A Sin, Yes, but Don’t Burn Public TV

Earlier this year Boston’s public television station, WGBH, did a dumb thing. It gave the Democratic National Committee the names of several thousand of its 225,000 supporters, from whom the DNC then solicited contributions. Sharing its donors’ names with political groups is not only against station policy but against the law, since as a tax-exempt entity WGBH must not engage in anything that looks like support for a political party. Finally, WGBH’s action was a public relations gaffe of the first order. While offending many of its own supporters it has also given congressional opponents of public broadcasting, who regard it as irredeemably left-leaning, a new excuse to try to slash its funding.

This week the House Commerce Committee was scheduled to take up a bill authorizing $525 million for public broadcasting in the coming fiscal year. Several Republicans, after reading the Boston Globe story that told of WGBH’s blunder, now indicate that the funding might be in trouble. But any punitive cut in current federal support would most harm public broadcasting’s millions of viewers, who look to public stations for programming of often unusual quality and depth. WGBH’s mistake, which it admits, must not be made a reason to pillory the whole of public broadcasting.