Have you even listened to NPR? or a public radio station? When my ill mother was staying at my place we had the NPR station on 24/7, and most of it was programs that had nothing to do with news and politics. What 'news' or 'politics' is there in music programs like 'Live From Here', or the two mechanics' show that was on every Saturday? What 'news' or 'politics' is there in Rick Steve's travel show? Or the 'Hidden Brain' show?
What 'news' or 'politics' is there in the thousands of college and university stations that get some CPB funding to help them stay on the air? The college and community station I worked at for three years, which did get some CPB funding, had maybe two hours of news (one show, during the late afternoon). The other 22 hours of programming were music and some cultural music programming. The vast majority of the time slots and dayparts weren't news at all. Just music.
You remind me of the naysayers back in the 1930's who didn't want government funding the REA, TVA, or the Columbia Basin project.
Hey, if you choose to live on a farm out in the middle of the Great Plains where there's no electricity, you made that choice. Don't expect me to fund the power generation or power delivery infrastructure. Telephones? You already knew there were no phones out there when you decided to live there. Deal with it.
There were people back in the 1930's who were dead set against the Rural Electrification Administration, TVA, and other similar infrastructure projects, for the same basic reasons you've listed. They saw it as a waste of Federal tax money, wiring up rural areas where only a few hicks and dirt farmers lived. After all, those folks didn't need electricity. They already had kerosene lighting and wood stoves. If the power companies and phone companies didn't want to wire up those areas, obviously it was for good reason. Too expensive. Why should the government do it when the companies didn't see a profit or benefit in doing so? That was the argument used. Same one being used to yank the CPB funding.
You keep harping on the millions of channels that people have access to when they have broadband internet. OK, that's true, the internet provides for literally millions of information and entertainment 'channels'.
Do you even understand what function Radio performs, and how it's different from cruising the internet, checking out social media notifications on a smart phone, or picking up the remote and dialing through endless channels of infotainment on cable TV? Radio is not TV, it's not cable, and it's not an internet website -- it's a completely different medium and can be used in the car, in the home, or at work, and be listened to while you're doing other tasks.
Those of us who worked in Radio, or were Radio hobbyists and Radio fans all our lives, understand this.
And in many places where CPB funded public radio stations exist, those stations are the only radio station with local news, State news, and the like. It's necessary infrastructure. Where SRG lives, for example, KSKO is the only station on the radio dial. In rural Burns, Oregon, the only radio station with news -- whether it's state or national -- is the OPB public radio station. The big news and info stations on the FM and AM band in Oregon are all west of the Cascades, and none of them have workable signals in places like Burns, which is a relatively isolated town in the Eastern Oregon desert. A lot of the folks in that section of Eastern Oregon are ranchers. Radio is an important medium for them. It's not like they can carry around a satellite dish. Sure, some of them might get Sirius. But Sirius doesn't carry Oregon state news, like the OPB stations do.
CPB's costs, when compared to a lot of other subsidies and Federal programs, was a drop in the bucket. The Federal government still subsidizes the Oil Industry. They're some of the richest corporations in the world, and yet they get Federal subsidies.
But instead of being against that sort of government spending, the conservatives running Congress go after Radio.
