(FORTUNE Magazine) – As always happens during ''pledge week'' on public television, the latest round (mid-March) featured a certain amount of bitter back talk by your servant anytime the babbling pitchpersons came on-screen. This time, however, our rebuttal was much better prepared than usual, as we had been hovering extensively over Making Public Television Public, a paper composed by Laurence Jarvik and issued recently by the Heritage Foundation. Nutshell brief, it recommends that the way to make public TV truly public is to . . . (pause for dramatic effect) take it private. Specifically, it proposes that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which receives maybe $250 million a year from the U.S. Treasury and disburses same to local and national public broadcasters (including National Public Radio), be sold to private investors. The privatized CPB would continue to support high-quality television -- a mission that, Jarvik persuasively argues, does not require government support. He makes several points. For openers, the original premise supporting a federal role -- that quality broadcasting was uneconomic in commercial markets -- has not made sense for many years. The broadcasting in question now attracts an audience that is an advertiser's dream: huge, upscale, highly educated. In addition, the infinite burgeoning of cable programs tailored to minor market niches has undercut the argument for government as the only possible supporter of worthy non-mass broadcasting. Another rap on public television is that year after year it keeps proving itself over-susceptible to left-liberal biases, especially in its documentaries -- even though the 1967 act establishing the CPB mandates ''balance'' in public-affairs programming. Despite a few over-cited exceptions like William F. Buckley's Firing Line, public television has resisted all efforts to balance its public-affairs coverage. (Anyone inclined to argue about balance should begin by consulting the detailed evidence in another recent report: Balance and Diversity in PBS Documentaries, published by the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C.) Jarvik leaves you thinking that if privatization ever came to public TV, viewers need never notice the difference. Privatization could mainly mean that advertising was called advertising, not ''enhanced underwriting.'' Public television spokespersons heatedly and repeatedly cling to such euphemisms, denying that they run commercials -- a contention recently ridiculed in an editorial in Broadcasting magazine. Its title: ''Quacks Like a Duck.'' Broadcasting made the additional point that the quacking in question has to be viewed as unfair competition for private commercial broadcasting. More ducks and fewer pitchpersons is the new slogan around our house.