As somebody who watches television news more than any reasonable person should, there is not a doubt in my mind that The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer is easily the best nightly news show on American television. It is more professional than the CBS Evening News and ABC’s World News Tonight; and much more professional than NBC’s Nightly News. It is more substantive than CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360� or Paula Zahn Now. And comparing it to FOX News’ FOX Report is just an insult to Jim Lehrer’s ability as a journalist. So what makes NewsHour different from the rest of the competition? Well, one big difference is that the show airs on PBS.

The problem with so much of the media today, especially the 24-hour cable TV variety, is that they are a part of the very system they are supposed to be reporting on. As a result, they are incapable of looking at it objectively. CNN is owned by Time Warner. MSNBC is owned by Microsoft and NBC, a network which is itself owned by General Electric Company. And FOX News is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s global media conglomerate News Corporation.

Nearly all of America’s news organizations are controlled by major corporations. This is a problem. And the reason why it is a problem is because journalists are in the business of journalism to make money. It is true that most journalists have some higher ideal about informing the public. But because journalism is their job and not just a public service they perform out of the goodness of their hearts, making money will always be their most immediate reason. It’s how they put food on the table. Even if they would like to report something other than what their corporate employers want, they don’t have much of a choice. If they want to stay in the game until the next round, they have to make certain compromises. And that means letting their reporting be influenced, to some degree or another, by the corporation’s quest for profits.

This is probably seen most clearly in the case of FOX News. Yet in every news organization there is a certain sense of what the corporate leadership wants. It is perhaps not always as blatant as with FOX News, but it always exists to some extent. The mistake that most people make is to assume that this bias is a matter of liberal versus conservative. And in this sense FOX is actually the exception rather than the rule in that they have made it quite clear that they are really little more than a mouthpiece for the Republican Party. For almost every other news organization, however, the bias is not toward any particular political party, but rather toward the accumulation of profit. This means most of all protecting the status quo. Thus, with an organization such as CNN we see them leaning liberal during Democratic administrations and leaning conservative during Republican administrations and especially after 9/11. And they played the nationalist angle for all it was worth because they immediately realized that 9/11 sells.

And this is the problem. As long as journalists’ fates ultimately rest in the hands of corporations rather than the public, those corporate interests will always come first. Enter PBS.

PBS is a non-profit public broadcasting station. Meaning they, unlike all of their competitors, are not owned by corporations. It is by no means a perfect system. PBS can still be influenced by corporations since much of their funding comes from corporate sponsors like SBC Communications and ADM. But that extra layer of removal from the corporate hierarchy seems to make a lot of difference. So journalists on shows like NewsHour are free to report real news. Watch an episode of NewsHour and compare it to any one of its corporate counterparts. NewsHour goes much more in depth into the stories it covers. And, despite claims of liberal bias, it is actually amazingly objective. Debates on the show sound less like two people giving their stump speeches while sitting next to each other as you would see on CNN, and more like two people having an honest discussion.

This removal of the media from corporations seems to have worked for other countries as well. BBC News is probably one of the most reliable news sources in the western world. It too is aired by a publicly funded broadcaster.

And the effect can be seen in more than just news. PBS is at the top in almost everything it does. NOVA and Scientific American Frontiers are both among the best in their genre. As are Frontline, Masterpiece Theatre, and even Antiques Roadshow. PBS is also known for being the best in children’s programming with shows like Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. With perhaps the only exception being their decision to give airtime to Tucker Carlson, PBS seems to excel at just about anything it chooses to do.

The lesson here seems obvious. If Americans want quality news reporting, they cannot continue to rely on self-interested corporations to provide it. Do I see a publicly funded 24-hour news channel in the future? Well, a guy can dream.