A House Appropriations subcommittee has voted to sharply cut back federal support for public radio and TV and, within two years, to quit funding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the pass-through agency for funding the services.

Billed as cutbacks, the reductions likely would kill, and likely are meant to kill, public broadcasting, and never mind ''Sesame Street," ''Arthur," ''Reading Rainbow" and other excellent children's programs that would go. Perhaps, although not innocent of conflict, they are simply not violent enough for this Congress.

Never underestimate politics' resistance to reality when it is in the throes of an ideological lust. The political and cultural right has been working up an animus against public broadcasting out of a doctrinaire objection to spending public money for any merely good purpose and on the grounds that, in as much as public radio and TV aren't conservative, they must be liberal.

This is suicidal irony.

Suicidal because, given even half an invitation, there isn't a conservative in the country, especially a cultural conservative, who wouldn't mount a soapbox and inveigh against the crudities of popular culture -- and they would have a very real point.

Commercial radio is a tedium of standard-issue pop music formats, nudge-and-wink ''personalities" working as close as the FCC allows to the indecency line and, for nearly all of talk radio, one long right-wing primal scream.

Commercial TV has finally achieved its predicted fate as a vast wasteland.

It is a compound of crime shows, ever more gory, of sitcoms that so nearly amount to one long dirty joke that they don't even bother to double their entendres any more and of reality shows that traffic in the prurience, fake thrills and contrived emotions of manufactured realities.

Our nation's greatest musicians and singers, our best playwrights -- even our mediocre playwrights --, our opera companies, our artists and our great documentarians are nowhere to be found on the commercial dials.

And where is all of this not true? On public radio and TV where much of the best of our culture, including our popular culture, does get an airing: fine recorded and performance music, ballet and other dance, moving dramas and insightful documentaries, many of them thoughtful studies of our national history.

Public TV and radio are the anti-crudity media, refuges from the wasteland, a demonstration that mass media don't have to probe constantly for the lowest common denominator and a standing rebuke to the commercial media for defaulting on their putative public trust.

The attempt to defund public TV and radio is of a piece with the Bush administration's appointment of conservative operatives to the networks' policy positions, a political intrusion even Nixon didn't try.

Rep. Ralph Regula, the subcommittee chairman, pooh-poohs worries that he's got it in for the public media. He's pushing the cuts, he says, only because the government no longer can afford ''nice-to-do" items.

Sure.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers.