It’s SOS time at National Public Radio — “save our subsidies.”
Today, NPR will put CEO Vivian Schiller in front of a sympathetic National Press Club audience to plead for Congress to spare its funding. And if the announcement is anything to go by, Ms. Schiller will tug at the heart strings by insisting that “rural and economically distressed communities” will be hardest hit by this “significant blow” against public broadcasting.
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But it might be too little, too late, and way too manipulative this time. National Public Radio is too anachronistic, too expensive, and, yes, way too liberal for the new Congress to show it sympathy.
NPR could have saved itself years ago, perhaps, by arresting its slide into liberal orthodoxy after the GOP first went after it. But it was too blind (and too smug, maybe?) to concede that it was growing increasingly and stridently biased. No institution that touches the public dime can live long by being partisan.
So now it has dragged down PBS, too, which has done a somewhat better job of keeping its biases in check. It has culminated in the new House of Representatives’ voting last month to cut out the entire $460 million budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which purports to oversee both. Sen. Jim DeMint (R., N.C.) also introduced a bill stripping the CPB of funding last week. PBS has done its lobbying bit by sending Arthur to Congress. Now it’s Ms. Schiller’s turn.
Alas for Ms. Schiller, the arguments against saving the CPB funding are too strong. That they take the public dime at all is, in fact, one of the fundamental problems with NPR and PBS.
The very idea of government journalism falls apart over the following Catch-22: Any institution that uses taxpayer money must be accountable to the political representatives of those taxpayers; a journalist, however, must never be accountable to a politician. On this contradiction alone, NPR should lose its funding (though cultural and educational programming at PBS could in principle survive).
NPR, of course, would counter that the CPB solves this Catch-22 by providing a political “firewall” for NPR’s journalists. All the CPB has done, however, has been to insulate NPR from criticism that might have helped it while failing to correct its problems. What NPR needed was adult supervision; instead it got Vivian Schiller, a former New York Times executive under whose tutelage NPR veered further and further left, took $1.8 million from the liberal millionaire George Soros, and fired commentator Juan Williams for things he said on Fox News.
If a debate I recently had on an NPR affiliate is anything to go by, NPR will also argue that, no, the American people don’t think it is biased. My debate was with Patrick Butler, board member of the Public Media Association, the group hastily put together last month to conduct the lobbying effort. He left me convinced that NPR will pour all its energy into persuading enough Republicans to spare its funding one more time.
It will not, however, do anything to bring a better balance to its newsroom. It is, after all, a newsroom that counts among its reporters Dina Temple-Raston, who covers national security and counterterrorism despite authoring a book on civil liberties with Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU; Peter Overby, who follows campaign financing despite hailing from the ultra-left group Common Cause; and Nina Totenberg, whose liberal political opinions are aired for all to hear every week on TV news shows.
At its peak quarter-hour listenrship, PBS has 2.5 million listeners NATION-WIDE.
Name a commercial radio or television network that could survive on this low level of listener support.
NPR / CPB long-ago abandoned any semblance of being balanced.
The biggest problem for decades has been the liberal bias paid for by taxpayers. I am tired of hearing NPR quote the NYT and then back it up with a quote from the BBC or worse, the French. I also get offended by PBS offering the most conservative programming possible, like classical music no less, Pavorotti and the tenors, etc. during pledge week and then the next week sticking you with Frontline and POV. They do this every time. If there is a market for these people they will be bought. But I am tired of helping to pay the big salaries, like it or not, for leftist shills like the twit in charge of NPR and her little goon sguad of politically correct harpies.
Enough....I feel better now after the rant. Thanks.
I don't really see the Senate passing or the President signing legislation that eliminates CPB so I'm a little nonplussed. Besides, some bias is inherent in any reporting. My life has been enriched by PBS and NPR. They are both good uses of my taxes, far more than many redundant defense programs.
"I don't really see the Senate passing or the President signing legislation that eliminates CPB so I'm a little nonplussed."
A good point, which brings up another one: I don't expect our current government to do ANYTHING about the country's budget woes, because they're NEVER going to agree on what substantive cuts need to be made. They might as well all just go home.
A few years ago, I prepared my 12th grade English class to participate in a round table discussion to be aired by our local public radio affiliate in Albany, NY. The panel consisted of 6 adults and 12 students and their topic was affirmative action. The moderator, Alan Chartok, assembled a group of adults who were all personally (and some even professionally) invested in promoting affirmative action. It was left to the high-schoolers to introduce any suggestion of a an argument against it. The enlightened, liberal adults simply intimidated the children into silence or agreement.
The low point came when a brave young woman stood her ground and artqiculated a rational critique of the practice of affirmative action in the workplace. One of the panelists, a black man whose job was to monitor affirmative action in the hiring practices of a regional supermarket, observed that in his position he often had to address such attacks leveled at minorities from the Klan. The Klan! He assured us that the Klan is still a potent force for oppression and that we needed to support affirmative action in order to combat the dark forces of insidious racism. I did my best to suppress the urge to laugh out loud at the notion that the Klan exerts a powerful influence in upstate New York. But as I looked around the table I saw the adults nodding gravely as if to agree that yes, the Klan sure is a problem here in the belly of the beast of Northeast liberalism.
It would be very gratifying to withdraw tax payer support from such a loathesome nest partisan hacks because they so richly deserve it.
Smither-Jones, you might believe that funding for PBS and NPR are good uses of your tax dollars. However, many others feel that it is not a good use of their tax dollars. You might believe that some of your tax dollars are spent unwisely. Simple solution, and the 'solution' that was envisioned by the founders of our republic: A limited gov't that focuses on its limited core responsibilities will not require large transfers of wealth from its citizens.
Let those who enjoy and/or believe in the mission of organizations like NPR, PBS, Planned Parenthood, the NRA, etc., fund those organizations, rather than have those organizations partly funded via coercive federal taxation. Oh wait, I don't believe the NRA, an organization that supports constitutional rights receives any federal funding.
Regarding redundant defense spending, yes, there are redundancies. However, national defense is a core federal responsibility. In addition, w/out an effective national defense we would probably not even be in a position to be discussing funding of non-essential services such as 'public' broadcasting.
What really irks me is hearing the shills on PBS urging folks to call their elected officials to voice their concerns, of course they don't push their agenda, but the call is on our dime.
It reminds me of the teachers who take sick days to protest.
CPB CEO Patricia de Stacy Harrison received $298,884 in reportable compensation and another $70,630 in other compensation in 2009.
PBS President Paula Kerger recieved $632,233 in reportable compnsation in 2009.
President Emeritus Kevin Klose received $1,200,000 in reportable compansation in 2009.
I read elsewhere that NPR's listnership self-identifies itself as eighty-something percent "White".
There's your defunding argument right there; what good liberal could possibly defend a subsidized entity that only serves such a narrow and non-"Diverse" base???
Any other such taxpayer-subsidized entity that was found to be benefiting whites almost exclusively would be denounced and trashed by the entire left!
The 1st amendment deals with both freedom of the press and freedom of religion--yet we apply the contruct of separation of ___ and state only to church. We need separation of media and state. State involvment with media is just as dangerous as state involvment with chuch; probably more so in a society where more citizens watch the news than go to church.
Non-commercial radio can survive without NPR or CPB but they will have to do so on listener contributions and/or insitutional support. My favorite FM station is a club - all volunteer, no salaries or subsidies. Of course, the leftists sneak in, trying to politicize everything.
Even Pacifica Foundation's network of five FM stations gets 10% of its operating budget from government sources - and it is not affliated with NPR or CPB so we need to keep an eye on the backdoors.
Let's not forget that the FCC allocates big chunks of the broadcast spectrum to "non-commercial, educational" broadcasters - about 15% for FM. The bandwidth that Pacifica's five stations claim is worth $500 million on a free market basis.
As someone who hails from a rural, economically distressed area (central Missouri), I can happily report that we will somehow muddle through our shallow lives without Public Broadcasting. Oh, the horror!!
The government should not fund radio and TV programming.
Over the decades, as I grew more conservative, NPR and PBS grew more liberal until, today, I can't stand to listen to the so-called journalism they peddle. I've grown suspicious of any programming on public stations. I watch PBS, but confine myself to dramas and documentaries, and then, only with due cynicism. I've caught them in so many lies, half-truths and manipulations it sickens me. They should have been stripped of any taxpayer support decades ago.
Sesame Street, from the beginning, was a brainwashing implement for the multiculturalist agenda. All PBS News is slanted far to the left and always has been. Documentaries, even "how to" cook, gardening, carpentry and building shows all support leftist agendas.
The left-leaning nature of public broadcasting is not new and it did not happen gradually. It was part of a greater leftist plan already designed. How to maintain public funding and gain more commercial support from twisted Soros-types and duped, careless, or unprincipled advertisers is ongoing strategic development.
Even if NPR and PBS were more balanced (ha ha ha), it still needs to be defunded. It doesn't matter what their bias is (not that we don't know what it is), whatever it is, it shouldn't be getting taxpayers money.
Even if it was conservative (which it isn't by a long shot) it shouldn't be funded.
So even if somehow they would agree to balance it better (an impossible job in my opinion) there should be no attempt to fund it with tax dollars.
The crazy thing is: They could do whatever they wanted if they would just give up the tax money!!! It not like they would take the licenses and stations away (I know some would sell off all of it).
Do they like these battles every few years? Granted they have won them every time so far. However they will lose it someday. Is it so hard to raise more money privately or to cut the budget?
Almost 4 years ago, the BBC released the results of a study which discussed its left bias.
If NPR was unable to imagine such introspection, then it could have learned from the lead of the BBC. Since it did not, then one is left to suppose that such things matter little to NPR management. Voters and taxpayers take note.
NPR now will have to be more competitive in the marketplace of ideas now. Oh how liberals hate to compete: affirmative action, preferred minority contracting, welfare, etc- they are going to be really put off.
Yes to Click Clack. I would pay a subscription fee to be able to listen to them.
But gpsjr is correct. The GOP won't have the fortitude to pull this off. Here in Wisconsin, there is no defense of Walker by anyone - notably not even by Walker. I'd like once (since I'm heavily invested in Wisc. real estate) to hear that if we don't get relief from union rules, the state budget cuts merely mean my property taxes skyrocket. And I go out of business, because around here in this economy I cannot raise rents.
So no defense of Walker, and I expect no fight to destroy government propaganda. Just like there was no fight to preserve the domestic oil industry, either now or in 1995 or ever. The GOP is dead, and must be replaced by a conservative party.
BTW, electing Donald "I had to contribute to Rahm Emanuel" Trump will not solve our problem.
