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The First Amendment doesn't require journalism to be fair, balanced, objective, wise, or have any other virtue. In fact, just the opposite - the First Amendment requires the government to keep hands off of print journalism (and book publishers as well) no matter how unfair, unbalanced, unobjective, or unwise the government may suppose a given print journalism to be. The First Amendment codifies the right to be, by the lights of any administration, wrong.
In fact, it makes no constitutional sense at all for the government to be in the business of saying whether any journalism is "in the public interest" or not. For if the government is virtuous enough to be able to judge that, it makes no sense at all for the government to have to submit to the judgement of people who are not, in general, wise and virtuous. Elections would then make no sense. But what we know beyond peradvernture is that if the government is allowed to define wisdom, it will define "wisdom" in terms of eternal incumbency. It is for the people, and only for the people, to decide what is wisdom, and whose speech is in the public interest.
And that implies not only that the government has no buisiness sponsoring NPR or PBS but that the govenment has no business censoring broadcasting. Which means that broadcasting - the transmission of radio signals by licensees only, and the censorship of those who do not have the imprimatur of the government to broadcast "in the public interest as a public trustee" - is illegitimate and fundamentally unconstitutional.
The mistake that people make when they criticize efforts to measure the leftist slant of PBS is, quite simply, the error of selfrighteousness. They assume that because everyone they know who is intelligent agrees with their perspective, that what they think is just what is - and any attempt to hold their own perspective up to measurement is inherently illegitimate. That is an easy mistake to make, but it it arrogance.
Such people actually assume that they do not need the First Amendment because they are always right. But the First Amendment exists because the people who know they are right just may happen to be wrong.
Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate