A new academic paper defending PBS as trustworthy, “An island of trust: public broadcasting in the United States,” is making the public media rounds, and the three academics who authored it for the Journal of Communication penned a related explainer op-ed for Current, a sort of trade publication for public media: “Study shows Americans trust PBS precisely because it’s publicly funded.”
The left-leaning Harvard-affiliated Nieman Journalism Lab found the piece so vital that it quickly reprinted it. with the tag “This opinion piece was first published at Current, a news site that covers the world of public media intensely. It’s essential reading for this season of attacks.”
The Nieman Lab version is illustrated with Lego versions of Sesame Street characters, which is an ironic acknowledgement that such purported jewels in public television’s sacred crown can fund themselves via product licensing without having to dip into the public treasury.
After noting Trump’s executive order defunding PBS and NPR, the authors claimed that the public media congressional hearings in March “followed in the footsteps of a longer history of Republican criticism of U.S. public media’s alleged left-leaning bias and “woke” agenda, the latter often illustrated through reference to children’s programming like Sesame Street.”
While anti-PBS voices have “ideologically inspired beliefs,” normal Americans trust PBS “immensely.”
Contrary to these ideologically inspired beliefs, our empirical research, recently published in the Journal of Communication -- the flagship journal of the communication studies discipline -- finds that Americans from across the political spectrum do not subscribe to the notion of a biased PBS. More than this, we found that those who watch PBS trust it immensely for several complementary reasons.
So “those who watch PBS” trust it. Doesn’t that sound redundant? Liberals love using polls -- and NOT content analysis -- to make the case that PBS is somehow fair and balanced.
The paper found three reasons to trust PBS, including the fact that “viewers say PBS is an excellent value for public dollars" and that "viewers trust PBS because of its content, notably news and children’s programming." Included in that last point was the finding that “PBS audiences evaluate its news as unbiased.” Wouldn't you like to meet these people?
The third point involved “nostalgia” around PBS’s educational programming. “Many other respondents noted that Mister Rogers was a major reason they trust PBS, a phenomenon that we dubbed ‘the Mister Rogers Effect.’”
(Nostalgia indeed: The last episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired in 2001.)
But the trio’s patina of political objectivity began to chip, as a standard liberal argument surfaced.
Given that the U.S. spends only $1.40 per capita on public media, compared to over $100 per capita in the U.K. and Norway and compared to, for example, the $849 billion spent on the military (almost $2,700 per capita), the high levels of trust in PBS from across the political spectrum suggests a tremendous value for very little money.
The article concluded by calling PBS “a vital component of our democracy.” But Robby Soave at Reason magazine dispatched the findings quickly and neatly under the pungent headline "If Viewers Love PBS So Much, Let Them Pay for It."
One issue: The study measured trust in PBS, not among all Americans, but among viewers of PBS. That was the sample: survey respondents who themselves watch PBS. This is hardly a surprising finding -- and is not whatsoever grounds for public funding. Regular viewers of Fox News, for instance, place very high levels of trust in Fox News. Does that mean all Americans do? Does it mean that Fox News should receive public funding? One doubts that the researchers would agree with such an argument….
