There’s a proposal before the United States Senate to strip federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Should NPR and PBS continue to receive taxpayer dollars?

That’s our Question of the Week for readers.

More than 50 years ago President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act, and now PBS and NPR broadcasters receive more than $500 million a year from the government. This week the Senate faces a vote that would stop that spending. Do you agree or disagree with the plan?

Because the big public broadcasting stations do such a good job raising funds from members, it can seem as if the cuts would not be catastrophic to them. NPR gets just about 2% of its annual budget from the federal grants, whereas PBS gets about 15%. Relatively speaking, media analysts say that stations in populous areas such as our own would survive federal cuts, and they are already upping their asks from members in pledge drives.

It’s the stations in rural areas that rely more heavily on public funding. One estimate is that 18% of some 1,000 member stations around the country would close if the Senate approves the cuts.

Critics say the reason to defund is a liberal bias on the part of almost all publicly funded media. Former NPR editor Uri Berliner last year wrote an essay saying journalists there had “coalesced around the progressive world-view.”

Among other reasons to continue with the status quo, managers at rural stations say that the prospect of an internet outage is precisely the reason public radio should be funded, as they would be a key emergency management resource for listeners.

Do you listen to and watch public media here in Southern California? Or are the stations not of interest to you?

The Senate must act on the proposal to cut funding by this Friday, July 18. The House has already passed it. If it’s approved, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting won’t be making grants after September. Has the need for NPR and PBS, seeded in the 1960s, passed in the 2020s? Or should the nation continue to fund them?

Email your thoughts to opinion@scng.com. Please include your full name and city or community of residence. Provide a daytime phone number (it will not be published).