Paul_Warren said:
Either unwittingly or perhaps on purpose, you entirely miss the Bob's point. It matters not that advertising is a legitimate cost of doing business; it remains a fact that, as a tax-deductible expense, it is being subsidized by the rest of us, regardless of whether we buy the advertised product or not. We are all involuntary stakeholders in commercial broadcasting, to a much greater extent than the $2-worth you mention for public broadcasting.
Therefore, we subsidize commercial broadcasters to a hefty degree. (And it's not much of a digression to point out that these same broadcasters make a mint out the political commercials that so inflate the cost of the democratic process - not to mention perverting it, especially since the Citizens United decision). If public broadcasters are subject to criticism from their tax-paying partners the way you say, shouldn't commercial broadcasters all the more subject to criticism? Yet they act as if they own the airwaves.
And by the way, you write as if people have the choice of not supporting an advertiser by not buying the product. That's only true for identifiable consumer products. You would have a hard time, for example, not supporting a particular bank or insurance company. You could be doing any business with any number of customers of such an institution and have no way of being any the wiser - and therefore you would be supporting it unwillingly as an indirect customer. The same would go for all kinds of other institutions. So don't go singling out the measly tax you pay for public broadcasting for special criticism; the truth is that it's the most transparent contribution you can make, other than your direct contribution to a station.
