Public broadcasting in the United States
Sources of funding also include on-air and online pledge drives and the sale of underwriting "spots" (typically running 15–30 seconds) to sponsors.
[2] Donations are widely dispersed to stations and producers, giving the system a resilience and broad base of support but diffusing authority and impeding decisive change and priority-setting.
Public television and radio in the U.S. has, from the late 1960s onward, dealt with severe criticism from conservative politicians and think-tanks (such as The Heritage Foundation), which allege that its programming has a leftist bias.
Partly because of this belief, although it accounts for only a small fraction of government spending overall, some conservatives (including Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich) have made various efforts to defund or privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting through federal budget legislation.
Comprehensive studies by the Government Accountability Office and other organizations have concluded that private financing would not be universally available to public television and radio stations in less densely populated areas to sufficiently replace taxpayer funding that makes up 40% to 50% of the annual budgets of some stations, and ensure universal access to public broadcasting services.
[5][6][7] Early public stations were operated by state colleges and universities, and were often run as part of the schools' cooperative extension services.
[8] The concept of a "non-commercial, educational" station per se did not show up in U.S. law until 1941, when the FM band was authorized to begin normal broadcasting (before 1941, it was experimental).
While the intention of the act was to develop public television and radio, a revision of the bill had removed all mention of radio from the original text; Michigan Senator Robert Griffin suggested changing the name of what was to be called the Public Television Act, and last-minute changes were subsequently made to the bill (with references incorporating radio into the bill being re-added with Scotch Tape) before the law was passed by Congress and signed by Johnson.
Some stations also derive a portion of their funding from federal, state and local governments and government-funded colleges and universities, in addition to receiving free use of the public radio spectrum.
NET's constant need for additional funding led the Ford Foundation to begin withdrawing its financial support of the network in 1966, shouldering much of the responsibility for providing revenue for NET onto its affiliated stations, prior to the foundation of the CPB, which intended to create its own public television service.
PBS' incorporation coincided with the merger of NET's New York City station, Newark, New Jersey-licensed WNDT (which became WNET), into National Educational Television, the impetus of which was to continue receiving funding by Ford and the CPB.
Unlike National Public Radio, however, PBS largely does not produce any of the programs it broadcasts nor has an in-house news division; all PBS programs are produced by individual member stations and outside production firms for distribution to its member stations through the network feed.
In a deviation from the affiliation model that began to emerge in commercial broadcast television in the late 1950s, in which a single station holds the exclusive local rights to a network's programming schedule, PBS maintains memberships with more than one non-commercial educational station in select markets (such as Los Angeles and Chicago, which both have three PBS member stations); in these conflict markets, PBS members which participate in the service's Program Differentiation Plan (PDP) are allocated a percentage of PBS-distributed programming for their weekly schedule – the highest total of which is usually allocated to the market's "primary" PBS station – often resulting certain programs airing on the PDP outlets on a delayed basis, unless the primary or an additional member station holds market exclusivity over a particular program.
Acquired programming distributed directly to public television stations – such as imported series, documentaries and theatrically released feature films, political and current affairs shows, and home improvement, gardening and cooking programs – fill the remainder of the station's broadcast day.
Independent services include Create, an American Public Television-operated network featuring how-to, home and garden, cooking and travel programs; MHz Worldview, a network owned by MHz Networks, which carries international dramatic series (particularly crime drama), news programs and documentaries; and World, a joint venture of American Public Television, WNET, the WGBH Educational Foundation and the National Educational Telecommunications Association that broadcasts science, nature, news, public affairs and documentary programs.
