LOS ANGELES — Community-supported media has had a tough year with the defunding of the Corp. for Public Broadcasting, created by Congress under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. At the time of its death, the organization provided grants to 365 noncommercial television and 1,216 radio stations. ("Ending Taxpayer Support of Biased Media" was the biased title of this executive order.) The CPB, it seems worth pointing out (again), was not in the content business; independent stations produce their own shows and/or acquire others, produced by other member stations, via NPR, PBS and various sources, free from interference.

In addition to government funding, amounting to some $1.60 per taxpayer per year (or 0.01% of the federal budget), the system has survived on a mixture of grants, endowments, corporate sponsorships and donations from "people like you." And if you are not already one of those people, this would be a good time to consider becoming one, by donating to NPR or PBS or directly to a favorite local station or show. Quality costs!

Here are six big reasons, encompassing dozens of little reasons.

Value for money

Conceived as a public good, community-supported TV and radio is broadcast for free over the air and over the net, where extra content, including short-form videos and podcasts, is often available. But a tax-deductible $5 a month to PBS gets you a "PBS Passport," which allows you to access an enormous archive of shows, new and old, from many producers, from many states, on all sorts of subjects — news shows, dramas, science series, live music, historical deep dives, multiple series about woodworking, gardening and home repair, and the cooking programs of Julia Child, Jacques Pépin, Lidia Bastianich and Ming Tsai, to name a few. (If you can't find something to watch or listen to here, you are simply an incurious person.) And there is the incalculable value of knowing that your money helps public media, and the creators it in turn helps fund, survive and thrive.

It's local

As a decentralized system whose channels and stations exist within the communities they serve, public media represents a last bastion of local and regional programming. A quick search through PBS Passport reveals. "Vermont Poetry," "Kansas Week," "Curling Minnesota," "Central Texas BBQ," "South Dakota High School Rodeo Finals." On the radio, Madeleine Brand's "Press Play" on KCRW, and "AirTalk" on LAist (aka KPCC), whose host Larry Mantle solicits calls from listeners, are morning newsmagazines with a hometown focus. PBS SoCal has mounted series such as "Lost L.A." (episodes on bootlegger tunnels, architect Paul Williams, historic Filipinotown, the Watts-based Shindana Toy Co.), "Artbound" (the Case Study House program, punk music in Chinatown, Duchamp in Pasadena, gospel in L.A.), "Coastal California" (public art projects reflecting local histories from Venice to San Rafael) and Roy Choi's "Broken Bread" (food as an instrument of social activism). Happily, it still airs episodes of "California's Gold" and "Visiting," from my man, the late yet eternal Huell Howser, that amiable, amazed videographer of our city and state.

It stands up for diversity

Formulated in part expressly to serve the underserved, public media stands for diversity, inclusion and equality, which, I am here to tell you, are good things. (Their opposites are not.) I'm enough of a cockeyed optimist to believe that exposure to different cultures, to ways of being in, looking at and talking about the world, can cure a person of prejudice. (And for those who are part of those cultures, representation matters.) The PBS series "Independent Lens" (2025 subjects included the history of funk, an Asian American high school basketball star, a Lakota dance and a camp for widows) and "P.O.V," a showcase for documentary films that personalize social and political challenges, take you places most television platforms don't bother to go. "The Migrant Kitchen," from PBS SoCal, explores our cosmopolitan food culture and the immigrants who create it. Cartoons on PBS Kids include "Molly of Denali," centered on a Native Alaskan girl, her friends and family; "Rosie's Rules," about a Mexican American 5-year-old living in San Antonio; "Alma's Way," about a Puerto Rican 6-year-old living in the Bronx; and "Lyla in the Loop," whose heroine is an 8-year-old Jamaican American. "Sesame Street," of course, is a marvel of urban multiethnicity.

You might — no, will — learn something

Public media is a home for scholarship, experience and expertise — a university of the air. Between "American Masters" — whose 2025 offerings featured films on jazz pianist Hazel Scott, graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, historian-philosopher Hannah Arendt, cooking writer Marcella Hazan, actors Marlee Matlin and Dick Van Dyke — and "American Experience," whose recent episodes looked at the Americans with Disabilities Act, the development of the Polaroid camera, fighting smog, and Henry Kissinger — you have the syllabus for a course in American cultural history. Add to that the works of Ken Burns and company, 44 of which are available via PBS Passport, from 1982's "The Brooklyn Bridge" to this year's "The American Revolution," with "The Civil War," "Baseball," "The Vietnam War," "The Central Park Five," "Country Music" and "The U.S. and the Holocaust" along the way, and you have the makings of a well-rounded citizen."Nova" serves up science; this year's shows include a two-part documentary on the building and life of the International Space Station and a timely look at superfloods. "Nature" brings the birds, bees, walruses and whales. And, on the radio, Terry Gross' peerless interview series "Fresh Air" catalogs figures who have shaped our times.

News you can use that doesn't use you

We could get into a long discussion about balance in media, but it's likely that many of those who accuse NPR and PBS of liberal bias don't actually watch or listen in a serious way. To be sure, one can argue with any news organization about its editorial choices, based on one's own preferences, but you won't find better informed, more reasonable, journalistically acute or ethical news and current affairs programs anywhere on broadcast or cable television (and certainly not on the Web, where standards are arbitrary, to say the least). There are panels, but no pundits, and no billionaires advancing an agenda or appeasing the White House. The PBS flagship news documentary "Frontline" posted its episode "Surviving CECOT" even as CBS was notoriously withdrawing a "60 Minutes" report on the subject.

Finally, it's fun

It's not all schoolwork. Entertainment, of a presumably worthy variety — which is not to say genteel or exclusive — has long been a key element in the system's programming and a cornerstone of its fundraising. The comic omnibus "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" and the storytelling series "This American Life" and "The Moth Radio Hour" (both produced by the PRX network) are prime comfort listening. For a long time public television was the sole entry port for British shows, and it still waves that Union Jack. "Monty Python's Flying Circus" was brought to America by a Dallas member station. (Raise a glass to programming director Ron Devillier at KERA-TV.) Under the umbrella of "Masterpiece," a cavalcade of mysteries, dramas, melodramas and multipart adaptations of classic novels have come to these shores. (This year brought "Patience," about an autistic detective (played by autistic actor Ella Maisy Purvis), and "The Great Escaper," the last work of Michael Caine and the late Glenda Jackson. The long-running period pieces "Call the Midwife," in its 14th season, and "All Creatures Great and Small," about a country veterinarian, in its sixth, have audiences as devoted as those for any tale of swords and sorcery. The juggernaut that was "Downton Abbey" was first presented by "Masterpiece."

Public media celebrates the arts, higher and humble — "Craft in America," highlighting workers in many mediums, from many places, is a personal favorite. An invaluable service in a time when the president targets museums (and national parks, and zoos) over "improper ideology" and has slapped his own name on Washington, D.C.'s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The PBS series "Great Performances" fulfills an early, generally unkept, promise of the medium to bring the arts into every home, with opera, ballet and theater. This year brought Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," with Lupita Nyong'o and her brother Junior as twins, along with Sandra Oh, Peter Dinklage and Jesse Tyler Ferguson; a new "Nutcracker" from the English National Ballet, and a documentary on pioneering Black opera singer Grace Bumbry. Listener-sponsored radio is traditionally home for music that corporate stations don't play. The PBS series "Austin City Limits" is a live showcase for all sorts of traditionally based American musics. On NPR's YouTube-based series "Tiny Desk Concerts," musicians set up in a corner of their offices and play unplugged for the staff; with guests ranging from Taylor Swift to Parliament-Funkadelic, Tame Impala to Silvana Estrada, it's a place to discover new artists and rediscover older ones — as potent an appearance as a slot on "Saturday Night Live."

All in all, these are great places to invest your money and, if you haven't got the money, your time. You'll be better for it; that is my New Year's promise to you.

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(Robert Lloyd has been a Los Angeles Times television critic since 2003.)

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