What PBS Means to Me
My thoughts on a vital service
If you haven’t heard, the non-profit is on the verge of losing government funding after the Senate voted to “claw back $9bn Congress had previously approved for foreign aid programs and public broadcasting.” Only $1.1 billion of that money was budgeted for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS. If you are wondering about the audience that PBS reaches, I’ll let the foundation speak for itself (as of February 2024):
Each month, more than 36 million people watch their local PBS stations, more than 16 million viewers watch video on PBS’s site and apps, and over 53 million fans enjoy PBS Digital Studios and other content on YouTube.
Over the course of a year, 58% of all U.S. television households – more than 130 million people – watch PBS via traditional television.
PBS KIDS averages 15.5 million monthly users and 345 million monthly streams across PBS KIDS’ digital platforms.
PBS stations reach more children and more parents of young children than any of the children’s TV networks.
PBS and its member stations are America’s undisputed home for documentary storytelling. During the 2022-2023 season, PBS offered over 200 hours of new documentary content, seen by more than 50 million people.
PBS and its member stations are helping to keep the arts alive today and for generations to come. During the 2022-2023 season, PBS offered more than 200 hours of new arts and cultural programming, seen by 55 million people.
While financial support of PBS and our member stations from the federal government is critically important, those monies represent about 15% of our annual revenues, underscoring the vital need for philanthropy to fulfill our mission to serve the American public.
For 21 consecutive years, a national study has rated PBS as the most-trusted institution in America. When asked which networks they trust most when it comes to news and public affairs programming, respondents ranked PBS #1, ahead of the major broadcast and cable news networks.
Needless to say, PBS is a vital resource for many families in the United States.
PBS Has Helped My Family
When you have a toddler, it’s a struggle to find quality television (Whether or not children that age should be watching television at all is another conversation I’m not entertaining right now).
Certainly, Bluey has been a godsend with its quality, but few children's shows are created with the same care. Furthermore, Bluey is tied to a monthly subscription at Disney+. There are other shows I’d probably recommend for that age group— Tumble Leaf (Amazon Prime Video), Stillwater (Apple TV+), Puffin Rock (Netflix), etc. You certainly don’t want to be in the weeds with the slop fest that is Cocomelon/Little Angel (both currently on Netflix). But the fact remains that a lot of these shows are tied to subscriptions.
PBS Kids is free.
There’s the PBS Kids programming block that is shown on many PBS stations, with shows like Alma’s Way, Elinor Wonders Why, Molly of Denali, Rosie’s Rules, Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum, and more. You’ll find episodes of shows like Daniel Tiger and Sesame Street there as well. If you can access the PBS Kids app, you can stream many of these shows directly from your TV, phone, or tablet for free. My child particularly enjoyed the show Hero Elementary, which was one of the few superhero shows they could watch at that age. There’s a certain comfort that comes from letting a child watch a program and not being frightened about the content they’ll be shown. So many children are finding videos through services like YouTube, being shown inappropriate messages, or simply being advertised to. Even the Kids section of YouTube can only be curated by algorithms so much.
Is PBS Kids perfect? No, of course not. There are some shows featured that get on my nerves (here’s looking at you, Pinkalicious & Peterrific), but for the most part, I’ve enjoyed their content, and I’ll be disappointed if the free access goes away. For a while, my family was using it so much that we were even paying for access to the PBS library (through Amazon Prime Video) so we could access the entire backlog of episodes at any time. While I could pay for the service, I realise there are a lot of communities that don’t have the same privilege that I do and won’t be able to access the content should it go behind a paywall.
My Connection to PBS
While I was growing up with children’s television, my great aunt was making it better for me. Peggy Charren was the founder of Action for Children’s Television (ACT), a national child advocacy organization. In 1995, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work.
When she started her work in the late 1960s, she noticed that the Saturday-morning cartoons were filled with violence. ACT pressured networks to remove those shows and replace them with lighter programs like Scooby-Doo. In the 1970s, ACT petitioned the FCC to ban advertising from children’s programming. Can you imagine if that worked? Shows that Hasbro put out in the 80s, like G.I. Joe and Transformers, were essentially advertisements. And shows like Paw Patrol and Gabby’s Dollhouse nowadays certainly sell their fair share of merchandise.
I imagine my great aunt would be devastated to learn about the defunding of public television if she were still here today. After she learned that the onslaught of advertising in traditional programming wasn’t going away, she turned toward making PBS better. In an obituary posted in Variety in 2015, Brian Lowry wrote that “Perhaps that’s why she turned much of her attention to lobbying for PBS, seeing public television as a lifeline to quality children’s fare – and particularly as a source to serve the interests of poorer kids, who didn’t share the same number of viewing options.”
If you’d like to hear my great aunt on WBUR, you can listen to this archived radio show from February 27th, 2003, when she spoke about the late Fred Rogers. Her segment starts about 25 minutes into the episode. She talks briefly about the rhythm of television and how Fred Rogers took things slowly. That’s also a trend with some of the shows I mentioned above— slower, quieter content that doesn’t just bombard the senses.
Although I didn’t spend a lot of time with my great aunt, I can’t help but be inspired by her. I hope children still get to watch quality television shows (mine included) with the defunding of NPR and PBS. Because kids don’t need constant advertisements, they need an opportunity to learn.
Great article about Great Aunt Peggy and her contribution to keeping Children’s tv educational and not commercialized PBS is a great learning channel and does rely on donations too. People need to step up and protect the ones who can’t protect themselves