Editorial: Senator Kyl, Take the Lead on De-Funding PBS

The American Family Association (AFA) just announced the results of an interesting poll run on its website. In fact, the results are astounding.

Asking the question, “Should taxpayers be forced to give nearly a half-billion dollars a year to support PBS?”, AFA received more than 80,000 votes. No less than 78,733 chose “No,” compared to just 2,180 “Yes” votes.

And that brings the subject round to U.S. Senator Jon Kyl, the conservative Republican of Arizona. A few years ago, in the late 1990s, I wrote a letter to Senator Kyl suggesting that Congress pull the plug on federal funding of PBS, the liberally-slanted Public Broadcast System.

I received a phone call from an aid of Senator Kyl’s. He told me that Senator Kyl definitely agrees with the sentiment that PBS should not receive any federal funding. However, the aid said, Senator Kyl felt that there was insufficient support in Congress at that time to withhold PBS funding from the federal budget.

This begs the question: do we want lawmakers who wait for a groundswell of congressional support before following the overwhelming majority of citizen sentiment? Or, do we want our lawmakers to start the ball rolling and build consensus so that eventually the will of the people is honored?

The Arizona Conservative believes the latter. We’d like to see Senator Kyl show leadership in the area of de-funding PBS. The sooner, the better. There is no point in waiting. The Washington Post and New York Times and Senator Kennedy will condemn the action, but so what? Who cares what they think. Arizona conservatives – Senator Kyl’s base – couldn’t give a hoot what those liberal icons say or think.

The time is way past due to pull the plug on PBS, merely a pawn for the liberals. Conservatives control both houses of the legislative branch, as well as the executive branch of the federal government. The power is there to do the right thing, and the people favor it.

The coming two-year congressional term presents the greatest chance we’ve had to take PBS off the federal gravy train – where it never belonged in the first place.

Dennis Durband