In the coming days, our U.S. senators, Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno, will be voting whether or not to kill funding for PBS and NPR.
If you grew up like me, watching Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and The Electric Company; if you deepened your love of American history with documentary series like Ken Burns’ The Civil War and Eyes on the Prize; if you learned about homeownership and repair from shows like This Old House and American Woodshop; if you stay engaged in the world with WYSO and NPR’s thoughtful, balanced reporting; then please take a moment to take action, and call senators Husted and Moreno to voice your feelings.
I’ll never forget when Julia Reichert and I were attending a cancer conference, a few years after our film “A Lion in the House” aired on PBS. We were in a lunch line and Julia started chatting with a young Black doctor ahead of her in line.
Pretty soon he asked her what we were doing at a medical conference, and she said we’d made a film about kids fighting cancer, called “A Lion in the House.” He stopped her and said “You made that film?!” And he went on to say that “Lion” is the reason he became a doctor, after seeing how kids of color fighting cancer so rarely had oncologists that looked like them. He told us that film changed his life. One story of many on the impact of PBS.
Anyone in the Miami Valley knows what a treasure we have in our great public radio station, WYSO, home to meaningful, beautifully produced local series like Veteran’s Voices, WYSO Youth Radio and Blue Skies and Tailwinds. WYSO and NPR bring balanced, in-depth reporting to every story they tackle. They avoid drama, put their heads down and do the work.
Mike Turner’s colleague in the House, Rep. Warren Davidson, who represents the district just west of Dayton, recently said that PBS and NPR had been taken over by “radical leftists.”
Concerned, I did a quick dive into research, and found that these so-called radical leftists are behind such radical leftist TV series as Antiques Roadshow, Masterpiece Theater, All Creatures Great and Small, Nature and The Great American Recipe. Please.
In the coming days, the U.S. Senate will face the same vote as did the House in June. I urge senators Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno to do the right thing and not kill funding for PBS and NPR. And I urge all of us Ohioans who care about public TV and radio to contact our two senators and let them know how we feel about this.
Steven Bognar is a documentary filmmaker based in the Miami Valley whose films include the Oscar-winning “American Factory” and the Emmy-winning “A Lion in the House.”
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