Ken Burns meets America's latest crisis [View all]

Ken Burns meets America’s latest crisis
America's storyteller wants to put the 'us' back in the U.S. PBS is the key to that mission

By Melanie McFarland
Senior Critic
Published July 17, 2025 12:00PM (EDT)


(Salon) Having spent nearly 50 years telling America’s stories, warts and all, Ken Burns knows better than to traffic in the reassurance business. I was reminded of that on Monday when I spoke with him a couple of hours before he was set to take the stage for an eager audience in Seattle’s McCaw Hall.

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But then, Burns is a unique public figure meeting viewers at a dire time for public broadcasting. His name is synonymous with public television’s mission statement to serve the American public “with programming and services of the highest quality, using media to educate, inspire, entertain and express a diversity of perspectives.”

Burns’ Seattle visit happened days before the Senate approved the White House’s request to claw back nearly $1.1 billion in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the private, nonprofit corporation that provides funding to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service.

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Calm as this may read, Burns is under no delusions concerning what PBS and NPR are facing. “I just think it’s so incredibly short-sighted that you would take something that is so central to almost every citizen and gut it — kill it in many areas, particularly rural areas,” he said. “It seems the opposite of what you’d want to do, to provide such extraordinary services just beyond children’s and primetime.”

“The pursuit of happiness that our founders meant was not the pursuit of objects in a marketplace of things, but lifelong learning,” Burns observed. “PBS is a marketplace of ideas. So this is our role, and to create citizens is to create a population that’s virtuous and actively participating in whatever citizenship means. And that’s the ongoing revolution.” ...............................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/07/17/ken-burns-meets-americas-latest-crisis/