When the way of consuming the medium changes, the message it carries changes as well. The reason public broadcasting is so well loved and "special" is that it was something collective (out of necessity). If I don't like charcircuit, I can find a youtube video declaring charcircuit a dangerous enemy combatant. When you are the only game in town, there was a sense of making it somewhat "casual" and we got things like bob ross and mr. rogers neighbourhood.

Sure, but PBS member stations also function as incubators, in addition to providing a platform. They provide (along with underwriting from 3rd party charitable institutions) artists/intellectuals/entertainers the upfront capital to produce their programming. YouTube isn't going to provide anyone with money upfront to make a show unless they already have a massive following. Mr. Rogers Neighborhood wouldn't exist if WQED hadn't taken a chance on a couple of 20 something's letting them produce Children's Corner in 1958.

It's certainly possible that's less necessary nowadays, given how cheap filming and creating video content is nowadays, but it's worth considering.

Imagine YouTube but publicly funded. No horrible AI targetted ads without any restraint. No monopolistic control over half the worlds viewing devices to control what's installed.

Instead, public good free informational content.

“We” aren’t politicizing anything. Trump calls anyone reporting facts he doesn’t like politically biased. Reality is politically biased to him because it doesn’t conform to his pathological lying.

PBS is not simply Bob Ross and Mr Rogers. for example, PBS NewsHour

Also NOAA receives significant funding for climate change efforts primarily from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act

This is how you know you live in a bubble.

PBS is unbelievably slanted; you just happen to agree with them in general.

Here is the CEO of PBS saying insane things about the truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPYXrhOXkwU

"The truth is a distraction"

PBS kids shows teach (sometimes via a heavy hand, I'll admit) things like acceptance of people of different skin colors and ability levels. There's a show featuring Inuits called Molly of Denali, not McKinley. Some of the characters are even LGB (not trans as far as I've seen). Sadly in the current world these concepts are considered 'political'.

As corporate media demonstrates, depending on ads and therefore, corporations, inevitably leads to compromises in your news coverage. NPR has tried to avoid this.

donations from viewers don't come with strings attached, where as advertisers want content that is conducive to the agendas of the advertisers (which generally is something that enables their bottom line, more or less).

That is why donations are better, even if it makes less direct cash.

It's brand advertising itself, precisely to give the impression of 'being funded by listeners like you.' NPR has navigated trust far better than average for the media. A quick search shows some 54% trust in them, contrasted against 28% for the media at large.

When media runs non-stop pharmaceutical ads you obviously question their motivation when reporting on pharmaceutical adjacent topics, which are almost invariably neutral to positive. Yet when NPR runs non-stop Walmart articles [1], often in a neutral to positive fashion, most are unaware that they've received millions of dollars from the Waltons.

And FWIW those millions the Waltons have given aren't that much relative to their overall funding, but if you saw an equivalent amount of annual advertising from the Waltons on NPR, you'd certainly be looking at those articles from a different perspective than somebody who's unaware of said funding.

[1] - https://www.npr.org/search/?query=walmart&page=1

Or maybe those stations will simply close, never to be reopened, which in the grand scheme of things seems like a worse outcome.