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Hidden with code "Submitted as Feature"Hidden with code "Submitted as Feature" |
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News :: Media |
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Threats to Public Broadcasting and Community Radio Funding: WILL and WEFT would suffer |
Current rating: 0 |
by Kimberlie Kranich
Email: kakranich (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified!) |
17 Jun 2005
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Threats to totally eliminate funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) would gut the services of many public and community radio stations, low-power FM stations and public TV stations including WILL AM-FM-TV and WEFT, 90.1 FM in Champaign-Urbana, IL. Funding of the CPB amounts to less than $1.20 per taxpayer per year. A vote in the US House of Representatives will take place next week.
Read what you can do to save public broadcasting and community radio. |
Both WILL and WEFT rely on funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Proposed cuts passed by the House Appropriations Committee yesterday would cut WILL’s grant by about $300,000. WEFT would lose thousands of dollars as well. Both station’s programming services would be drastically cut, if they would survive at all.
How would our democracy suffer without the watchdog programs and investigative journalism offered on and carried by WILL and WEFT on such programs as “Democracy Now!,” “NOW,” “Frontline,” “Free Speech Radio News,” UCIMC Radio News,” “Independent Lens,” and numerous local public affairs and call-in programs?
Backgound on the Proposed Cuts:
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting the US-tax payer funded agency that passes funds to public broadcasting stations in this country. The proposal to cut funding was authored by Ohio Republican Representative Ralph Regula and would eliminate $100 million in federal funding to CPB, 25% of the total allocation.
Regula's proposal also calls for all federal funding to the CPB to be eliminated in two years. The cuts, if passed, would represent the most drastic cutback of public broadcasting since Congress created the nonprofit CPB in 1967. Regula has defended the cuts as necessary to avoid reductions in federal support for vocational education, job and medical training.
And last week, it was reported that a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee is the leading candidate to take over the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Patricia de Stacy Harrison is reportedly the favored candidate of the CPB's Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson. Harrison is currently a high-ranking official at the State Department. She was co-chair of the RNC from 1997 until January 2001, helping to raise for Republican candidates, including George W. Bush.
And in the face of charges from CPB Chair Tomlinson that it is has a liberal bias, and threats to its funding from Congress, the Public Broadcasting Service on Tuesday adopted an updated set of editorial standards and announced that it would add an ombudsman who will report directly to PBS President Pat Mitchell.
Steps Needed Right Now:
1) CALL YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS now and tell her or him to preserve CPB funding and to investigate Kenneth Tomlinson, current CPB chair, for turning the CPB into a partisan political machine, which is against the law. For example, Tomlinson ordered a $14,000 study of the political persuasion of guests on "NOW with Bill Moyers." The public paid for the study but Tomlinson refused to release the results.
2) Contact the Democratic and independent members of the CPB, Ernest Wilson, Frank Cruz and Beth Courtney and demand that they speak out against what's happening at CPB. They may be reached at 202-879-9600 or go on-line and leave a comment: http://www.cpb.org/talktous/. They need your support to snap their backbones back in line!
3) Register your object to Tomlinson's attempt to hire as the new CPB president, Patricia DeStacey Harrison, former RNC co-chair. Her appointment would further seal the CBP as a political arm of the white house.
4) Forward this email to everyone you know. |
See also:
http://www.cpb.org/talktous/.
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This work is in the public domain |
