Well, you know.. I don't think federal funding to "faith based initiatives" is particularly useful either. How about this, when the right stops funneling money into thousands of instances of crap they think is more important than secular institutions, and which only helps promote **their** agendas, which currently are decreased health care, denial of information about sex education, various "just say no" BS ideas, etc., which I can guarantee you most of these initiatives do or they wouldn't get the money, then we will stop screaming about the **one** thing they fund that isn't on their side. How about that?

The feds fund lots of stuff. What gets a priorority is always political. And unfortunately for the people on "both" sides of the argument, 90% of it wouldn't exist if the government cut funding off at the knees to those things, and just said, "Ok, we will keep our hands off, but you have to pay for it." Right now, I am way more worried about the shit they think "is" important to fund than if they are going to fund PBS, which they babble about being too fracking elitist and leftist with the same stupid assinine ferver that the left uses to complain about the kind of crap CNN and Fox put out. Or do you honestly think its not a tad disengenuous for CNN, to use an example, to host a show about, "Why atheists are hated so much", which initialy only had right wing religious preachers on it, but got hurriedly re-taped to include Richard Dawkins, and then only because some stupid celebrity happened to die conveniently when they needed to back peddle?

There is a bias. Usually its toward sensationalism. Sometimes its towards, "defense of what even nuts are in charge, because they might get pissed off and pass laws we don't like if we pee in their coffee." Almost no one is "honest" about it. And some are so dishonest that they shout down or intentionally pick opponents that are bad at defending there side, so as to make it more likely that the idiots babbling about the truth of the prevailing political bias in the country itself will "win" in the argument.

Even the honest people, from 20+ years ago in the news, will tell you that the news as it is today is vacuous compared to the integrity it once had. And I would think they matter a bit more than the opinion of people that basically say, "Well, it supports what I want to think is true about X, so it must be honest, careful in collecting its information and as factual and truthful as possible."

Yeah, I think Fox sucks. So do all the rest of them. PBS does too some times. I wish they would stick with British comedies and some other things, but they also show "local" stuff that doesn't get onto the TV otherwise, because the people making that can't afford it. Do what I do, watch the stuff that's worth it, and turn the damn TV off when something comes on that you don't like. Grumbling over "if" it deserves federal funding opens a can of worms I seriously doubt you really want to deal with, because I am sure I could find a whole list of stuff far more useless, which you would blindly agree to "keep" funding using the same federal money.