THE GOP IS PICKING ANOTHER FIGHT WITH BIG BIRD

Big Bird is a large target for the GOP.

Rochester, N.Y.-- The budget fight in Congress is really just beginning and it's going to be a hair-raiser for independent thinkers. Republicans are claiming they'll reduce spending or shut the government down if they don't get their way. The temporary budget agreement reached Wednesday is for only two weeks, so a new shutdown threat arrives March 18.  They're willing to put even more Americans jobs on the line-- just so the GOP can score political points, hold Obama hostage and win the presidency at all costs in 2012.

What Republicans don't understand is if right-minded Americans stand together, we'll win this fight.

That's why local CSEA members are demanding a federal budget that has no cuts to vital programs, invests in jobs, and makes the rich and corporations pay their fair share.

And when we talk about vital programs, we're not just referring to Social Security, Medicare, or the many aspects of our social safety net that keep the struggling middle class and poor Americans from poverty and homelessness. We're also talking about education, the Environmental Protection Agency, and of course, NPR and PBS.

House Republicans, when deciding how they want to fund the government for the remainder of the fiscal year, immediately attacked NPR and PBS. They wanted to cut all funding -- that's right, all of it -- for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the nonprofit responsible for funding public media including NPR, PBS, Pacifica and more.

It would be a tremendous blow to the entire public interest media sector if they ever get their way.

Polls show voters support public broadcasting

Respondents to a national survey by a pair of bipartisan polling firms indicates 69 percent opposition to proposals to cut government funding of public broadcasting.  Read the PBS press release here.

Polls by Hart Research and American Viewpoint indicated 83 percent of Democrats, 69 percent of independents and 56 percent of Republicans oppose measures to eliminate funding.

More than two thirds of voters said Congressional budget cutters should "find other places in the budget to save money."

The poll was conducted Feb. 11-13 of a representative cross section of 804 registered voters. The survey has a 3.5 percent plus or minus margin of error.

The House approved a bill Feb. 19 that would cut all financing for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the year 2013.

"In an era in which reducing the budget deficit is a high priority, the public is not willing to 'cut for cutting's sake,'" said Peter D. Hart of Hart Research, a Democratic polling firm.

House Republicans disingenuously claimed that they needed to cut funding for public media because of budgetary constraints. But what they failed to highlight is that national public broadcasting is remarkably cost effective, providing local news and information, free of charge, for millions of viewers while only receiving about .0001% of the federal budget.

More to the point, it's nearly impossible to put a price tag on the actual value of public broadcasting and our local PBS affilitate, WXXI.  We cannot allow congressional Republicans to destroy public media. We fully expect Congress to fully fund NPR and defend public service media.

Public media is one of the last bastions against the corporate media, where the combination of consolidation and profit motive has long since shifted the focus to infotainment rather than substantive news. In many rural and less affluent communities, broadcasters rely on federal funding to provide the only available high-quality news and public affairs programming.

Without public media, corporate media monopolies would increase their already large control of what we see on television, hear on the radio or read in the newspaper.

The increased accumulation and consolidation of corporate power is a threat to our democracy. And nowhere is this more evident than in our media. It's important that we stand up to stop this today. America simply cannot afford to lose what public media brings to the table.

Conservatives have longed for any opportunity to defund NPR, PBS and other public media, and now it looks like they may finally get their wish -- unless we stop them.  Can you rise to the challenge?