Next Monday, Feb. 12, is the golden anniversary of the premiere of the landmark public television children’s series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhoood. But today, a week earlier, President Donald Trump has announced his budget plans to eliminate PBS from the federal budget.
The two events are not unrelated. It was almost 50 years ago that Washington debated taking funding from public broadcasting for the first time — and the champion who saved the day then was Fred Rogers, host of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
It’s really not much of a surprise that President Trump has followed through on last year’s threats to eliminate all funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts, as well as all federal funding for PBS. What’s a bigger surprise is that Washington keeps trying this from time to time, despite the laughably miniscule amounts it would save, and how vastly those same amounts can help keep public media alive and vital.
Today, the most visible champion to use as Exhibit A against such shortsighted policies would be longtime PBS documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. For decades, it was Sesame Street feathery figurehead Big Bird.
But in 1969, when national public TV was in its infancy, the champion was a then-new children’s TV host name Fred Rogers, whose program, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, had premiered only the year before. The Senate was threatening to cut $20 million in funding for public TV when what would become PBS was just getting started, and Rogers flew to Washington to testify before John Pastore and his Senate Subcommittee on Communications, arguing why public TV needs and deserves federal support.
Pastore was a gruff senator who had led an earlier investigation into violence on TV, and almost single-handedly put an end to ABC’s The Untouchables. But against the soft-spoken Fred Rogers, the senator more than met his match, and public TV got its funding.
Watch this live TV clip from 1969, and wish, along with me, that today’s television hosts and elected officials could talk as honestly, and listen as intently: