That seems like a dishonest comparison. While it's true public television has some divulgation programmes, they are usually pushed to the secondary channels and they aren't watched by many people. If public television consisted only of those programmes, its budget would be much, much lower, and I would be happy to pay for it.

The truth is that public TV nowadays contains lots of series and movies (in many cases, American), cooking programmes, tabloid celebrity stuff, etc that they think they must do to stay competitive with private TV. And that's rubbish.