PBS gets 15 percent of its budget from the government. Lib loving "Sesame Street" would also be fine, as it largely survives on corporate sponsorship's and merchandising deals.

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Now what is the trouble here? We have a corporation partly funded by the government that is using its position as a public agent to promote the agenda of only a faction of the public, namely the faction that favors PBS.

Of course, those who love PBS want it to be continued. But PBS is not a private sector venture the supporters of which are using their own wealth to undertake various projects. No. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting funds PBS and the various stations that broadcast its programs. A large percentage--around 15%--of the funding comes from taxes paid by all of us, not only by supporters of PBS. So this outfit has no business using your and my money to promote something to which you and I are opposed.

Now we learn that not only did PBS run these ads in flagrant violation of its public and thus necessarily non-partisan nature. Many of its stations–15% of them--committed even more blatant acts of partisanship. They shared their list of donors with political parties, mainly the Democratic National Committee but also with some Republican efforts, such as the Dole Presidential campaign.

The rational is not difficult to understand. PBS and its radio sister, NPR, are clearly edited to bolster liberal and statist causes. This may not be true of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer but it is with many of their programming decisions, choices of topics, the sorts of questions they pose to people they interview, and so on.

What is wrong with all this? The reason that governments may not run churches or newspapers is that it is not the business of a government to advocate various special programs. Government is supposed to make sure that we can all strive to implement our ideas, to the extent our good fortune and hard work make possible. It has no business getting into the promotional fray itself.

But when government gets involved anyway, as it must administering schools, colleges, universities, and broadcast networks, its role as a fair representative of the people must be destroyed. That is one of several reasons PBS should be abolished--not just "phased out" but scrapped immediately. It is antithetical to the non-partisan job with which governments are entrusted.

Given that broadcasting of any sort cannot escape being partisan, no matter how one may try to dodge that fact, government isn't supposed to be involved in it. Its only business should be what the US Declaration of Independence stated: To secure our basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.