You are making a strawman argument, I didn't say "the public" meant taxpayers, I was talking about the "the public" in National "public" Radio and the "public" Broadcasting System, and the federally funded Corporation for "public" Broadcasting.

And in any case, your clarification is baloney, you are either being fooled by NPR's accounting sleights of hand, or you are helping to propagandize it. Federal money does in fact flow through public broadcasting's network of "shell" companies such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to local stations to and then to NPR. Here is an article on PBS.org about Congress potentially cutting funding to NPR. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/us-house-votes-to-cut-np... Yes, that was 2011, but the same baloney about NPR not receiving direct federal funding was the story back then too.

In any case, my argument that the works of public broadcasting belong under a creative commons license is referring to the same public that the stations bray about endlessly, "you the listener".