Bush Threatens PBS; Tell Congress to Save Public Broadcasting (w/poll)

(Intro: I'm the Advocacy Manager for CREDO Action from Working Assets.)

If this seems like dejá vu all over again, well, it is. This is the eighth straight year that Bush has tried to de-fund public broadcasting...but this year the proposed cuts are the deepest ever.  Even Patricia Harrison, a former RNC co-chairwoman who Bush installed as the President of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a couple years back, has called these cuts "draconian."  (Clearly she didn't get the memo from the White House this year, or something.)

Full details are available from the New York Times or the Washington Post.  Bush even proposes to go back and yank ("resciss") funding that was approved from last year (including funds for stations to convert to digital transmission, which is required by federal law).

Here's the action link, and more on the flip...

Now, one would hope that this budget proposal will be dead as a doornail when it arrives on Capitol Hill; indeed, in previous years Congress has always restored CPB's funding.  But that's only been after huge public outcry; after all, public broadcasting is very broadly supported by Americans of all political persuasions.  

So, kossacks, please have at it.  Have your senators and representative heard from you this year that you want to see public broadcasting fully funded?  (They need to; silence is assent and all that.)

Personally, I really enjoy the News Hour (not perfect but WAY better than G.E./Disney/Viacom national news in the evenings), and my one-year-old is a big fan of Word World and Teletubbies in the morning.  Let's make it eight years in a row we've swatted down Bush's dumb idea to de-fund public broadcasting.