Back in the 1960s, PBS was created to fill a hole in the market for educational television. So it’s strange to read The Washington Post and find PBS trying to finagle its way into a crowded market of digital and mobile apps in 2013. Reporter Cecelia Kang began: “On television, Big Bird stands tall among children’s shows. But on the iPad, he is just a little chick.”
Kang says PBS is hoping for an Internet hit with its new math show "Peg & Cat" and is competing “against corporate giants such as Disney, Fisher-Price, and Netflix for a share of the multi-billion-dollar business of entertaining and teaching children online.” Only one paragraph in this PBS-promoting story has a free-market rebuttal from Trevor Burris of the Cato Institute:
Most networks skipped over the story of their own corporate advocacy of broadcast profanity last night when the Second Circuit Court of Appeals shredded the FCC’s broadcast decency regulation. (All the major broadcast networks signed on, with Fox in the lead). NBC’s Brian Williams offered 94 words, but erred in claiming "When a curse word has slipped out in the past, the FCC has imposed heavy fines on networks." There were no fines for NBC when Bono said "f—ing brilliant" at the 2004 Golden Globes, nor were their fines for Fox when Cher and Nicole Richie for profanity at (respectively) the 2002 and 2003 Billboard Music Awards.