Has PBS Been Defunded?
It has not! The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been defunded by the federal government. In its quest to suppress any narrative except the one it prefers, it moved to remove educational television from people’s screens in an attempt to keep us uninformed.
National Public Television is alive and well, although because of the way the media and social media twist the narrative, it appears that public television is going away; but nothing could be further from the truth.
Has this new narrative made it more difficult for educational programming like mine to raise the funds we need to produce? It has. We spend a lot of time explaining that the loss of federal dollars (while a small percentage of public television’s total budget) hit many stations hard, especially small rural stations, public television marches on.
We are all worried for the future; for our children and their children and what sort of world we are leaving them. We are all looking for ways to step lighter on our planet. We all need strength and wellness to cope with these interesting times in which we live. And we need access to good, solid information to do that.
Investing in the production of Christina Cooks is what I like to call funding the biggest classroom in the world. When Robert and I began this project in 1997, we had options. We could have gone the route of commercial television and made more money, sat back and lived easily on those profits. Instead, we decided to stay true to our mission of education on national public television: to help people to have a healthier relationship with food; to provide information that helps people to make the healthiest choices they can and to tread lighter on the planet by way of those choices.
Purely educational (even though I can be funny sometimes), we use our cooking show as the vehicle that draws people in and gets them hooked. Gorgeous food will do that.
Do we help people? I don’t know; you’d have to ask the thousands of people who email us or some of the millions viewers who tune in faithfully each week to discover the impact of food on wellness and how they can use food to live well.
As I planned this ask, I hadn’t wanted to be political, but the administration in power has left all of us who work in public television no choice. We can’t speak about the challenges we face; the misinformation, the maligning of what public television does and is, without politics. It’s politics that have created this situation. And it’s not just this administration. The conservative right has pushed to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for decades. They finally succeeded with this, the most anti-education federal government in my memory.
It’s not news that to produce for public television means raising all of your production budget from outside sources; sponsors and donors. Of course, it also means that we control the message; no one tells me what I can and can’t say on the show. No one can cancel me.
But television is an expensive proposition; I’m not going to lie. It’s worth it, but we need your support. Hard stop!
The work I do is important; not just to me, but to people who want to live better and healthier lives.
I’ll end by saying that I hope you see the value in what I do as much as I do. Not reliant on sponsors who might demand that I compromise what I believe or whose product I must endorse; I prefer to rely on the people who watch the show; who support my mission; who wish for a better future through education.
Please donate here*
In peace and gratitude,
Christina
*Please also note, we are now using Zeffy, a totally secure nonprofit payment platform for our donations. This saves us having to pay fees on your donation.
