Challenges

Image source: The Alaska Dispatch