Poll: America wants vast increases for PBS, NPR

On March 17th, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to prohibit federal funding of National Public Radio. In light of that development, it's interesting to note a new CNN poll — highlighted by the wise folks at Talking Points Memo — that studies popular perceptions and opinions of the federal budget. It turns out that Americans have a wildly exaggerated idea of how much money is spent on public broadcasting. The median guess yields a budget of $178 billion, which is 424 times larger than the reality. Just as interesting, a majority of Americans don't seem to have a problem with a budget of that size. Thirty-nine percent think that it should stay the same; nineteen percent think that it should be "decreased a little"; and fourteen percent think that it should be ... bigger. No fooling.