I will be willing to forgive President Bush many things if he stands firm on cutting the budget for public broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Public media is maddening for all sorts of reasons: The first is that I’m in the media business and the government is subsidizing my competition. The second is that the public radio and public television clans are sanctimonious and dishonest: When it’s fundraising time–or when somebody complains about government subsidies for broadcasts that are leftist, trivial, or illiterate–the PBSers and NPRers go on and on about how they get only nominal, practically symbolic, money from the government. But when the government wants to cut those nominal funds, the PBSers start wailing a whole Wagner opera of angst and alarm.

I also reject that idea that a free and liberal society should have any government-sponsored media.

And last, but certainly not least, I am curious as to whether Garrison Keillor’s cornball parade of banjo orchestras and flatulence jokes would actually survive in the market.

There’s a PBS slogan–”If PBS doesn’t do it, who will?”–and I’d like to find out the answer to that question.