Negative comments about PBS programming

I doubt seriously that negative comments about PBS programming and/or its purported bias are submitted by regular viewers, but rather are submitted as part of a campaign to defund public broadcasting waged by political factions that live in a “post reality” world in which ideology trumps, so to speak, a genuine concern for a reliable picture of the world as it is instead of how they have been led to believe it should be. What these commentators have in common is an unwillingness to accept that political reality is under no obligation to be either reassuring or pleasant. In my judgment, based on four decades of teaching and researching mass media, public broadcasting (whether television or radio) is to a democracy as a clean water and good air quality are to a healthy community.