PBS is not government owned and operated.....

The airwaves are considered common property, just the way the Mississippi River is, for example. Both legislatively and constitutionally it has been affirmed to be a public property. It is controlled by the Federal Communications Commission, which is supposedly the real estate agent, so to speak, for the people who own the public airwaves. The FCC then allocates space on the public airwaves to radio and TV stations and now other forms of cellular communications, etc. We own the public airwaves. We're the landlords. The radio and TV stations are the tenants. They pay us no rent. They use our property free yet they can decide who says what on our property which they control 24 hours a day.

From Wikipedia...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_broadcasting

In the United States, public broadcasting is decentralized and is not government operated, but does receive some government support. The majority of funding comes from community support to hundreds of public radio and public television stations, each of which is an individual entity licensed to one of several different non-profit organizations, municipal or state governments, or universities. Sources of funding also include on-air fund drives (see below) and - on public radio stations - the sale of underwriting "spots" (typically 15-30 seconds) to sponsors. Public radio and television organizations often produce their own programs, but purchase or receive most of their programming from national producers and program distributors such as National Public Radio (NPR), Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Public Radio International (PRI), American Public Television (APT), and American Public Media. U.S. Federal government support for public radio and television is filtered through a separate organization, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).