points by dredmorbius 5 years ago

It is fair to say that funder bias is a significant concern in the not-for-profit world, including in public broadcasting.

There's been open mainstream speculation of that "PBS sold its soul" to the Koch Brothers:

As David Sirota, the author of the PandoDaily expose, wrote in its aftermath, PBS doesn’t stand for “Public Broadcasting Service” anymore. As it becomes more addicted to big-bucks donors, it risks becoming the Plutocrat Broadcasting Service.

https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-xpm-2014-feb-17-...

Tiny Spark is the podcast of Nonprofits Quarterly, and has dedicated numerous episodes to the question of funder influence.

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/podcasts/

Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, and Robert W. McChesney are voices on the left who have called out corporate / fundraiser bias on the part of PBS, NPR, CPB, and other public broadcasters in the US. McChesney notes:

Public broadcasting today is really a system of nonprofit commercial broadcasting, serving a sliver of the population. What we need is a system of real public broadcasting, with no advertising, one that accepts no grants from corporations or private bodies, one that serves the entire population, not merely those who have high-brow tastes and disposable income to contribute during pledge drives.

https://www.lehigh.edu/~jl0d/J246-02/oligopoly.html