End the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

With conservatives back in power, public media is getting back to what it really excels at. No, not objective, impartial reporting. If NPR and PBS focused on that, they wouldn’t need to be so good at their side hustle: desperately lobbying Congress not to defund them.

Now that they’re good at. The lobbying efforts have worked every time conservatives have had power, going back to when President Lyndon Johnson created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the late 1960s. 

Every Republican president after Johnson has tried to defund, dissolve, or reform public broadcasting. Yet the CPB is still standing, and NPR and PBS remain unreformed.

Weak Republican members of Congress always sweep in at the last second to save public media’s bacon. That is true even for some congressmen who sit in +30 and +40 GOP districts in states as red as Oklahoma and West Virginia, but who nonetheless act as if they’re afraid of their own shadow.

Sources tell me that the NPR’s biggest member stations are taking the threat so seriously this year that they have produced an internal document that foresees four outcomes—and strategizes for each: 1. Congress claws back all funding immediately; 2. All funding is clawed back after two years; 3. Congress only cuts back half the funding; 4. Congress maintains the status quo.

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This time it must not work. The only shadow congressmen should see is that of a White House operative knocking on their door. NPR and PBS covered themselves in infamy with their leftist bias while reporting on the 2020 and 2024 elections.

According to a study the Media Research Center published last month, “PBS staff used 162 variations of ‘far right’ labels and only six ‘far left’ labels, an astounding ratio of 27 to 1.” Yamiche Alcindor, PBS’s White House correspondent between 2018 and 2022, used her public broadcasting job to practice activism for far-left causes rather than journalism.

During the 2020 election, she defended the riots by Black Lives Matter, an organization founded by Marxists who admit they are intent on “dismantling” America’s “organizing principle,” and claimed Trump had no evidence when he rightly called it a “movement to distort American ideals.” A year later she complimented the newly elected Biden as a “moral, decent man.”

Then, in a final thumb in conservatives’ eyes, last year NPR hired as its CEO the egregious Katherine Mahr, who thinks that “our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”

During the 2024 election, PBS and NPR again presented Trump as a dangerous threat to the republic and democracy, and Kamala Harris as a steady politician who was, they insisted, not all that liberal.

That may be how many progressives view Trump and Harris—in part because that’s how the liberal media, including NPR and PBS, describe them—but more than half the electorate weren’t fooled. And unlike the equally liberal MSNBC, NPR and PBS are funded by all taxpayers, by blue America and red America.

They have an obligation to be non-partisan and impartial. But they will be frantically knocking on doors on the Hill this year because they’ve given up on that, and Trump has returned to power.

Uri Berliner, an NPR editor for 25 years, wrote in a 2024 essay for the Free Press that it was in fact Trump’s political advent that finally broke NPR. “His election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair.” Tough coverage “veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.”

Before Trump, the audience was more balanced, Berliner says: 26% were conservative. But after a decade of anti-Trump stridency, only 11% of NPR’s audience today describes itself that way. “Now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America,” wrote Berliner, who ended up leaving NPR.

Ironically, the CPB’s lobbying campaign will revolve around the needs of rural folks. Past efforts relied on the educational value of public broadcasting (“It’s for the children,” George Will once wrote ruefully). This year, the effort will cynically focus on local coverage and emergency services in rural communities.

The CPB distributes to local stations about 70% of the over half a billion taxpayer dollars that Congress appropriates annually for it, Brooke Gladstone, host of On the Media, reminded me last week. “Those stations play crucial roles, especially in rural areas, in news deserts,” and to partner with “emergency services in their areas,” she said.

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Gladstone interviewed me for the WNYC-produced show that runs on public stations across the country. She accurately presented my views and was a pro who did not stoop to gotcha questions. When I asked the following day if I could record a further explanation of my views, she broke her own precedent and allowed it.

Here’s what I said: “If some local communities have disaster-response and weather-related needs that the market does not supply a solution to, state and local governments can devise and set up systems that take care of the problem, on a much cheaper basis than the entire public broadcasting apparatus, and without the attendant ills that accompany the present system.”

Gladstone tenaciously defended NPR and PBS, and we exhausted ourselves parrying back and forth for longer than an hour, only 10 minutes of which got on air. The public broadcasters must lobby Congress, she said at one point, “to defend the funding against the quadrennial attack!” 

“Why not just be less biased? Why not just be objective in reporting the news?” I asked in response.

There are already some bills in Congress that defund NPR or dissolve the CPB. The latter is the best approach. But whatever happens, everyone must understand that this is the year to finally right this wrong.

Mike Gonzalez
https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/end-the-corporation-public-broadcasting
January 18, 2025
heritage.org