Eponeen

Hi Mr. Taylor! My dad and I are both huge fans of your music! He's listened to you for most of his adult life and introduced me to your first album just about ten years ago. Listening to you as we drive through the mountains of NC, or to your Christmas album while we cook at Christmastime count among some of my most beautiful memories, often because of how dad and I can share our love of your albums. Just last week we had a great time when I visited him talking about how much we love your new project! Thank you for the enormous positive impact I know you've had on both my life and his. I can't think of any other artist who means as much to me as you do.

My question to you is: are there any of your older songs that you don't identify with much anymore? Similarly, are there any that still particularly resonate with you?

I also asked my dad what he'd like to say and he told me to ask you for your pecan pie recipe :)

The federal funding is kind of a framework. Donations and grants fill in the rest. NPR couldn't exist without private money, as we all know and are told over and over again during pledge drive seasons, but the federal funding (while small) is still essential.

If federal funding was eliminated, then yes, NPR would rely entirely on listener donations and those grants. They wouldn't go out of business, and popular programs like Sesame Street would no doubt remain on the air, but a lot of the less popular and yet important and very intelligent broadcasting would be cut in favor of content that would be more attractive to a broader group of people. So really, PBS and NPR would start needing to appeal to people who didn't already appreciate them which means the style would change and quality of the content would go down.

This probably sounds alarmist and I'm sure the drop in quality wouldn't be as bad as this example, but think of the shows The History Channel used to air and then consider what they air now so that more people will watch and so they can afford to stay on the air. NPR and PBS are federally funded because the content that sells well and could survive solely on listener donations or by reaching more people is largely not informative. The stuff you get from public radio and television broadcasting would not exist if those outlets needed to compete for eyes and ears with other stations.

In the end what it comes down to is this: do you believe that there is content that is objectively important and should be supported by the government rather than turning it over to the "free market" of information? If so, keeping NPR and PBS federally funded is incredibly important.