MoveOn.Org has responded to Bush's latest proposals to gut funding for NPR and PBS with a very simple petition. The petition states, in its entirety, thus:
Sign it here.
"Congress must save NPR and PBS once and for all. Congress should guarantee permanent funding and independence from partisan meddling."
Sign it here.
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2 comments:
Here is the text of the petition:
"Congress must save NPR and PBS once and for all. Congress should guarantee permanent funding and independence from partisan meddling."
I like public broadcasting. I've both donated and signed past petitions to prevent defunding of public broadcasting. But this petition is different.
What does "once and for all" mean? Are they suggesting a constitutional amendment?
And what is the difference between "partisan meddling" and, uh, submitting budget bills and voting on them?
There was another petition posted at the same URL from Nov 2005 to May 2006 (before the election), but it was in opposition to a particular proposal, and didn't call for establishing any permanent level of funding that couldn't be altered by future lawmakers.
Have a look at that previous petition on the wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://civic.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/
Although superficially similar, this new petition is significantly different. It calls for permanent funding that cannot be rescinded, regardless of how NPR/PBS may change in the future. Do we really want to establish a publicly-funded institution that is accountable to no one?
The "once and for all" wish is an understandable one, but is bad for democracy. And it's a lazy wish.
Is it really a 25% cut or is this an instance of baseline budgeting deception?
It'll be interesting to see if the number is legitimate or not.
For example, in the past if an organization had a reduction in the rate of growth it gets reported as cuts.
As an example, if an organization has $75m budget one year and a projected budget of $100 which gets reduced to an $80m budget the media will report it as a 20% cut even though the actual budget grew.
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