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Big Bird needs our help. That's right; Jim Lehrer, "The American Experience" and that big yellow bird have all become targeted by President Bush's new, severe budget cuts.\nWhenever budgets need cutting and belts need tightening, public broadcasting is always an easy target. When there are 300 channels providing a wide range of programming, it's quite easy for free-market adherents to say that PBS should simply vanish. So, to no one's surprise, when Bush proposed his budget, 13 percent of the public broadcasting budget was gone. \nThirteen percent doesn't sound like much, but that's $53.5 million. That's a whole lot of pledge drives -- although it's no more than a drop in the bucket for the federal budget -- and since all TV stations have to reconfigure for high-definition by 2009, we're cutting at the wrong time.\nWhy fund PBS? When we're fighting a War on Terror, paying retiring boomers' Social Security and trying to salvage public schools, it's easy to question public broadcasting's purpose.\nYet PBS provides essential programming that no one else on TV is willing to put on. "Frontline" provides the best documentary filmmaking on television today, while Tavis Smiley and Charlie Rose each broadcast extensive interviews with newsmakers. All of this simply adds to the excellent educational programming that PBS has for children and adults, from "Sesame Street" to "Nova." \nOK, say the free-market advocates; but if these shows are so good, they should succeed on network TV or cable just the same, right? "Sesame Street," for example, makes money on Tickle-Me Elmo dolls, but when the program was just starting out, think about the unbelievable risk PBS took by running a kid's show that centered on foam puppets who sang about counting and the alphabet. If such a show were pitched today to Nickelodeon, it would never run. \nIt's hard to think about PBS as risk-taking, but the promise of federal funding allows PBS to provide a unique experimental service to television. There would be no multi-part miniseries without the revolutionary "Masterpiece Theater." There would be no cooking shows without Julia Child. There would be no educational children's programming without "Sesame Street." And while each of these shows was supported by local viewers, each individual station needed funding from the federal government to keep afloat . \nWatching PBS helped make me who I am today. I grew up with Mister Rogers and Elmo, watched Ken Burns documentaries and classic movies with my parents and laughed with "Monty Python" reruns on late nights. \nNow, when commercial stations like CNN and Fox News broadcast "truthiness" as news, when every show is just another spin-off or imitation, when carbonated, sugared drivel passes as educational children's programming, we need PBS more than ever.\nLet me end with a little anecdote. In the early 1970s, some PBS affiliates needed a movie to play royalty-free. So they picked up a forgotten Frank Capra Christmas film called "It's A Wonderful Life." In doing so, PBS saved an American classic for a country that needed it badly. Now it's our turn to return the favor. Donate to your local affiliate and write your congressman today. Help save public broadcasting.