Ideology, Institutional Concerns, And Congressional Control Of The: Fill & Download for Free

Believe it or not, a postmodern progressive outlook has not always been a prominent thread in American thought.United States in 1870 (the first transcontinental connection)Railroad map, 1892 (our rail system is not all that much more extensive today)Children’s board game, 1890US immigration map, turn of the centuryForeign-born Americans in the 12th Census, 1900.It was Leland Stanford who drove the golden spike that connected the East Coast of the United States with the West Coast by rail in Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, on May 10, 1869. Things happened fast from there.Stanford gained much of the political clout that made him governor and then senator from California by strenuously opposing the influx of “inferior” Chinese to California. So, it was a bit of a controversy when it was revealed that his Central Pacific Railway had been active in importing Chinese workers.There is a story about Stanford, perhaps apocryphal, though I heard it from someone long affiliated with Stanford University, that after the death of his son and only child, Leland, Jr., to typhoid fever in 1884, Leland and his wife Jane traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Harvard for the purpose of endowing a building on campus in his son’s name. Perceived as a couple of rustics, they were left sitting in the front office all day. Toward the end of the day the president made his way out and inquired as to their business. Told that they wished to endow a building, he took their lack of fashionable East Coast attire to mean they were not people of means and chided them that a campus building these days could run a million dollars.“Is that all?” thought Stanford, who promptly excused himself, returned to Palo Alto and opened Leland Stanford, Jr, University the following year as an agricultural school. The first student enrolled was a promising lad named Herbert Hoover, later our 31st president. A power shift westward had begun.The Eleventh United States Census, 1890The 1890 census boldly proclaimed the end of the frontier. The Native American population living within the borders of the country had fallen 38 percent since the census of 1880, to just fewer than a quarter-million. The official US population was 62,979,766, an increase of slightly more than 25 percent from the prior census, the results of which, because it was tabulated entirely by hand, had been officially available only two years earlier. The eleventh census used Hollerith cards with their electro-mechanical tabulators.When the 1890 census produced a rough-cut population estimate (that proved to be closely accurate) in only six weeks after the end of data gathering, the public was incredulous. How could they have a number so fast? But even more to the point, why was the number so low? The widespread expectation was that we would top 75 million, thanks largely to immigration.To give you a relative idea of population distribution then versus today, the top two cities in the Northeast were #1 New York (1.5 M) and #3 Philadelphia (1 M). Add #4 Brooklyn to NYC and you get 2.3 M. In the Midwest, the leader was #2 Chicago (1.1 M) followed by #5 St Louis at 451 K.The Mid-Atlantic boasted #7 Baltimore (434 K) and #14 Washington, DC, (230 K), while the Deeper South had #12 New Orleans (242 K) and #42 Atlanta (66 K). The Southwest was home to #77 Dallas and #81 San Antonio, a few hundred citizens apart at 38 K.The West had a top-ten city, #8 San Francisco (299 K) with the next ranking city being #26 Denver at 107 K. Salt Lake City (#63 with 45 K) was the only other sizable city in the vast mountainous expanse between the Prairie states and the Pacific Coast States. Phoenix had just become Arizona’s capitol with a population just more than 3,000. Los Angeles, for that matter, was in the bottom half of the list with a population of 50 K.Nationalism and the End of the FrontierThe successful birth of the United States changed human thinking worldwide. For the first time in human history, the mass production of chronographic watches and clocks and of Mercator maps [see above] lent a whole new sense of time and space. Latitude, longitude and national boundaries became visual elements in thinking about geographic space. Even children’s board games used maps basically to announce, “This is ours to have and to hold.”Columbia, the personification of the United States, brings rail, telegraph, hearty individuals and light from the East to the West in American Progress, an 1872 painting by John Gast.The painting of western progress by Gast above captures an incredible number of the filaments of American nationalism and manifest destiny, an offshoot of Jacksonian democracy. Our progress became heavily romanticized in Europe, leading essentially to a science of social progress as espoused (without going into some rather tasty detail) by the likes of Comte, Marx, Bentham, Mill and many others. Their more-institutional views then trickled back goading us on.By this time, the United States had succeeded in radically altering the map of North America. Texas had revolted against Mexico in 1836 and become a state in 1845. The southern half of the West that belonged to Mexico was wrested away. The United Kingdom abandoned its claim to the western half of Washington Territory. Finally, during the Lincoln administration, “Seward’s folly” added Alaska to our territory.To this point, it’s fair to say that Democratic policies focused on making the US an example to the world of a powerful nation, an agrarian and industrial powerhouse with plentiful resources and strong leadership. Republicans focused on making the US an example to the world of the power of virtue in governing by ending slavery and promoting citizen self-government. That was about to change radically.In a foremost example of nation-building, Otto von Bismarck was tasked with uniting the remaining independent German states under the Prussian rule of King Wilhelm I. War with France would be the inevitable outcome, for which the Prussians prepared. They handily defeated the French under Napoleon III, in half a year, by 1871, in the Franco-Prussian War. The rapid unification of Germany followed swiftly by the rapid crushing of France made Bismarck an instant celebrity, a prestige he swiftly capitalized on by simply stealing Marx’s social democracy and implementing it on behalf of now-Kaiser Wilhelm I.There it was—power politics with bold, decisive leadership and unification of the people based on “virtue” and “caring” (Bismarck himself more candidly referred to it as “bribing”). A new politics was born, one that had a siren call to American politicians in both parties. We’ll get back to that.The Role of Immigration and the Reaction against it.Take a look at the last two maps above. They graphically portray the immigrant imperative—we needed living markers to stake our claim to all that empty space out west, especially along the border with Canada, then under control of the UK, and Mexico to the south.There was also the fact that our native stock [read: Anglo-Saxon Protestants] in the East were no longer into heavy labor. They wore suits; they did not swing axes, picks or sledge hammers in forests, mines or foundries. We needed willing others for that work and lots of them. Besides our native stock now resided in tony communities unaffordable to immigrant stock. The need for mixing was minimal.To this point there was a strong sense that the frontier itself, as civilization advanced westward, changed immigrants into Americans. The labor, perspectives and privations required could transform anyone who lived it into a resourceful, enterprising American.But, in the 1870s, as Reconstruction ended and Bismarck created the first paternalistic welfare state (though “welfare” to refer to aid benefits did not emerge until 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt began trying to color aid benefits as being acceptable under our constitutional Welfare Clause), things started their rapid change. Former slaves began moving North looking for factory work. Same for German and Swedish farm laborers from the Northwest. “New” immigrants began piling up on the Eastern seaboard—Catholics and Orthodox from Southern Europe and Jews from Eastern Europe. Even those Chinese who had built the railroads out west were now boarding them to look for more lucrative employment in the East.As the North became an economic magnet, it freaked. All that Republican idealism and virtue that had demanded equality of all and an end to slavery suddenly clamored after progressivism—the new politics to install Bismarck’s (not Marx’s) version of social democracy to replace our founding charter here in the US. At the same time, the Conservative Democrats in the South, the avowed enemy of the Yankees only a generation before, likewise embraced Bismarckian social democracy.Progressives were soon attempting to use the very notion of social progress to stifle social progress… for many. Horace Mann, with a big assist later from John Dewey, peddled the model of school he borrowed whole from Prussia as “the solution to the immigrant problem.” For those new immigrants arriving with socialist ideas more along the lines of Marx than Bismarck who had no intention of moving inland, this school system would serve in place of the frontier to make its pupils good Americans. The Flexner Report and initiatives like it attempted to keep the professional “treehouse”—medicine, law and so forth—Anglo Saxon Protestant by removing the ladder for all others.Zoning laws, child labor laws, wage laws and so on were used, primarily at the state and local level, to thwart immigrant initiative. It was fine if immigrants wished to be laborers… in jobs whites did not care for. But they crossed a line when they tried to take good-paying jobs, and they especially crossed a line when they attempted to go into competition with whites in their own shops, bakeries, garment businesses and manufacturing concerns. The trouble was, the Supreme Court at the time was in the hands of old, idealistic Republican “beards.” To the lasting consternation of progressives, they knocked such anti-immigrant laws down one after another.The End of the FrontierAs I said above, the 1890 census proclaimed the end of the frontier. The census tabulations as they were released were being turned into social science by one Frederick Jackson Turner, who laid out his Frontier Thesis in 1893 with publication of his “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” which detailed the importance of the frontier in our history and the pluck, grit and other fine qualities life on the frontier gave rise to.That was the part of the essay that nostalgically captured attention at the time, but future historians (and Turner spawned many) focused more on his predictions. With the US east of the Mississippi on the verge of reaching the same population density as Europe, he predicted in “demographics = destiny” mode that we would become equally rigid, sclerotic and bureaucratic. One of his disciples was a foremost author of ours when I was at the University of Texas Press—Walter Prescott Webb, who penned The Great Frontier in 1951 (since picked up by another press).I read the book in 1974 at age 25, and it clouded my world. Webb pinned the negative events and ideologies of the first half of the twentieth century, especially the two great wars, on the loss of the frontier. He also predicted that such artifacts of our character that rose during the dynamic frontier era—liberalism, individualism, capitalism—would come under increasing political control and disappear, replaced by the apparatus of the bureaucratic state (in the European sense). The energy invested in opening up new land and resources would be channeled into squabbling over existing land and resources.The only chance to avoid this grim fate… a new frontier. But there was none, he pointed out in 1951. Of course, by the time I read the book, we’d put men on the moon. We were starting to explore underwater realms. We were looking at a new technological frontier, new ways to use diminishing resources. Soon we added another technological space and a frontier of the mind—cyberspace …and there we seesaw.Where to?Progressivism in the Progressive Era grew to encompass four-fifths of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who, in turn, represented four-fifths of our population—an almost two-thirds majority, a political force held in check only by the presence of old liberals on the Supreme Court. The excesses of the era, particularly the moralism of Prohibition and the many excesses of Woodrow Wilson, stunted progressivism.Two popular Republican liberals—Harding and Coolidge—led to the election of Herbert Hoover, mentioned above, a Republican, but a progressive. His bungling of the outset of the Great Depression led to the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose “New Deal” programs revived progressive politics in the US, but only to about half its former strength. The sense during and after World War II, that it was our liberal [true sense] and not progressive values triumphing, followed by the Cold War antagonism to anything socialist suppressed progressivism in the US for a generation.By 1968, with the northern and western wings of the Democratic Party liberal and allied with congressional Republicans to end racial segregation and Jim Crow once and for all. The trunk of the Democratic Party, the Conservative Democrats in the South, was cast adrift (and, no, they did not cross over to the Republican Party in more than trivial numbers). At the same time, a third wave of progressivism got its start in the student revolts of the late 60s. Only, with Conservative Democrat numbers no longer available, this wave would seldom number much more than one-sixth of the US population.Not only that, but the Supreme Court ruling on behalf of abortion being legal deprived that Democratic Party of probably more than 25-million people who would be voting age now and very likely lean Democrat, a number that would have resulted in a shift to the Democrats of probably more than 5-million votes.With the disastrous presidency of Richard Nixon, the last Republican progressive (especially with the recent demise of John McCain), progressivism is a thoroughly Democratic phenomenon, one that Democratic progressives trusted to the point of pushing more-moderate “Blue Dogs” out of the party, creating the disaster that befell them in 2016.Such losses of numbers have to be made up somehow, and the strategy of using identity politics to create voting coalitions among the very “deplorables” their grandparents and great-grandparents deplored stands, along with the about-face of northern liberals in the 1870s as one of the great ironies of American politics. But even that is not enough, and so the Democratic Party has been gung-ho pro-immigrant and, especially, pro-refugee (they can be fast-tracked to voting). Democrats especially concentrate on hard-to-assimilate populations on the assumption they will be beholden to the party for that much longer.With the 60s student-radical generation that revived progressivism shuffling off the stage, with the inherent difficulty of managing identity politics, with Republicans in charge and willing to sever the Democratic lifeline of wide-open immigration, and with the Obamas, now in their quest to become a “billion-dollar brand” as the Clintons did before them, exposing the protection of wealthy and powerful political elites at the heart of Bismarckian social democracy, there are growing signs that survival will depend on new thinking. And Millennials do not appear to be the ones to do that reality-based thinking.And so, thankfully, the saga of the closing of the old frontier does not seem to be playing out the way historians predicted.

Skipping to the end:Yes. The tax money that we all are required to pay to the Federal Government should be spent on programs whereby a bunch of educated intellectuals try to tell everyone else what they ought to think and how they ought to think. I say it this way specifically since I wish to address common criticisms on their own terms in this answer and not speak past them.The general concept of "public broadcasting" and the rationale supporting it is a very good one.On the children's education front, I have first-hand insight into the level of scrutiny that PBS-distributed children's programs are subjected to in terms of proving that they are effective at achieving pedagogical goals and in demonstrating positive impact. The bar is far higher than anything I've encountered in the private sector. They set the standard.There are certain "inefficiencies" (to put it mildly and politely) in the broadcast paradigm. That's true in for-profit television as well, but when cash is coming from government grants, foundation grants, and donations from "viewers like you," certain excesses are much less palatable. Although it will take awhile longer before anything matches the reach of broadcast television & radio, technological progress is leading us to better and more cost-efficient models of content distrubtion.I love many of the programs that are distributed by PBS (public TV) and Public Radio – and there are several where I get tears in my eyes. I've had to work really hard to keep this answer clean and not resort to appeal to emotion in lieu of making an argument. My "top ten" list is at the end.Now let's start at the beginning:I offered an answer to Obama-Romney Presidential Debates (October 2012): Is cutting federal funding to PBS an important spending cut? I addressed the question at a general level of American History and Politics of the United States of America – there are people who are still furious about the Barry Goldwater loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and despite the fact that CPB funding is a drop in the ocean when it comes to the Federal Budget, the fact that it's a highly visible Great Society initiative makes an attractive target. I didn't, however, say much about what I personally think. Then Rahul Shankar had to go and call me out. So here we are.In the context of the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election, I'm not at all beyond using pictures of sad-looking Sesame Street (creative franchise) characters to engage in blatant appeals to emotion to rhetorically club Mitt Romney (politician). Such things are completely within bounds of the "Pirate Code" for political discussion.http://www.quora.com/soapbox/319777http://www.quora.com/soapbox/A-Summary-of-the-Debate-for-Emily-Smith-Who-Didnt-WatchThat, however, is not what we're here to talk about. This is a policy conversation that needs to be had independent of that.We need to define a few things:Public Broadcasting: Television, radio, and other electronic media outlets whose primary mission is public service. It's a general concept.The Corporation for Public Broadcasting: A private corporation in the United States that is Congressionally chartered to distribute Federally budgeted funds to further public broadcasting. The CPB does not own stations and does not produce programs.PBS (public TV) - The Public Broadcasting Service: A non-profit American public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership over the network. PBS is a network that distributes content to its affiliates. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBSNPR (public radio) (National Public Radio), APM (American Public Media) and PRI (Public Radio International): Three networks of public radio stations that all produce and distribute public radio content to those stations. NPR is the largest network with 900 members, but prominent programs are distributed by the others. For example, This American Life is distributed by PRI and A Prairie Home Companion (radio) is distributed by APM.Affiliate: A local member of one of the networks that serves a specific market.Producer: Whoever it is that makes the content that gets distributed by the networks and broadcast by the affiliates. Sometimes the producer is one of the affiliate stations, sometimes it is the network, and sometimes it is an independent company – like Sesame Workshop (formerly known as the Children's Television Workshop), which is the producer of Sesame Street (creative franchise).We also need to address the elephant in the room...or whatever it is that Mr. Snuffleupagus is. THE PRODUCTION OF SESAME STREET IS SELF-SUPPORTING AND HAS BEEN SINCE 1978. The Federal Government DOES NOT pay for the production of Sesame Street. Big Bird is a red herring – except that he is yellow and not a fish. If you want to get technical, a small amount does flow from CPB via PBS to Sesame Workshop to cover content acquisition, but it is very little.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Street#Fundinghttp://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/04/sesame-workshop-big-bird-lives-on-we-receive-very-little-funding-from-pbs/http://www.forbes.com/sites/larissafaw/2012/10/04/romney-may-like-big-bird-too-bad-he-doesnt-know-sesame-doesnt-receive-pbs-funding/As a matter of fact, Sesame Street started airing in 1969. PBS did not start broadcasting until 1970. Sesame Street came first. Not every show is Sesame Street, though, and not every Producer is Sesame Workshop.(Amended 3/16/2017: In 2015, Sesame Workshop made a deal with HBO to have HBO fund all of its production and then provide to PBS at no charge after a nine month exclusivity window. See Sesame Street’ to Air First on HBO for Next 5 Seasons)Back to the core matter at hand: you want to know why public broadcasting should be funded by the Federal Government? Here's how the 90th Congress of the United States of America explained it:http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2011-title47/html/USCODE-2011-title47-chap5-subchapIII-partIV-subpartd-sec396.htm47 U.S.C. §396. Corporation for Public BroadcastingThe Congress hereby finds and declares thatit is in the public interest to encourage the growth and development of public radio and television broadcasting, including the use of such media for instructional, educational, and cultural purposes;it is in the public interest to encourage the growth and development of nonbroadcast telecommunications technologies for the delivery of public telecommunications services;expansion and development of public telecommunications and of diversity of its programming depend on freedom, imagination, and initiative on both local and national levels;the encouragement and support of public telecommunications, while matters of importance for private and local development, are also of appropriate and important concern to the Federal Government;it furthers the general welfare to encourage public telecommunications services which will be responsive to the interests of people both in particular localities and throughout the United States, which will constitute an expression of diversity and excellence, and which will constitute a source of alternative telecommunications services for all the citizens of the Nation;it is in the public interest to encourage the development of programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities;it is necessary and appropriate for the Federal Government to complement, assist, and support a national policy that will most effectively make public telecommunications services available to all citizens of the United States;public television and radio stations and public telecommunications services constitute valuable local community resources for utilizing electronic media to address national concerns and solve local problems through community programs and outreach programs;it is in the public interest for the Federal Government to ensure that all citizens of the United States have access to public telecommunications services through all appropriate available telecommunications distribution technologies; anda private corporation should be created to facilitate the development of public telecommunications and to afford maximum protection from extraneous interference and control.Our common interest – as manifested by 47 U.S.C. §396 – isn't about television or broadcasting. It's about education, and making educational and cultural materials accessible. Easy access to education, information, and instruction is both an imperative for employment & GDP growth and makes for a better society. Both capitalistic free markets and democratic governance break when people are ignorant and uninformed. Education is a matter of national importance and critical infrastructure that supports the economy. The American Dream is a hollow vision when U.S. Citizens aren't equipped to compete.(Frankly, if you spend any time at all on Quora and I have to convince you that you personally benefit from other people being educated, then what are you doing here?)People often raise issues on of the amount that government in the U.S. spends on Education proportional to other things. I have issues with the proportion we spend too:http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2012_US_totalA total of 15% of Government spending – when you factor in all levels – is directed to education. That's more then we spend on defense and second only to what we spend on health care. (Go ahead and read that again – especially my very good friends who lean left. We do invest more into education than we do on bombs.)We spend a total of $910.2 billion annually on Education and we're getting inadequate results out of just about everything...except Public Broadcasting. I have first-hand insight into the level of scrutiny and rigor that PBS' educational programming put through and that $445 million is an amazing deal when so much else isn't working. We're getting tremendous of reach and a lot of educational bang for the buck out of the five hundreths of a percent of all of the Education spending we do.Education is a topic I'm very passionate about and I could go on and on here. I've got another post I'm planning to write at some point, but the point I want to reinforce before I digress too far is that – despite rumors to the contrary – we throw a lot of money at this problem, and public broadcasting actually delivers. My argument is NOT that it's only whatever tiny percent of the Federal budget; my argument is that it's a tiny percent of what we collectively spend on Education and we get great value compared to the rest of what we're doing.I'll have a lot more to say on the general issue of education policy in the future, but now back to our regularly scheduled programming.The next piece we need to talk about is access.As I said before, Sesame Street will be fine – but that doesn't matter if people are unable to get to Sesame Street.Some people point to educational Cable channels (like those run by Discovery Inc. (Mass media company)) and to an emerging array of options on the Internet.Regarding cable:http://www.mediacenteronline.com/attatch/Cable10.indd.pdfRegarding the Internet:http://www.census.gov/hhes/computer/publications/2010.htmlUnlike either cable or Internet, Broadcast television has near universal penetration into American households. Over the course of a year, according to Nielsen (company), 91% of all U.S. television households - and 236 million people - watch PBS. The demographic breakdown of PBS' full-day audience reflects the overall U.S. population with respect to race/ethnicity, education and income. http://www.pbs.org/about/background/Via the PBS and Public Radio networks of broadcasters, that investment in educational (and informational and cultural) programming actually gets out there and makes it available.We need to address the perfectly valid questions about private foundations and individual donors filling the void.There's a bit of history that has mostly gotten overlooked in this debate over the years: the private sector actually created non-commercial public broadcasting when the Ford Foundation created the Educational Television and Radio Center (ETRC) in November 1952. That became the National Educational Television and Radio Center in 1958, and simply National Educational Television in 1963. In 1966, Ford Foundation began to withdraw its support. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Educational_Television.As that began to happen, the Carnegie Corporation of New York sponsored a 15 member panel to investigate the future of educational television. That panel – which included corporate leaders – recommended legislative action. http://www.current.org/wp-content/themes/current/archive-site/pbpb/carnegie/CarnegieISummary.html , http://cspcs.sanford.duke.edu/sites/default/files/descriptive/public_broadcasting.pdfPrivate foundations - e.g., Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Gates Foundation, Doris Duke, Melville Charitable Trust, and countless others – are often willing to offer varying degrees of support year over year, but being relied upon as a bedrock restricts them from undertaking other activities. It's not their cup of tea.(Besides, I can hear the conspiratorial complaints now about how a handfuls of private foundations are trying to influence our youth without any transparency or public accountability. We'll wind up having Congressional hearings over it all anyway.)As for individuals.... <sigh>We now head straight towards the heart of one of the core philosophical debates about American governance.236 million people watch PBS in a given year. The CPB appropriation for FY 2013 is $445 million. If that money were cut, every one of those people would have to contribute $1.88 annually to make up the shortfall.WAIT – WHAT??? THAT'S IT???That's correct. One dollar and eighty eight cents per person. Per year. (On top of what regular donors are already giving) If every viewer donated the amount of spare change that they might find lying in the street to their local PBS and Public Radio affiliate, the Federal funding issue goes away.There are two things though:They (we) do this.They (we) don't do this.91% of the 97.5% of U.S. households with television – or 88.75% of American households – watch PBS. And those households pay taxes to the Federal Government. (Go right ahead; I dare you to say "47%" to me.) The government takes a portion of those taxes and appropriates it to the CPB. The 12.5% of households that never ever watch PBS may be a bit irked by that. However, $10.8 billion has been put towards the Corporation for Public Broadcasting over the 43 years since 1969 and that has bought a lot of kids learning ABCs & 123s, a lot of people getting inspired about the Universe through shows like Cosmos & NOVA, a lot of people learning about America through Ken Burns (documentary filmmaker) specials, a lot of people appreciating fine cooking though Julia Child (TV personality), and lots and lots of happy little Bob Ross (artist) clouds. Let me know when the F-35 Lightning II – estimated lifetime cost = $1000 billion (otherwise known as $1 trillion) – finally goes into production and then we'll talk about how the Federal budget process works. That's a program we've been pouring money into and haven't seen anything out of it.Flipping to the next point: do you think all those pledge drives would be necessary if everyone who watched or listened was willing to chip in two bucks? People don't do it. People should but people don't.So do we pull the plug?.....Well?Here we begin to tread a bunch of slippery slope arguments. Some will say that if we expect everyone to simply do the things that they ought to do then we'll never live in a civilized society and we might as well give up on the whole grand experiment of American democracy. Others will say that by protecting people from the consequences of their actions or inactions that we're already on a slippery slope that jeopardizes our civilized society so we might as well give up on the whole experiment of American democracy.I don't want to go to either of those places. How then do we move forward when many of our great debates can be reduced to this elemental question?The best answer I have – which will be unsatisfying to those who crave certainty – is by taking it one step at a time. There are lines and boundaries that we all have to balance individually and all have to balance together. I understand that pragmatism can be really frustrating to people who are looking for ideological clarity and yearn to be in a perfect world that we don't live in. (If you take issue with that stance, please reread Oh, the Places You'll Go! before getting on my case.)In the world we live in, I think we need to spend collective funds trying to persuade individuals to eat more fruits & vegetables, to exercise more, and to embrace education – and part of that is making those "good" things more accessible and available to everyone. How do we determine what is good? There are people who spend time studying things that have positive effects and things that have adverse effects and we drag them before peer-review panels and Congressional subcommittees and we make them defend their conclusions. And then we put those studies out there and put them into action.There are two other things to consider here in terms of individual action:Big MacsThe murder of Kitty GenoveseFor the first of the two above items, I'm of course alluding to America's 30+% obesity rate. With all due respect to the fine folks at McDonald's (fast food chain) who are perfectly welcome to offer and promote their array of fast food products, there are plenty of examples where people don't choose what is "best" for them of their own accord and it has broader consequences for the rest of us. (It also doesn't help that moderation went out of style in this country in the early 1980s.) These individual choices – all combined – are a major contributor to skyrocketing health care costs in this country. It is not too different with education, thinking, and general media consumption. Absent active encouragement from social institutions of more constructive behaviors, a non-trivial percentage of the population will opt for the "lowest energy required at the lowest price presented" offering available to them. The Public Broadcasters are such institutions. As for "lowest energy required" offerings that come out of the private sector, I have two words: Jersey Shore. There may be 57 million channels these days, but there is still nothing on.An aside: I'd like to observe that churches can be great social institutions for encouraging more constructive behaviors; unfortunately, though, some churches and religious denominations are constructed on questionable foundations, too resistant to change, and/or are otherwise dangerously rigid. Some of those even have their own television networks. That's a conversation for another day, though.That brings me to my second point about individual action: there is a well-documented sociopsychological phenomenon known as Diffusion of Responsibility. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility Individuals tend to assume that either others are responsible for taking action or have already done so. The phenomenon tends to occur in groups of people above a certain critical size and when responsibility is not explicitly assigned – and is more likely to occur in conditions of anonymity. One of the most famous examples of this phenomenon was the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese; the crime had 38 witnesses and no one called the police because everyone assumed that someone else was taking care of it. When you expand that pool to a broadcast television audience and the level of urgency is that of a pledge drive, it's easy and low energy to think, "someone else has got it covered."If your reaction is, "if people won't pay then we shouldn't offer it," then please loop back to the bolded, "So do we pull the plug?" above.Moving on.You may be wondering about perceived bias.Which bias? The accusations of liberal bias or the accusations of conservative bias?http://mediamatters.org/research/2005/06/16/noonan-claimed-everyone-knows-pbs-has-liberal-b/133349http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/050623/23cpb.htmhttp://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2671The Public Broadcasters get hit from both sides of the political aisle, which I take as a sign of doing something right. The content that gets put out there is subject to the scrutiny of a partisan Congress – and for all of the threats, CPB funding keeps increasing over time – even through the early 2000s where the ostensibly conservative Republican Party controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. http://www.cpb.org/appropriation/history.html If you consider the fact of PBS' receiving tax dollars via the CPB an affront to Conservatism, there's not much I can do for you if you don't buy the case I've made thus far.I strongly believe that the benefits are well worth the costs, but...Read Marco North's answer. I come out in a different place in my conclusions, but I don't dispute his observations. The benefit of the broadcast medium is wide audience access and nearly 100% household reach. The downsides are high barriers to entry, high capital costs to maintain, and lots of middlemen in the operating and production structures.Yes. I am obliquely stating that there are some places where money hemmor - OH MY GOODNESS! Look overhead! Is that an F-35??? No - my bad. Just a pigeon. We still don't have any F-35's.The future heralds something different, though. When Internet household penetration gets to 95+% and approaches the reach of broadcast, the benefit of the expensive broadcast infrastructure goes away and we can focus entirely on promoting quality content which is being made in abundance online for a tiny fraction of the production cost. The future is Khan Academy, Coursera, MITx, Udacity, iTunes U, Podcasts, random how-to videos that individuals upload to YouTube, and expansive conversations about politics and public affairs on Q&A Websites.It is technically possible for many of the people reading this to shoot & edit a video on their smartphone and then post that video for public consumption. Once we get to the point where everyone has the ability to do that and access to what everyone else is doing, it's a whole different ballgame. We're not there yet (http://www.internetworldstats.com/am/us.htm), but the day is coming.CODA(If you don't know what that is, you should probably listen to a classical music program – perhaps on a public radio station.)This answer went through more drafts and course adjustments then pretty much anything else I've written here. Somewhat ironically, the biggest reasons that it was challenging for me to approach this subject in a balanced and reasonable fashion are a host of balanced and reasonable people that have entered my life via public broadcasting. Here's my top ten:#1: Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers)I count Fred Rogers as a personal hero. I LOVED Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood as a child and his attitude to creativity, make believe, and imagination. I went to college in Pittsburgh, PA – in Mr. Rogers REAL neighborhood. WQED Pittsburgh, where the show was filmed and produced, was between my apartment and the Carnegie Mellon campus. The School of Drama did the annual "Television Project" over at the station, and the set for King Friday's castle was along the wall. These days, I have a wooden "Neighborhood Trolley" sitting on my window sill as a constant reminder of that model of amazing human decency and sincere commitment to bettering the lives of the young.#2: LeVar BurtonSome people hold that LeVar Burton's most important cultural contribution is his role as Kunta Kinte in the Roots TV miniseries. Others will say that it was as Geordi LaForge in Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV series). Without a doubt in my mind, the most important work that Burton has done has been on Reading Rainbow (Children's Television Show). The show featured great books for children to read and children themselves reporting on their favorite books. (A child reporting on Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport is etched in my own childhood memory.) These days he's continuing the work in the form of an iPad app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reading-rainbow/id512350210?mt=8#3 Jim HensonC'mon. You KNEW he was going to be on this list.#4: Neil deGrasse Tyson (astronomer)And you had to guess that he was going to be on this list too. Following in the footsteps of people like, Don "Mr. Wizard" Herbert, Bill Nye, and most importantly his mentor Carl Sagan, Tyson is currently America's foremost voice for Science. And he makes it AWESOME.#5: Sylvia Poggioli#6: Lourdes Garcia-NavarroI'm pairing #5 and #6 together. I listen to NPR most of the time when I'm driving and part of the reason for that is because actual Journalism occurs. The foreign correspondents on NPR – most notably Poggioli and Garcia-Navarro – provide what I hold to be the best coverage and insight into what's going on in the broader world. I'm incredibly grateful for their work and the stories they bring home.#7: Terry GrossFresh Air is what an interview show ought to be. Terry can sit for an hour with just about anyone and plumb the depths of their life story, interests, and opinions. Interview "segments" almost anywhere else usually deliver little except talking points or a plug for a new book or movie. Terry Gross gets their story told. Amongst my personal favorites are her two interviews of Tom Waits – where she's practically giddy: http://www.npr.org/2011/03/04/134236977/tom-waits-a-raspy-voice-heads-to-the-hall-of-fame , http://www.npr.org/2011/10/31/141657227/tom-waits-the-fresh-air-interview#8: Louis RukeyserMy appreciation of Rukeyser is mostly nostalgic, and a large reason that he makes this list now is because of the current ridiculous state of what passes for financial reporting. Remember when this person, who exuded sober discipline and responsibility – at least in the mind of an elementary school kid who left the TV on after kids programming was over – was a public face of Wall Street and Investing?#9: Kai RyssdalWith my #8 in mind, amongst the people still doing a good job with making business and financial news both insightful and interesting is American Public Media's Ryssdal. When I'm working on site somewhere, Marketplace is usually what I listen to during my evening commute. Ryssdal does a great job with feature stories and connecting the dots of the day's events to market responses.#10: Tom & Ray Magliozzi (Click & Clack, the Car Talk (talk show) guys)I close my personal top ten with two guys who would probably take offense at being called "balanced and reasonable." They're retiring now after 35 years on the radio. C'mon – admit it. You know you love 'em. And you know you've learned from 'em too.Honorable mentions: Ira Glass (who I imagine is way up on other people's lists), Peter Sagal & The "Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me!" Cast, The Radiolab Team, and Garrison Keillor.And that, as they say, is a wrap.

There aren’t term limits for two major reasons.The first, and perhaps most significant, is that people in power rarely volunteer to limit the duration of their power in the absence of overwhelming and unrelenting popular demand. Over 90 percent of the U.S. House and around 80 percent of the U.S. Senate enjoys near-guaranteed re-election chances in their current, gerrymandered and highly politicized jurisdictions. Extremely few of them are keen to cut their potentially decades-spanning careers by cutting their terms of service.In the states where there are term limits for legislators, most of those resulted from popular referendums rather than legislatures acting of their own free will. Indeed, the cases of Idaho and Utah are telling about legislators’ resistance to term limits in the absence of people’s direct engagement. In Idaho, voters approved term limits by popular referendum (twice), and the term limits were upheld as constitutional by the Idaho Supreme Court; however, the legislature went ahead and overturned the law. In Utah, the legislature established term limits, but then overturned that law before it was to take effect.However, unless the states call for a Constitutional Convention for the purposes of imposing term limits on Congress, there is no like-mechanism to translate “the people’s will” on the Constitution in the absence of Congress doing it themselves. On that point, calling for a Constitutional Convention requires two-thirds of the states to petition Congress for a Convention, and currently less than one-third have term limits for their own legislators; and because it would follow that imposing term limits on Congress would result in term limits being imposed on state legislators, it’s unlikely that the non-term-limited state legislatures would be willing to sign up to a Convention for that purpose – much less be part of the three-fourths of states needed to ratify the amendment.Now, even though polls over the last decade have shown a near-consistent three-fourths of Americans in favor of term limits, two decades of evidence shows that Congress is less persuaded by the national opinion than by the opinion of America’s moneyed elites. A study by Princeton researchers found a markedly high correlation between what business elites and interest groups want and what Congress does, and almost no correlation between what the American people want and Congressional action. From the study:Even in a bivariate, descriptive sense, our evidence indicates that the responsiveness of the U.S. political system when the general public wants government action is severely limited. Because of the impediments to majority rule that were deliberately built into the U.S. political system—federalism, separation of powers, bicameralism—together with further impediments due to anti-majoritarian congressional rules and procedures, the system has a substantial status quo bias. Thus when popular majorities favor the status quo, opposing a given policy change, they are likely to get their way; but when a majority—even a very large majority—of the public favors change, it is not likely to get what it wants. In our 1,779 policy cases, narrow pro-change majorities of the public got the policy changes they wanted only about 30 percent of the time. More strikingly, even overwhelmingly large pro-change majorities, with 80 percent of the public favoring a policy change, got that change only about 43 percent of the time. . . .When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.Here’s a helpful but depressing video that describes the study’s broad findings at greater length:How does that play into term limits?Term limits introduce volatility to legislatures by pushing out incumbents (duh), with the intent being to stop politicians from becoming too comfortable in their positions and cozy with special interests (more on that in point two). But special interest groups and business elites *want* to be cozy with legislators, because that way they can be more safely assured of favorable business conditions in which to grow their profits. If legislative bodies keep turning over, the wealthy and their special interests have to work harder – and routinely – to find and build allies to knock back harmful proposals. Given that, they will always work against term limits, and their career-minded allies in legislatures won’t make them work too hard, 75 percent of the American people be damned.That leads into the next major reason why we don’t have term limits for legislators: They’re a terrible anti-corruption measure that doesn’t actually lead to any less corruption and, instead, degrades the quality of legislative proceedings such that special interests can entrench themselves in bureaucracies with little threat of oversight.Copying heavily from my answer to, “Is there any evidence that term limits for elected officials help improve the government?”:None of the alleged benefits of term limits – improving legislative efficacy, reducing corruption, encouraging younger legislators to replace aging incumbents, and broadly diversifying legislative bodies – have been observed in any state with term limits. The popular appeal of term limits is based solely on voters’ incorrect beliefs that “career politicians” become more and more detached from their constituencies as their careers advance, but this is not based in any evidence.The impact of term limits has been studied at several points. In 2006, a report on a survey of state legislatures conducted at two points in 1995 and 2002 – a period during which most term limits came into effect – found:Virtually no effect on the types of people elected to office. . . . Once we control for characteristics of their districts and legislatures, we find no systemic differences between legislators from [term-limited] and [non-term-limited] states, whether [“old timers”] or [“newcomers”]. . . .Term-limited legislators become less beholden to the constituents in their geographical districts and more attentive to other concerns. . . . Legislators in adopted term-limit states report spending less time keeping in touch with constituents than do those in non-term-limit states. . . . The difference in time devoted to constituents is about twice as large [between term-limit and non-term-limit] states. . . . Term-limited legislators report spending far less time than those on non-term-limit states securing government money and projects for their districts.A study published in 2010 found that the oversight capacity of term-limited legislatures was diminished:[M]onitoring state agencies was a low priority . . . and it dropped even lower after term limits were implemented. More specifically, we found some institutional roles to be associated with legislators placing a higher priority on monitoring, especially before term limits, whereas some individual motives were associated with a lower priority, especially after term limits. Legislators exhibited more confusion about the process of monitoring after term limits.And moving past legislatures, a 2011 study found that, among governors:Holding tenure in office constant, differences in performance by reelection-eligible and term-limited incumbents identify an accountability effect: reelection-eligible governors have greater incentives to exert costly effort on behalf of voters. Holding term-limit status constant, differences in performance by incumbents in different terms identify a competence effect: later-term incumbents are more likely to be competent both because they have survived reelection and because they have experience in office. We show that economic growth is higher and taxes, spending, and borrowing costs are lower under reelection-eligible incumbents than under term-limited incumbents, and under reelected incumbents than under first-term incumbents.All of this should be intuitive. There is zero incentive for term-limted legislators to put in any significant effort to address problems that may well exceed their time in office. In the meantime, non-elected bureaucrats and lobbyists can simply wait out or ignore troublesome, term-limited legislators, having no real expectation of coherent, consistent long-term oversight of their activities.We then observe novice legislators either becoming more beholden to the non-elected yet more permanent political actors in navigating their legislative obligations, or more deeply reliant on their own ideological leanings. In either case, far from improving legislative bodies, term limits weaken legislators’ institutional knowledge and desire to form lasting partnerships with colleagues to solve long-term problems in a deliberative way.In essence, all term limits do is inspire ambitious politicians to rocket up the chain of leadership within the legislature - which they poorly understand - as quickly as possible in order to be in a position to seek higher, preferably non-term-limited office. It has turned career politicians from beasts of incumbency to beasts of naked ambition, even more deaf to the needs or wants of their constituents.So why don’t we have term limits for Congress? Mostly because Congress and our other elected legislators and their financial backers have zero interest in short-terming their career potential and introducing volatility into the system of government. And their naked self-interests aside, their preferences - not the American people’s - are supported by decades of evidence showing that term limits are, generally, a bad idea when actually executed.The concept of term limits is proof that just because a large majority of people want something doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea. It’s the lazy voter’s preference to paying attention to what their legislators are doing and doing the hard work of voting out entrenched, badly performing incumbents.