Sickle me, Elmo.

There's an air of doom at both PBS and NPR this week amid the current PR disaster over comments NPR's fundraising chief made during a video sting by conservative political activists. The result could mean the end of government funding for public broadcasting.

During a lunch meeting with activists posing as wealthy radical Muslims pretending to offer a $5 million grant to the public radio network, the impostors secretly filmed NPR's Ron Schiller making disparaging comments about Republicans and Tea Partiers. But even more damning may have been Ron Schiller's filmed remark that NPR doesn't really need federal funding and might even be better off without it.

NPR brass quickly disavowed Schiller's comments and booted him out the door (NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, no relation, was forced out as well), but the remarks seemed to validate the vote House Republicans made last month to cut funding for NPR and PBS from about $450 million per year to zero. The elimination of all federal funding for public broadcasting may not pass the Senate or President Obama's veto pen, but still, the whole imbroglio raises questions worth asking: Could public broadcasting survive and even thrive without federal money? Should the government be involved at all in funding culture? Can it afford to? In a 500-channel universe, is the programming provided by PBS and NPR not just a redundancy but an irresponsible luxury? Or would public broadcasting stations, along with many beloved shows, wither away without taxpayer dollars?
Republican efforts to trim public broadcasting's budget have been an annual ritual in Congress for at least a decade, but this is the first time the House has voted to eliminate the funding altogether. The old Republican argument against public broadcasting was that it was too liberal, an argument seemingly bolstered not just by the current scandal but also last fall when NPR fired Juan Williams after he expressed inflammatory opinions as a guest on Fox News. NPR said Williams had violated the radio network's ethics code, but Williams - and his new colleagues at Fox News, which hired him right after his firing - blamed political correctness.

But the bias argument doesn't hold much water anymore. There's no evidence that Ron Schiller's dismissive opinions about Republicans and Tea Partiers (which he stated in the sting video were his own and not those of the organization) are shared by other executives or the network's news editors and correspondents. (Indeed, NPR's reporting about the Tea Party has been respectful and fair in such stories as these.) The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the decision-making body behind NPR and PBS, has been overseen for several years now by Patricia Harrison, a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee. And PBS and NPR both have received plenty of criticism from the left arguing that, if anything, public broadcasting has been just as susceptible to bias in favor of its corporate underwriters and pressure from Republican complaints. Besides, news programming only makes up a fraction of the programming at PBS, alongside science shows, documentaries, highbrow fare like 'Masterpiece' and kids' programs - which have also caved to conservative pressure (remember the censorship flap over the 'Postcards from Buster' episode that saw nothing amiss about a family headed by a lesbian couple?).

So now, the argument is for austerity. Explaining the Feb. 19 vote to zero out funding for public broadcasting by 2013, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) recently told NPR listeners, "We've got ourselves in a mess as a nation fiscally and that we're going to have to make some tough decisions." In the wake of the Schiller exposé, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) issued a statement saying that Congress' concern "is not about any one person at NPR, rather it's about millions of taxpayers. NPR has admitted that they don't need taxpayer subsidies to thrive, and at a time when the government is borrowing 40 cents of every dollar that it spends, we certainly agree with them." Rep. Doug Lamborn (R., Colo.) put it more bluntly: "Big Bird needs to be pushed out of the nest."

Not that cutting public broadcasting would save very much money. The $450 million per year spent on public broadcasting represents about 0.003 percent of the federal budget, or $1.35 per American citizen.

That money makes up only about 10 percent of the annual budget for the 368 public television stations, 934 public radio stations and all their affiliated websites, but that 10 percent serves as seed money that attracts the rest of public broadcasting's funding, which comes from corporate underwriters, charities and listener/viewer pledges.

Public broadcasting stations have launched an online PR drive to save their funding at 170MillionAmericans.org. The campaign's name refers to the claim that more than half the people in the U.S. are viewers, listeners, or online users of public broadcasting stations and websites. PBS also commissioned a study from the bipartisan polling firms of Hart Research and American Viewpoint, released last week before the scandal broke, whose findings say that 69 percent of Americans oppose eliminating federal funding for public broadcasting. The study also suggests that Americans rank public broadcasting behind only military spending as the government program that provides the best bang for the buck.

But if PBS and NPR programming is so beloved, and if it's mostly paid for by private money, why does it need any government funding at all? Why can't it support itself strictly in the marketplace?

The answer, I suppose, is that much of the programming, while well-liked, isn't the sort of thing the marketplace values. This was certainly true 44 years ago, when the government launched the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and when there were only three other networks as alternatives. But even today, much of what PBS and NPR do isn't duplicated elsewhere, not even on cable. The fine arts programming, the long-form documentaries, the investigative journalism, the in-depth foreign reporting and (especially on NPR) the local journalism - none of these are things that national cable and broadcast networks can be counted on to provide. Quality educational programming for kids can be found on cable, but only with many commercial interruptions; PBS is the only children's TV outlet that doesn't also see kids as a target market to be exploited several times per half-hour.

I addressed in greater depth these points about the uniqueness of PBS programming in an article I wrote three years ago, at the time of another annual assault on public broadcasting funding. While I still believe that public broadcasting fills the same gaps left by the programming on network TV, cable and national commercial radio, I'm less certain that public funding doesn't imply some degree of compromise. Any time programmers are dependent on politicians for any part of their funding, there's always the risk that they'll water down programming to suit the agenda of those in power, even without being directly pressured to do so. (A recent example: last fall's censoring of a long Tina Fey joke at Sarah Palin's expense during a PBS special that aired the same week that Tea Party Republicans swept to electoral victory in the House.) But having all-commercial patronage doesn't make programming any less susceptible to bias and spin; it's just a question of whether you want to be spun in favor of the agenda of corporations or that of elected representatives.

If the Hart Research/American Viewpoint study is correct, most people don't mind paying for the latter type of spin, and they did not vote for their congressmen hoping that the House would kill programming they enjoy in order to save them $1.35. If PBS and NPR can argue that their programming is a public good because voters say it is, isn't that enough of an argument to keep funding it, and to not have to re-fight the same battle year after year?

•Follow Gary Susman on Twitter @garysusman.