The arts on PBS is essential viewing, essential funding, with 'front-row seating'

Wasserstein’s first play, “Uncommon Women and Others,” was broadcast on PBS’s “Great Performances” in 1978, giving the first national exposure for its stars, Meryl Streep, Swoozie Kurtz and Jill Eikenberry, while they were in their 20s.

Filmmaker Ken Burns, hailed as the “most influential documentary maker of all time," offered his support of funding for PBS arts in a February 2011 Washington Post editorial.

“Like millions of my countrymen, I am profoundly concerned that the debate over government spending, while necessary, has come to threaten the cultural, educational, informational and civilizing influences that help equip us for enlightened citizenship. Suddenly, these are dismissed as ‘unaffordable luxuries’ when in fact we have never needed them more,” he wrote.

“With minimal funding, PBS manages to produce essential commercial-free children’s programming as well as the best science and nature, arts and performance, and public affairs and history programming on the dial — often a stark contrast to superficial, repetitive and mind-numbing programming elsewhere.”