Another key programmer in TV history has been public television. Under President Lyndon Johnson, and in response to a report from the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and later, in 1969, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). In part, Congress intended public television to target viewers who were “less attractive” to commercial networks and advertisers. Besides providing programs for viewers over age fifty, public television has figured prominently in programming for audiences under age twelve with children’s series like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968–2001), Sesame Street (1969– ), and Barney & Friends (1991– ). With the exception of CBS’s long-running Captain Kangaroo (1955–1984), the major networks have largely abdicated the responsibility of developing educational series aimed at children under age twelve. When Congress passed a law in 1996 ordering the networks to offer three hours of children’s educational programming per week, the networks sidestepped this mandate by taking advantage of the law’s vagueness on what constituted “educational” to claim that many of their routine sitcoms, cartoons, and dramatic shows satisfied the legislation’s requirements.

The original Carnegie Commission report also recommended that Congress create a financial plan to provide long-term support for public television, in part to protect it from political interference. However, Congress did not do this, nor did it require wealthy commercial broadcasters to subsidize public television (as many other countries do). As federal funding levels dropped in the 1980s, PBS depended more and more on corporate underwriting. By the early 2000s, corporate sponsors funded more than 25 percent of all public television, although corporate sponsorship declined in 2009 as the economy suffered. In 2010, Congress gave an extra $25 million to PBS to help during the economic downturn.¹³ However, only about 15 percent of funding for public broadcasting has come from the federal government, with the bulk of support being provided by viewers, listeners, and corporations.

Despite support from the Obama administration, in 2011 the Republican-controlled House voted to ax all funding of the CPB in 2013. The Senate killed this effort, and eventually the CPB did receive $430 million in federal funding for 2012. Anticipating decreased government support, public broadcasting began inserting promotional messages from sponsors every fifteen minutes in its programs starting in fall 2011.¹⁴ Some critics and public TV executives worried that such corporate messages would offend loyal viewers accustomed to uninterrupted programming, and compromise public television’s mission to air programs that might be considered controversial or commercially less viable.

Also troubling to public television (in contrast to public radio, which increased its audience from two million in 1980 to more than thirty million listeners per week in 2010) is that the audience for PBS has declined.¹⁵ Between 1998 and 2008, PBS lost 37 percent of its audience (the Big Three networks were down an average of 35 percent during the same period). PBS content chief John Boland attributed the loss to market fragmentation and third-screen technology: “We are spread thin in trying to maintain our TV service and meet the needs of consumers on other platforms.”¹⁶