The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), as a part of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), were a couple of the extravagances that President Lyndon Johnson put into effect during the late 1960s.

The question has always been why the U.S. government is using taxpayer money to subsidize broadcasting and the arts. That’s not the government’s job.

Probably, if the CPB and NEA had been even-handed there wouldn’t be a problem, but the CPB – including PBS and National Public Radio (NPR) – and the NEA quickly became voices for the liberal side of the spectrum.

Most of the NEA grants go to liberal organizations and most of the programming in PBS and NPR are decidedly liberal in perspective. Everyone knows about the bias, but for some reason the liberal media balks at simply admitting what is well-known and what is at the heart of the discussion about taking taxpayer money away from liberal institutions like the CPB and the NEA.

Frankly, if the government is using taxpayer money for partisan purposes, whether liberal or conservative, it needs to stop. I wouldn’t want my money to be used to fund a conservative radio station and I don’t want my money to be used to fund a liberal broadcast medium either.

If there is a demand for liberal or conservative media, then let the public say so by supporting those things. Why don’t the liberal media that support NPR, PBS, etc., simply admit that they’re only telling one side of story about the CPB, the NEA, and so on?

It would be nice if our news media were getting all the objective facts out to the public, rather than simply trying to propagandize or “shape public opinion” by only telling one side of the story.

Mike Sigman

Durango