Savage said:
My information was that the parking garage "phase" or segment of the construction on State Street was budgeted at $5 million. As I said, it's been 20 years, but IIRC that figure was cited in the D&C or Times-Union. If it's incorrect, again, I apologize.
Without degenerating too far into dead-horse-beating territory (certain other posters on this thread have that department more than covered), I do believe the "$5 million" figure covered the entire south building expansion. There was no separate parking garage "phase" to that construction - the building went up all at once. But you're quite right - that's a diversion.
This whole discussion is an attempt to divert the discussion away from the point: the money which is being lavished on public broadcasting. I think this is particularly troubling given the political agenda often apparent in the final product. My point was, and remains: this is a service which can, and should, largely be listener/viewer-supported. Especially given the fact that it brazenly competes for advertising dollars in competition with commercial stations, which is a violation of its FCC authorizations.
May I try to bring some focus to this discussion?
A station like WYSL or WHAM or WPXY plays essentially one role in the community it serves: it programs one reasonably consistent format, be it news/talk or top-40 music, and sells the audience generated by that programming to commercial advertisers. It may have some additional NTR activities - selling discount coupon books to listeners, or website advertising, or staging concerts, or syndicating a talk show - but those are usually fairly small adjuncts to its one basic reason for being, and they're all still funded largely by the same model of selling advertising to commercial clients.
A larger public broadcaster like WXXI, by contrast, has evolved to play many roles. A few of them - the NPR and local news and talk programming on 1370, the PBS prime-time programming on WXXI-TV, the classical music on 91.5 - are fairly high-profile activities that draw audiences that are in some cases as large as those of our commercial brethren. I'm in agreement with you, Bob, that those mass-audience functions can be and should be supported mainly by underwriting and listener/viewer donations.
And in fact, they are. At least on the radio side of the building where I spend most of my time, there's essentially no government money, state or federal, funding functions such as our newsroom and our radio talk programming. This is especially true of the programming in which you perceive a political agenda. (Programming which, I'd note, includes not only Bob Smith's daily show but also Curt Smith's weekly "Perspectives," and I don't think there are two more divergent political viewpoints in one building, unless Lonsberry and Wease are in the same room.)
But here's the thing: in addition to "1370 Connection" and "Morning Edition" and "PBS NewsHour" and "Nova," there are a lot of other things happening under the WXXI banner that don't draw the kind of audiences that can directly financially support them, or that can be marketed to underwriters. There's children's TV programming that's of a much higher quality than anything Nickelodeon or Disney offer (and that's available to a lot of households that could never afford $1000 a year for cable). There are educational programs (some on the air, some offered in other ways) that work in conjunction with local school districts and colleges. There's Reachout Radio for the blind. There's an increasingly massive online presence, some of it offering niche content for which there's simply no on-air home.
It's those services - and especially the educational activities and Reachout Radio - that receive the lion's share of whatever government funding still exists. I'll concede that you can never have 100% separation of funding; all these functions share a building and at least some equipment and staff. But I do believe, very firmly, that these additional, lower-profile functions can't be sustained solely (or even largely) through member donations and underwriting. It's not my department (and I should note that as always, I speak here only for myself and not for any of my employers), but I suspect some of those functions locally are subsidized to some degree by the membership dollars that come in from the more mass-audience programming on radio and prime-time TV.
So if we're going to have an informed conversation about government funding of public media, let's at least be clear about what functions are being funded.
Zero out CPB funding, and you'd probably still be able to sustain most of what's on 1370 and 91.5 and the prime-time PBS schedule on TV with some combination of listener/viewer donations, grant money and underwriting (albeit, perhaps, in a more "enhanced" form that might more directly compete with commercial stations for the pool of ad revenue that's out there - do you really want that?) If that's all the "public media" we want as a nation, so be it.
What's being fought for, though, is all that "other stuff" - the things no commercial broadcaster in their right minds would ever want to provide. It seems to me that over the last few decades, we've made at least something of a tacit societal contract where broadcast regulation is concerned: all that high-minded "sustaining" programming that commercial broadcasters once offered by way of community service has been allowed to disappear in large part because public radio and TV have picked up that burden. Because WXXI is there to provide Homework Hotline and Assignment: The World, WUHF can run nonstop infomercials all morning and judge shows all afternoon, and Sinclair can reap whatever profits it can make from using our airwaves that way.
That's a tradeoff I can live with. But if the publicly-funded educational components of public radio and TV go away - and they will, if CPB funding gets zeroed out - I don't think commercial media get off unscathed. Would we so willingly accept the incredibly lax standards for what constitutes "educational/instructional" programming on commercial TV if there weren't the PBS kids' lineup to fill the void? Or would the WUHFs of the world start to feel pressure to replace at least one or two of those morning infomercials with something more substantial and less profitable?
There is, I think, a pretty good reason why we're not seeing very many commercial broadcast owners, especially on the TV side, taking a political stand on CPB funding: what you describe as "brazen competition" with commercial stations is really, in many cases, a fairly comfortable symbiotic relationship in which that dollar-and-change a year in per capita federal tax money (augmented by viewer and underwriter funding) lets public media provide the unprofitable vegetables so that commercial media can focus on the much more lucrative dessert.
