is there any justification for continuing to ask taxpayers to fund npr and pbs?

HERITAGE FOUNDATION ^ | Dec 7, 17 | MIKE GONZALEZ

[Drango]

In mid-1971, less than a year after the Public Broadcasting Service was created, a 35-year-old lawyer in the Nixon White House warned that conservatives were being “confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences - that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC.” That lawyer was Antonin Scalia, future Supreme Court justice, whose judicial rulings and observations would make him a conservative icon. His predictions were correct. Pledged as “a vital public resource to enrich our homes, educate our families and to provide assistance to our classrooms” by Lyndon Johnson in his 1967 State of the Union address, what was then known as educational television quickly morphed into something its originators in government insisted it would not become: a liberal forum for public affairs and journalism. When Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which set up public broadcasting in the United States on Nov. 7, 1967 - we mark the half-century anniversary this year - he warned against it degenerating into services that “could mislead as well as teach,” which is regrettably where we find ourselves today.

Legislators at the time fought hard to keep public affairs out of a purportedly educational endeavor out of fear that including it would be constitutionally dubious, and that taxpayer-funded opinion would generate political controversy. Even the liberal godfather of public broadcasting, Fred Friendly of the Ford Foundation, understood that “we must avoid at all costs any situation in which budgets of news and public-affairs programming would be appropriated or even approved by any branch of the Federal government.” During the debates throughout 1967 leading to passage of the bill, Senator William Springer included a ban on opinion because he felt that “the fastest way to get it [public broadcasting] changed to something else was to get it into the business of editorializing.” His colleague Senator Norris Cotton also warned that if public broadcasters ever exhibited such a bias, Congress would make life “very uncomfortable” by shutting down “some of their activities in the Appropriations Committee.”

That consequence has not materialized. Attempts by conservative leaders from Nixon onward to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in reaction to clear violations of this mandate have been repeatedly stymied. Scalia was once again clairvoyant when he said defunding would be “politically difficult in view of … the generally favorable public image which CPB has developed.” The same can be said for impracticable efforts to strip out the public broadcasting component. In 2017, a new Republican president promises to eliminate funding for public broadcasting. Though the strategy may fail yet again, the time is ripe for such action.

The argument for defunding is that bias exists in public broadcasting. True, a government that is $20 trillion in debt should not fund a service that is not included among the enumerated powers of the Constitution, especially when the original justification no longer holds in the present technological environment. But taxes should not be coerced from the citizenry to fund expression that is consistently found to lack balance, a position upheld by courts in other contexts. Thomas Jefferson, who never heard a broadcast, was undoubtedly right when he observed that “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagations of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”

This paper will build on the academic work of, among others, Charles S. Clark at Congressional Quarterly, Trevor Burrus at The Cato Institute and Patricia Chuh at The Catholic University of America. The author would also like to thank his intern Maiya Clark for her invaluable help and insights. And as befits a paper written during the anniversary of the great public broadcasting debate, it will make its case by dissecting the historical record and the cultural antecedents of public broadcasting.

Introduction

On the morning of June 2, 2017, one day after President Trump had announced that he would pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, National Public Radio informed its listening audience that the U.S. president’s actions notwithstanding, China, Europe and many private corporations would continue to work “in a sustainable direction.” NPR was not ostensibly giving the opinion of any individual or institution. It was simply reporting the news while also implying that the practices that would follow the President’s actions were unsustainable. News at NPR, Public Broadcasting Service (NPR’s television counterpart) and the other smaller public broadcasters is, however, almost always framed in like manner within the ideological assumptions of liberal elites. What is produced is a quality product - but one that skews to the left.

NPR and PBS deny they are biased and insist they just report the news. In this case, they might argue that “sustainability” is not an ideologically loaded term but simply a synonym for “action on climate change.” After all, at American Public Media - the second largest producer of public radio programs after NPR - stories about energy on the show “Marketplace” are reported by the “Sustainability Desk,”[1] a unit set up by the liberal Tides Foundation to look at climate-related stories through the lens of environmental and social justice.[2] Public broadcast apologists might counter that with 97 percent of scientists endorsing “the consensus opinion on man-made global warming,”[3] the unsustainability of refusing to follow the Paris Agreement is a scientific fact. That framework would ignore - perhaps because they have not heard - conservative critiques of that assertion. One such critique made by colleagues at The Heritage Foundation[4] points out that the study in which that claim is made does not stand up to scrutiny. Writers and announcers for NPR may be unaware of other perspectives and their own biases.

NPR and PBS do not broadcast government propaganda. But they do represent the views of a particular group - those of the politically correct elite left - whose assumptions frame public affairs programming on public broadcasting. This group is comprised of a bien pensant coalition of government bureaucrats, academics, entertainers, philanthropists, ethnic group activists, corporate leaders, etc., many of whom control America’s institutions. This coalition is an updated version of the “managerial elite” which the political theorist James Burnham warned would come to rule industrial societies.[5] The views of this group almost always favor government control of or involvement in everything from healthcare to the environment to the media. “I don’t think there is any denying the fact that the establishmentarian thought is liberal,” William F. Buckley said with some bitterness about his experiences working on “Firing Line” at PBS.[6]

The Burnhamite elite bias demonstrated on climate is replicated on issues from gun control to taxation to abortion.[7] On the live wire issue of national identity, the CPB is all in: In its 2018–2020 Federal Appropriations Request and Justification,[8] two of the five activities that receive funding have to do with promoting “diversity.” This is despite the fact that conservatives as well as a growing number of liberals[9] are warning that the emphasis on subnational groups erodes national solidarity. Michael Lind even goes so far as to write that the managerial elites of North America and Europe champion diversity because it “reduces the likelihood that workers of different ethnicities will unite in a common front against economic elites.”[10]

Many if not most journalists (not just taxpayer-funded ones) echo the opinions of the elites, whom they tend to use as sources. The difference here is taxpayer involvement. Problems inevitably arise when taxpayers are asked to fund the work of journalists. Teaching children to count can be done in a neutral fashion, as can a cultural series on Shakespeare. The nature of public affairs itself, however, tends toward politicization. A documentary on the Vietnam War or climate change will by necessity involve opinion. The problems become all the more acute when one side of the political spectrum perceives persistent bias. Conservatives make up an infinitesimally small portion of the audience for public broadcasting.[11] Conservative leaders must now find the intestinal fortitude to free Americans from the tax obligation to fund it. President Trump’s 2018 budget, which includes the removal of federal grants for public broadcasting, is an opportunity to do so.[12] Defunding would not be easy. Each time funding cuts are proposed, public broadcasting institutions tout their educational role.[13] As George Will writes, “Often the last, and sometimes the first, recourse of constituencies whose subsidies are in jeopardy is: ‘It’s for the children.’”[14]

Cutting CPB’s subsidies should be the mission not only of conservatives but also of all who care about the health of First Amendment rights and of self-rule. Government paying for news for Americans to consume damages freedom of the press. The money is not insignificant. NPR, PBS and other public broadcasters such as American Public Media and the far-left Pacifica Radio network get about half a billion dollars in funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ($445 million in the 2017 appropriation),[15] which gets all its money from the taxpayer. That is about one tenth of the $5 billion in discretionary cuts included in the House of Representatives budget released in July. Though that budget is less clear than the President’s one on elimination of funding, it calls for encouraging private funding for the CPB, the activities of which, it says, “go beyond the core mission of the Federal Government.”[16]

More importantly, perhaps, the prevailing Orwellian doublespeak that occurs when the media repeats the managerial elite’s interpretation of policy choices can endanger the ability of the electorate to detect the potential for an erosion of democratic self-rule. The Paris climate accord, championed by NPR, is a case in point. President Obama, in league with foreign leaders[17], refused to submit it to Senate confirmation. Thus, by repeating the mantra of a global elite, public broadcasters perversely limit the choices of the people coercively taxed to fund them.

Only an in-depth look at the trends and events that led up to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the hearings and debates that were part of it during the Johnson Administration, and the creation of the institutions under the Nixon Administration can provide the proper context for what is needed today.

~snip

Much more, please read online

[Drango]

BRAVO.

[SMARTY]

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[rlmorel]

One of my pet peeves for decades. It makes me grind my teeth to see the letters “NPR” or “PBS”.

[Lurkinanloomin]

NPR is the part of the Ministry of Propaganda we pay for unwillingly.

[golux]

With very few exceptions, everyone at NPR is either a woman, or a homosexual, or both. Insiders call it a “big gay mafia.”

[Rurudyne]

Seems like the more government money PBS got the less British SciFi they ran. The Avengers or the Prisoner? As if....

[Brilliant]

Gotta save those liberal reporter jobs.

[kaktuskid]

Especially now that PBS takes “ads”-they just call them “grants”. Notice the Chrysler ad with the Sesame Street characters?

[real saxophonist]

All those shows start or end with 'Additional funding was provided by the So-and-so and Such-and-such Foundation'.

Well, if it's that important, why don't y'all provide ALL the funding?

[Jim W N]

Well, for ANY federal activity, the first question is ALWAYS, “IS IT CONSTITUTIONAL?” If not, the federal action is illegal and must be stopped and abolished. In this case, since there is no constitutional justification for federal involvement in NPR and PBS, there never should have been federal involvement and it should be stopped and abolished.

Great. What about the rest of the 80% unconstitutional portion of the $4 trillion feds? NPR and PBS only scratch the surface.

Also the feds don’t ASK taxpayers to do anything. The feds FORCE the taxpayer to pay for whatever the hell they feel like. Until We the People say “ENOUGH” and get the feds back into their constitutional cage as OUR servants, this tyranny will continue and get worse.

[thesharkboy]

PBS and NPR have no Constitutional basis. Therefore, they must be defunded and disbanded. Since no one in government gives a sh*t about the Constitution, I know this won’t happen, but the point is that nothing else matters.

[lgjhn23]

Ummmm..............NOPE!
Let em fund themselves like we have to
IF they can’t do it, they go the way of the DoDo bird.

[Sopater]

No, there has never been ANY justification for it.

[Salvation]

NO!

[SkyDancer]

And the NFL???

[\/\/ayne]

We need to shut down every wacko left-wing government operation there is, so yeah.

[thesharkboy]

Well, for ANY federal activity, the first question is ALWAYS, “IS IT CONSTITUTIONAL?”

Yep. The entire article above is irrelevant. PBS and NPR are among the many unconstitutional agencies and must be disbanded. Nothing else matters.

[petro45acp]

Absolutely not! While we are at it, NEA, public education, national council for the arts (or whatever). Then, lets move on to the big sucking chest wounds, welfare, social security, medicine, and the feral reserve. Taxes should go to national defense (with the proviso that contracting officers become 4$$holes regarding overruns), and the interstate highway system (form moving men and materiel during times of crisis). For good measure, noaa, fema, and any of a number of federally funded insurance scams, in which the government has no business participating.

fella can dream.........

KYPD

[polymuser]

None whatsoever. It’s not public access (no Bob & Doug shows for you or me). It’s got many sponsors and many commercially sold, trademarked products. It’s politically biased (um, duh). And the Internet replaces its reason for being. Buh bye.

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