Name: Ken Burns Talks About the Funding Cuts to PBS
Uploaded: 2025-10-09T22:01:06.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Ken Burns Talks About the Funding Cuts to PBS' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-09. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Ken Burns Talks About the Funding Cuts to PBS' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-09. Transcript available.

I have spent my entire professional life as an independent filmmaker, but all
of my films are
made for PBS. And let me tell you why. They are the Declaration of Independence,
the pursuit of
happiness applied to communications. There's rigorous fact checking. I cannot
put a film out
unless I have been vetted by scholars from all different perspectives and
understandings and
knowledge. And they also are not, they're free of that advertising thing, right?
So that
I am able to do it. Like I could tell you, like, let me just say our Vietnam
series took 10 and a
half years to make, cost 30 million bucks. I spent 10 of the 10 and a half
years with my cup out going
to foundations and corporations. Bank of America has been a corporate underwriter.
They're not a
sponsor. So they're not saying, Hey, we don't like that content. They accept
whatever content I'm
going to do because they know my process is rigors, foundations, individuals of
wealth,
government granting agencies until they were just killed. So that P that CPB
kill, you know,
the death of CPB is, is a big thing. I was going to ask you about that. You're
funding. How's that
been affected by it? It's huge. It's huge. But it's, you know, more importantly,
it's such a
short sighted decision because you know what's going to hurt most. Most of CPB's
money went to rural
stations. What is CPB? The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was just
not only they took back
money, they'd already appropriated 4 million for an upcoming project, but they,
we had been in
discussions for another 10 million. So I just lost 14 million for about three
or four projects coming
up in the future. I'll recover. But the problem is most of the money goes to
rural stations, which
would be, and will be when these stations die, a news desert, right? They're
used to the PBS, not just for
the children's programming, not just for the great prime time, but for their
homeland security,
their alerts. They may be, you know, the, the most important, the only signal
they get. And you don't
want to be a news desert where you've got somebody telling you because you want
somebody there covering
the school board. You want somebody there. You want somebody, you want a
personal, you want a personal
person that you know. So I have worked with them. So go back to my, my Vietnam
example. I,
I spent 10 of the 10 and a half years trying to raise that. I could have walked
into a streaming
service or a premium cable and with my reputation, walked in and given them a
description of Vietnam
and walked out in half an hour with a check for $30 million. They would not
have given me the 10
and a half years. It took me to do the good job. Now that film came out in the
fall, in September of
2017. If I do my math right, that's eight years ago. It is still, even though
it's a film, one-stop shopping for the most
aggregation of the most recent information about the Vietnam War still after
eight years. I am so proud of that.
I didn't take the money, do it in a year or a year and a half and have it be a
piece of shit.
Oh, you're not a T-bill. You're a Bond, dude.
Yeah, I am long-term. That's exactly it. And I'm, and I need to marinate and
mature and come to term.
And I need to just redeem it at its face value. I'm not making a, I am trying
to share this. And you know
what PBS stands for? It's not system. The S is not, it's public. I like that
part. Meaning you and me
broadcasting, obviously service, service. It's not the Columbia broadcasting
system.
It's not the public broadcasting self. It's, it's a, not a top down, right?
Like it's not a network
saying what part of our, our primetime schedule don't you understand? You're
taking it all.
It's individual stations working with independent filmmakers, making stuff and
sending it up. And
then it's going out and there's no, you have to take this. It's, it is exactly
the declaration of
independence applied to, um, uh, the communications world, just as the national
parks are the declaration
of independence applied to the landscape because we, for the first time in
human history, and you
could have only done that had operating under a declaration of independence. We
set aside the most
beautiful landscape in the world, not for Kings, not for noblemen, not for the
very rich, but for you
and for me and for more importantly, our posterity, our children's children's
children. That's what
Theodore Roosevelt says. We are not saving this for a day. We know we're saving
it for all time. And that's
beautiful stuff because if we didn't have that, if we had a different kind of
system, um, Zion and
Yosemite would be gated communities. The rim of the grand Canyon, there may be
one little place where
you could go and look out, but the rest would be owned by other people. Um, the
Everglades would
been drained and be endless strip malls and golf courses and condominiums. And,
um, Yellowstone would
be a down on its luck, um, sort of amusement place called geyser world, you
know, and, and just think
about it. There'd be a lot of hippies. There'll be a lot of be a lot of EDM
festivals out there.
Manifest destiny, manifest destiny says, we're going to take the whole
continent and you're going to have
to get out of the way, whoever you are. And that stand of trees I look at, I
think bored feet that
river. I think, damn that Canyon. I think mineral rights. That's fine. But some
of those places you
can set aside free from that so that we can go. So there are places in the
United States like the
South Rim or the North Rim of the grand Canyon or Zion or Yosemite. What I
think is one of the most
beautiful places on earth, if not the most beautiful place or Yellowstone. And
you can go there and look
at it and see exactly what Theodore Roosevelt saw. And more importantly, you
can see in the case of,
um, the native people who occupied Yosemite, what they saw 2000 years ago.
Right. And that gives you
an access to all time, which then gives you a perspective. Some journalist,
when he went up to
Alaska and he saw what was then called Mount McKinley and has been called Denali,
said McKinley never saw
the mountain. Um, he said, it reminds me of my atomic insignificance, meaning
the way nature dwarfs
you. You just look up at a night sky and when it's 10 below zero and you just
see all those stars and
you go, Oh, I mean, I'm like nothing. And then, but the, the thing is about
that it's paradoxical
nature. And, and I would suggest our national parks because they, that feeling
of insignificance
in spirits, you makes you larger, just as the egotist in our midst is
diminished by his or her
self-regard. Right. You know that. Like you see somebody who's so full of shit,
so full of
themselves and you think they just get smaller and smaller. But the person who
goes, wow, you know,
I'm nothing in the scheme of things. And that's true. Seems bigger. Yeah. You
know, seems like
somebody I want to listen to, you know? Oh yeah. All, all, all the great gurus
of the national parks,
like Emerson and, and, and particularly John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, they're
all, they have
distance in their eyes. That's what Stuart Udall, who's a former secretary of
the interior
of Kennedy and Johnson. He said he had distance in his eyes. I just love that
phrase as if somebody
could almost look around the curve of the earth and see not only physically
what's going to happen,
but in time. So he's this blustery, you know, guy that we love for all his belligerents,
walks awfully, but carry a big stick. But what does he do? He, he sets up the
grand Canyon,
the grandest Canyon on earth. I assure you. And have that longevity of thought
to have the,
I don't want other people to come here and see the same thing. And I want my
great,
great grandchildren to enjoy it. And guess what? They are. Um, we touched on
Spencer Cox really
quickly. I think we're in a new space for an American revolution in the sense,
uh, you know,
I know part of it was the bill of rights. Um, we don't have an internet bill of
rights. We don't
have a social media bill of rights. And it's, I think it's stuff like that that's
killing us,
you know, it's like, you can have, if I'm a restaurant and you come there and I
poison you,
yes, you can sue me. You can file charges against me. That will shut me down.
But there's all these
algorithms that are poisoning people, right? Feeding people, um, literally
poisoning. And they know what
they're feeding. They have a log of it. They have a log of the recipe. If you
go here, we're going to
send you here. They're poisoning people to the point where people are sick.
People are literally sick,
addicted and sick. And there's no way to, um, to kind of stop them. It feels
like.
I agree completely. I think that's beautifully said. And so one would hope that
there was a health,
uh, department that might have noticed that that restaurant had, uh,
ingredients or there was,
you know, mice or rats around in the kitchen that might be, uh, poisoning. They're
going to
contribute to this that shuts them down or gives them a, a bad grade as they do
in New York city.
You see the A or the B or the C and, you know, be forewarned. I'll eat a little
C. You'll eat a
C now. I draw the line at B. I'm sorry. This is where you and I disagree on
this, but you know,
maybe there is some overarching sense of discipline or maybe there's self-discipline.
Maybe I realize
that, you know, in, in Fantasia and the Sorcerer's Apprentice, where he's got
the endless number of
rooms carrying the, the buckets of water. Like it's just so proliferated. We're
just so out of
control and unable to, um, make sense of anything that at some point you need
someone in this case,
the wizard to come and recast the spell. So it, it goes back to being one room
that's carrying these
things. And then you've got, you know, we've got that possibility. And I, that's
my impulse is always
to just reduce, reduce, get down to something that, you know, you can trust.
And I think what you're
saying is, could we agree to maybe a set of rules that would govern facts that
we would say that facts
were primary, that we couldn't just constantly, not just speculate, but wildly
lie because the
toxicity of that is, as you say, as lethal over the longterm as that poison is
in your restaurant.
Yeah. And the algorithms, the fact that you can continue to point, imagine a 15
year old
but it pays if it bleeds, it leads. So then right now that used to be the thing
in the seventies when
there's still just three stations and whatever, but then you've got millions of
outlets who have
no responsibility and they can say that up is down and down is up. And what's
your problem?
You're, you know, you're wrong. It's a big conspiracy that you've been thinking
that up is down all of
your life. And I can prove to you why you're absolutely dead wrong. So follow
me over this cliff.
I don't know.