Public Broadcasting at Fifty: From a Proud Beginning to an Uncertain Future.

• Author: Stockwell, Norman

Fifty years ago, on November 7,1967, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act, which set the foundation for what we know today as National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). It also created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a nongovernmental agency to fund the two fledgling broadcasting services. The amounts were small ($5 million in the first year) but helped keep these new services afloat as they developed a new national broadcasting system.

Today NPR has 989 member and affiliated stations and serves more than thirty-seven million weekly listeners; PBS has 350 member stations and serves 82 percent of U.S. households. But President Donald Trump, from his earliest days in office, has threatened to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which currently receives $445 million in federal funding.

That's 0.02 percent of the federal budget, or about two dollars per person each year. The balance of the operating costs of public broadcasting stations are funded by listeners, viewers, and some business donations. In comparison, France spends $54 per person per year on public broadcasting and Norway spends $134 per person per year.

Already, public broadcasting in the United States is largely listener-sponsored. Every dollar of federal funding is used to leverage approximately six dollars of local matching funds. Meanwhile, noted veteran public television broadcaster Bill Moyers in a 2006 speech, "Congress even gave the media mogul Rupert Murdoch a tax break equal to about one fourth of public broadcasting's annual appropriation from Congress, money he might well have turned around and invested in his own ministry of information, Fox News, which regularly beats up on public television for being publicly funded."

Moyers spent the majority of four decades in public television, but before that he worked for President Johnson, including two years as his press secretary. Beginning in 1964, Johnson asked Moyers to join a series of meetings on "educational television" that eventually became the Carnegie Commission. Moyers, in his speech, recalls that the commission looked at how television "could be more diverse, exposing us to the experiences and thoughts of people living on the other side of the country or the other side of the globe."

Johnson, Moyers recalled, was fully on board with these discussions. "The President sat in on some of these meetings," he said. "He liked what he heard...