Columnist George Will eloquently argues for the obvious today: “In today’s 500-channel environment, public television is a preposterous relic.” Read the whole thing. I would only quibble with his conclusion, which talks about “the 15 percent of its revenue it gets from government.” PBS gets about 15 percent of its revenues from the federal government, but another 30 percent or more from state and local governments. It’s more “public” than PBS lets on.

Conservatives marched up this hill with passion in 1995 and 1996, charging that PBS was irrelevant and counting on Newt Gingrich’s pledge to zero it out. The case Will makes (and the most compelling one he doesn’t flesh out, that the federal government shouldn’t be in the business of aiding the Democrats with 60-minute liberal commercials, er, documentaries) is more relevant today than ever. But the political reality is that for conservative legislators, cutting PBS is a high-pain, low-gain proposition. Its budget number is way smaller than the heat generated by the liberal lobbies that you’re against Big Bird, “Baseball,” and education and sophistication in general.

So I confess I’m completely puzzled with what has happened here: the New York Times and other liberal organs seem to be the ones starting the fight for PBS privatization. I’m guessing they want to add this to their theoretical playhouse to go with Armstrong Williams and Gannon-Guckert: once again, the conservatives want to fund only the journalists that support them. Suffice it to say that by this logic, Bill Moyers and Jim Lehrer and Nina Totenberg make Armstrong Williams look like a piker.