PBS is mentioned across The Bob Zadek Show only incidentally, never as the subject of an episode. The excerpts supply three kinds of reference: PBS as an example of television that does not succeed commercially, PBS as the broadcast home of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, and PBS as the employer of a reporter whose audio clip Bob Zadek played. Nothing in the excerpts describes the network’s organization, funding, governance or history.
PBS as a foil in a discussion of television audiences
The earliest reference comes in an episode on Hollywood and politics. Responding to a caller, Ben Shapiro argued that television tries to appeal to an audience, and that if it did not, “it would be NPR,” adding: “It would not be successful. It would be PBS.” In the same exchange Shapiro said the industry does not appeal to the broadest possible audience and that its politics enters the discussion, contrasting shows like Glee with Everybody Loves Raymond, which he described as far more popular statistically. The reference to PBS functions as an aside in an argument about advertising demographics, not as a claim about public broadcasting itself Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011).
The same episode’s discussion of the 18-49 demographic — Shapiro’s contention that the industry has persuaded advertisers that only viewers aged 18 to 49, and 18 to 34, matter, and his statement that the Nielsens had reported zero correlation between spending habits and age — does not mention PBS again.
PBS as the home of Free to Choose
PBS recurs in later episodes as the broadcaster of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose. In an episode on state tax policy and migration, Bob Zadek invoked Friedman’s book and “very successful PBS television series, Free to Choose,” to introduce the proposition that freedom means the freedom to choose — free to live where we wish, buy what we want, pay the price we want or not, and vote for whom we want. Zadek tied that to the marketplace as the mechanism that determines whether an idea or product is what people want, citing Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” Where is Everyone Going? (2013).
The same framing returns years later in an episode on Arizona school choice. Zadek said that in 1980 Friedman wrote Free to Choose, “which was the classic inquiry into the relationship between freedom and economics,” and that it later became a PBS broadcast series hosted by Friedman himself, still receiving considerable attention over 40 years later. He then applied the phrase to public education, describing Arizona’s legislation as allowing citizens to free their children from the monopoly of government schools Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022).
In a 2018 episode with David Boaz, Zadek commended a different PBS series to his audience: The Real Adam Smith, which he described as wonderful, two hours of watching, and very informative. The recommendation came at the end of a segment in which Zadek argued that government has undertaken more than it can do competently and therefore does everything badly, and in which Boaz described the Cato Institute as a think tank with about 100 people studying public policy and mentioned humanprogress.org David Boaz on the Libertarian Ethos (2018).
PBS as a source of audio
PBS appears once as the employer of a reporter. In a 2016 episode, Zadek played a clip of Martha Coile, identified in the excerpt as a PBS reporter, discussing the Supreme Court’s docket after Justice Scalia’s death. In the clip, Coile listed “very high-profile, high-stakes controversial issues before the court this term, like abortion, immigration, cases involving redistricting, unions,” noted that eight justices remained, and explained that a 4-4 split leaves a lower court’s decision standing. Zadek introduced the clip by describing Scalia’s death, the eight remaining justices, and the Court’s majority-rule practice, and he followed it by saying that the list of cases affects everybody in America and that the founders feared concentrated power Sarah Stillman on Minors on the Sex-Offender List (2016).
The same episode’s main segment concerned sex offender registries and juveniles, with Sarah Stillman, a staff writer for The New Yorker, describing her article “The List” and a case in which a girl in Texas who had pulled down the pants of another kid on the playground was charged with a sex offense in juvenile court and placed on a public registry. PBS figures in that episode only through the Coile clip.
Across episodes
Four episodes touch on PBS, and the excerpts show no development in how it is treated. In 2011 Ben Shapiro used it as a foil for commercially unsuccessful television; in 2013 and 2022 Bob Zadek cited it as the broadcaster of Friedman’s Free to Choose; in 2018 Zadek recommended The Real Adam Smith on PBS; and in 2016 a PBS reporter’s clip supplied audio for a segment on the Supreme Court. No guest or host in these excerpts argues about PBS as an institution, and no position advanced in one episode is taken up or revised in another.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts say nothing about PBS’s founding, its funding mechanism, its member stations, its governance, or its programming beyond the Friedman series and the Smith series that Zadek names. They do not state what city PBS is based in, what its relationship to NPR is, or what any of its news programs have reported apart from the Coile clip. They contain no criticism or defense of public broadcasting as policy, and no guest is identified as a PBS employee or official. Any account of PBS as an organization would have to come from sources outside this show.