if that funding were guaranteed and beyond the influence of those government officials, then they wouldn’t have any fear of revenge-based budget cuts.
this could be accomplished by putting control of the funding into the hands of multiple levels of committee oversight so that no one person or even a single committee could threaten it.
Kinda like how Reagan removed the fairness doctrine... Oh, sure, any ol' President could have it restored... 8 years of Clinton, 8 years of Obama, 2+ years of Biden... Hey, it's only been since 1987... 36 years... I'm sure it will be back any day now...
My argument is that anything the government grants you can also be taken away… and if the counter is “But it can be restored too…”
it’s easy to win your own arguments when you put words in my mouth. why even bother pretending to have a debate when all you want is to put on a performance?
you can wallow in defeatist nihilism. I have better things to do.
It depends entirely on how the funding arrangement is enshrined. Some mechanisms are easier to undo and some are practically impossible to undo.
So while you could say that nothing in our world is guaranteed, it’s going too far to say we shouldn’t have publicly funded media because any old president can just snap his fingers and make it all go away. That’s not the case.
And even if funding were easy to pull, that would mean no public media until someone else snaps their fingers and restores it.
Kinda like how Reagan removed the fairness doctrine... Oh, sure, any ol' President could have it restored... 8 years of Clinton, 8 years of Obama, 2+ years of Biden... Hey, it's only been since 1987... 36 years... I'm sure it will be back any day now...
That’s the problem with charity— free reporting becomes a privilege bestowed to a select a few by private institutions and subject to their whims rather than a right guaranteed to everyone by the government. 
Publicly funded doesn't mean government controlled, PBS and NPR only get about 10% of their budgets from the government. Most of it comes from Viewers like You! (Donations)