Right to television?

This is case of seriously misplaced priorities in my opinion, when a government decides to allocate more funds for switching over to a digital transmission system than it does for education! Consider the following excerpt from the article in Popular Mechanics

The question is not meant to be cynical. There is, after all, a public-interest rationale for as many people as possible to have access to the television medium—in fact, it's the sheer number of people who have access to television that makes it such a powerful technology. According to Nielsen Media Research, 98.2 percent of American households have a television. By some measures, that even beats the penetration rate of basic adult literacy skills, which was last pegged in 2003 at 86 percent (to be sure, a comparison between households and individuals is inexact at best, but the statistic is still jarring). So when it comes to getting the word out for emergency alerts, public service announcements, news, election information and educational programming, there's no more effective distribution method.

Nevertheless, it would be naive to think that television's primary function in most households is as an emergency alert or learning tool. And it's illuminating to put the government's $1.5 billion allocation in perspective. Consider: The proposed 2009 federal budget for adult basic and literacy education is $574.6 million.