Letter from John A. Rudy

Help Fund CPB, NPR

My wife and I tithe a portion of our annual income to various religious and charitable organizations. Until now, we have not felt the need to include the public broadcasting outlets we enjoy watching and listening to daily on our list of donees.

Our reasoning has been that our support of those entities was achieved by virtue of the federal government’s using our tax dollars to provide funds to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio for distribution to our local public TV and radio stations. Sadly, that is no longer the case. As a result, we can no longer rationalize that we are “paying” to use those stations through our tax dollars.

To avoid “freeloading” our use of these outlets, we have added our local public TV and radio stations to our list of charitable donees. We urge all our fellow citizens who tune in to public media, to do likewise.

Until altruism is restored as an element of federal tax revenue allocation, we have an obligation to financially support the public broadcasting stations we utilize.

John A. Rudy
Cooperstown