Here's an interesting analysis of PBS and NPR. I know I've found
little to watch on PBS in recent years, only the occasional show like
"The War."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/arts/television/17mcgr.html

The New York Times

February 17, 2008
Television
Is PBS Still Necessary?
By CHARLES McGRATH

FOR the eighth straight year the Bush administration has ritually
proposed taking a hefty whack out of the federal subsidy for public
broadcasting. The cuts would in effect slice in half the money that
public television and public radio get from the government. If we
follow the usual script, this means it's time for upset listeners and
viewers to rally to the cause, as they have in the past, and browbeat
Congress into restoring the budget.

Every year, though, it gets a little harder to muster the necessary
outrage, and now and then a heretical thought presents itself: What if
the glory days of public television — the days of "Monty Python,"
"Upstairs Downstairs," "The French Chef" — are past recapturing?
Lately the audience for public TV has been shrinking even faster than
the audience for the commercial networks. The average PBS show on
prime time now scores about a 1.4 Nielsen rating, or roughly what the
wrestling show "Friday Night Smackdown" gets.

On the other side of the ledger the audience for public radio has been
growing: there are more than 30 million listeners now, compared to
just 2 million in 1980. "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered,"
NPR's morning and evening news programs, are the second and fourth
most listened to shows in the country. Go figure. Who would have
guessed 40 years ago, when public broadcasting came into being, that
the antique medium, the one supposedly on its way out, would prove to
be the greater success and the one more technically nimble. You can
even download NPR broadcasts onto your iPod.

Radio benefits of course from being a smaller target, and from
attracting fewer political enemies. In public television especially it
used to be axiomatic that attacks on the budget were retaliation for
perceived liberal bias. Newt Gingrich was quite upfront about
punishing PBS when he began his budgetary onslaught back in 1995. By
now, though, that war ought to be over. These days the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting is run by Republicans, and a few years ago,
Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, who was then chairman of PBS, wasn't the least
bit shy about trying to arm-wrestle stations into running a program
whose host was Paul Gigot, editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial
page. Unless you count occasional outbursts of hand-wringing
earnestness on the part of Bill Moyers or David Brancaccio on "Now,"
it's hard now to see anything resembling liberal excess on PBS, if
there ever was such a thing.

Scanning the PBS lineup, in fact, it's hard to detect much of a bias
toward anything at all, except possibly mustiness. Except for
"Antiques Roadshow," all the prime-time stalwarts — "The NewsHour,"
"Nova," "Nature," "Masterpiece" — are into their third or fourth
decade, and they look it. Every now and then a one-off like "The War,"
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's World War II documentary, the most-watched
PBS series in 10 years, comes along and makes a huge splash. The
broadcast of the first episode was watched by some 7.3 million people,
or about as many as tune in to the "NBC Nightly News." But such
projects are few and far between, and they're so overwhelming and
time-consuming that for many people they mostly serve as lengthy
advertisements for the boxed DVD set, which you can view at your own
convenience and your own pace.

More typical prime-time fare — if you watch WNET, Channel 13, in New
York, anyway — is the weekly rerun of "Keeping Up Appearances," a BBC
sitcom about class snobbery that was old 10 years ago. With her permed
hair, dowdy clothes and fluty accent, the main character, Hyacinth, is
practically a parody of a certain strain in public broadcasting: the
one that puts on airs and wants to pretend to singularity.

Forty years ago it really was different. There were only three
networks, and none of them were known for challenging or high-minded
programming. Indeed, public broadcasting came into being out of
collective despair over what had become of the airwaves. Cable has
changed all that. There are not only countless more channels to chose
from now, but many offer the kind of stuff that in the past you could
see only on public TV, and in at least some instances they do it better.

The stunning (and stunningly expensive) BBC documentary "Planet
Earth," for example, which in the old days would have been a natural
for PBS, was instead broadcast on the Discovery Channel, which could
presumably better afford it. The Showtime series "The Tudors" is just
the kind of thing — only better produced and with more nudity — that
used to make "Masterpiece Theater" (now simply "Masterpiece"), once
the flagship of PBS, so unmissable. Now it's so strapped for cash that
it has pretty much settled into an all-Jane Austen format.

If you're the sort of traditional PBS viewer who likes extended news
broadcasts, say, or cooking shows, old movies and shows about animals
gnawing each other on the veld, cable now offers channels devoted just
to your interest. Cable is a little like the Internet in that respect:
it siphons off the die-hards. Public television, meanwhile, more and
more resembles everything else on TV. Since corporate sponsors were
allowed to extend their "credit" announcements to 30 seconds,
commercials in all but name have been a regular feature on public
television, and that's not to mention pledge programs, the
fund-raising equivalent of water-boarding.

In a needy bid for viewers, public television imitates just as much as
it's imitated, putting on pop knockoffs like "America's Ballroom
Challenge." Even though a number of surveys suggest that a large
segment of the viewing population still wants the best of what public
television has to offer, there isn't as much of that as there used to
be, and when it is on, it often gets lost amid all the dreck.

Considering how much it costs to create new topnotch programming, the
best solution to public television's woes is the one that will
probably never happen: more money, not less. Here too public radio has
an edge, because giving listeners what they want doesn't cost nearly
as much. NPR has benefited, moreover, from a huge bequest from the
estate of Joan Kroc, widow of the longtime McDonald's chairman, and
you could argue that it has spent its money more wisely than PBS,
spiffing up existing shows rather than trying to come up with new
ones. Listeners complained mightily when Bob Edwards was booted as
host of "Morning Edition" in 2004, a month before his 57th birthday,
but the change invigorated the show and ratings are up. (Jim Lehrer,
73, has been with "NewsHour" since 1975, so long that some of his
early viewers are now in assisted living.)

But by far the greatest advantage of public radio is that, by not
trolling after ratings, it has managed to stay distinctive: it does
what nothing else on radio does and sticks to its core: news and
public affairs and the oddball weekly show like "Car Talk" and "A
Prairie Home Companion." At the same time, public radio thrives, in a
way that public TV does not, from internal competition: in addition to
NPR, the old standby, there is the newer, hipper PRI (Public Radio
International), importer of the invaluable BBC World Service news
program and distributor of innovative shows like "Studio 360 With Kurt
Andersen" and "This American Life," which NPR did not fight for.

Where would we be without this stuff, gathered so conveniently at the
low end of the FM dial? How would we fill those otherwise empty hours
when we're held hostage in our cars? At its best public television
adds a little grace note to our lives, but public radio fills a void.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company