It's worth noting that PBS affiliates are non-profits that have fairly constrained budgets, especially now that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been dissolved due to DOGE.
Non-profit IT has always seemed, to me at least, to be a land of compromises. There's rarely enough money, knowledge, or time to do things "the right way", so you have to do the best you can. If I could only choose one backup to have, it'd be remote on a provider like Iron Mountain. It would seem as if they are storing things on Iron Mountain through an intermediary company, who may or may not have actually paid the bill.
Old-fashioned as hell, too. My employer needed to put our stack in escrow for a large deal, and Iron Mountain was where it went. They pass Word docs back and forth like savages.
At a company I worked for, we used them for off-site storage, and when we finally went looking for alternatives, we realized we were being charged thousands of dollars a year more than competitors. We no longer have a contract with Iron Mountain.
It's nice to know that even in the end the CPB lived up to its mission and promise and swallowed its poison pill rather than be corrupted by partisan politics, but it's also gross to have seen that forewarned poison pill needed in my lifetime. There's some hope that we can still find the next Mr. Rogers to put a heart on a sleeve in front of some future Congress and build a sequel CPB with similar strong core principles.
I think we were just as polarized, if not more so, but we didn't have 24/7 ragebait egging us on to fight some more to drive up the engagement numbers. It's like someone watched the Star Trek ToS episode "Day of The Dove" and thought it was a great idea for a startup. But also, that was 1968, plus sa change and all that...
By their metrics, clearly, they are correct. But reading some books lately that were either from or set during the mid-70s to early 80s, the same tired political tropes were already in the zeitgeist.
But also, from that link...
"Americans' views on gun control seem to stem almost entirely from their cultural worldview and how they position themselves in that cultural schema. Statistics do not persuade them to change their minds."
In an oligarch owned media ecosystem, with obvious corruption of the regulators (FCC, DOJ) to ensure proper use of the public radio spectrum and monopoly restrictions, having a non-partisan publicly funded independent media is vital to the health of democracy.
The US is not a "free society".
Which is why the BBC, ABC, CBC, etc exist in civilized societies.
I think it's worth putting a finer point on the dynamic that the US's real state-run media IS FOX, NBC, and their ilk. The main power structure in the US is the corporate conglomerates, whose owners/managers may compete with one another like players of a sporting team compete with each other, but are ultimately all playing against the People. So invoking "state run media" to talk about PBS/NPR/CPB taking a little public money and trying to produce a different angle of public good rings totally hollow. If you don't like what they end up producing, you can always not tune in! But by the time you're rejecting them on ideological grounds, you should have already rejected every other single station on the air apart from community access type channels.
Non-profit IT has always seemed, to me at least, to be a land of compromises. There's rarely enough money, knowledge, or time to do things "the right way", so you have to do the best you can. If I could only choose one backup to have, it'd be remote on a provider like Iron Mountain. It would seem as if they are storing things on Iron Mountain through an intermediary company, who may or may not have actually paid the bill.
So, y'know, fraud's a possibility here.