And the Good News Keeps Coming

The CPB fell on its own pride (shocking, right?). They could have existed longer and off the fed teat had they simply embraced even a modicum of advertising. Instead, they insisted on the subsidies and their haughtiness about how they were different than other media organizations. Good day to them.

Every day on which a liberal progressive “news” outlet shuts down is a good day.

“Don’t fund your enemies” is a satisfactory principle. A more generic one is that the distribution of tax revenue to the private sector should be limited to the following circumstances: (1) compensation in accordance with contracts awarded consequent to the submission of sealed bids; (2) intermediated through members of the public, who have elected to purchase goods and / or services from a private provider making use of vouchers or insurance programs financed by the government; (3) disaster relief, which may mean indemnities paid to the private body for their losses or emergency financing to an actual relief service provider. Roughly the same principles should apply in re autonomous government corporations like state colleges.
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CPB is a grant distributor, not a content creator. They have no money to distribute, so bye bye.
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The stations, who are the ones doing the fundraising, may continue. They produce some local programming, purchase programming from a menu of stations which produce for syndication (e.g. WGBH in Boston and WNET in New York), purchase from British vendors (of which London Weekend Television was a common source). They’ve just lost a quarter of their revenue stream. They’re going to have to make up revenue or reduce costs if they’re to survive. Enhanced fundraising from local households, grants from various philanthropic bodies and state colleges, grants from local government, grants from state government are options. Local stations have to pay fees to PBS and to NPR if they want to continue receiving programming distributed through that channel. Unless I’m mistaken, there’s a baseline charge and then you purchase programming a la carte. NPR and PBS will be in crisis because some stations will leave the networks and others reduce the number of programs to which they subscribe.
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IMO, after the networks were established and a critical mass of households could receive UHF broadcasts of similar quality to VHF broadcasts (i.e around 1978), it was time to shut down the federal grant source and tell the stations to hit up state and county governments. Around about 1986, the majority of households had cable television which could serve niche audiences and it was also clear that NPR’s public affairs programming was regulated by gliberal and leftoid narratives. The justification for public funding dissipated around that time.
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My wager is that higher education will pick up the slack, but who knows?