NPR and PBS used to justify their unjustifiable taxpayer funding by telling people that poor children would be harmed if their educational programming was cut. Then, in 2015, Sesame Street got a private deal with HBO, and a stream of educational content came online.
Now, the mantra is that without public broadcasting, there will be no advance warning systems for weather emergencies in hard-to-reach places and that local news coverage will dry up.
The two syllogisms are as follows: 1) Without public media, there is no local coverage, and without local news, there is no democracy, ergo, without public media, there is no democracy. 2) Without public media, there is no warning service, and without warning services, people will die, ergo, without public media, people will die.
The last one sounds like a hostage-taking situation: “Send us money, or people will die!” It’s not true, of course, as I said in my testimony this Wednesday in the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency’s hearing on whether we should cut off public media.
The Democrats on the subcommittee, unaware perhaps of the HBO deal, kept bringing out pictures of Elmo, the Cookie Monster, and Big Bird.
The CEOs of NPR and PBS, Katherine Maher and Paula Kerger, respectively, who were the star witnesses in the hearing, knew better. They brought with them the head of Alaska Public Media, Ed Ulman. Alaska is exhibit A for “hard-to-reach places.”
When I testified, I said that both arguments were hogwash. “Over 98% of Americans today own a mobile phone,” I said. “Even Alaska, one of our most isolated states, has high levels of internet penetration.”
To respond to the other argument, I said, “As for the claim that the taxpayer is the last available business model for local news, NPR and PBS are asking us to believe something laughable: that the government can fund a media structure that actually keeps the government in check.”
I have thought it out, and I think I may have a solution. If providing warnings for local weather emergencies is really the top concern — it’s not, but let’s call their bluff here — then we should have the taxpayer pay for that, and not for the other nonsense that NPR, PBS, and the rest of state media do.
Let’s reduce the Corporation for Public Broadcasting all the way down to a distributor of much-reduced funding to broadcasters of weather emergency systems, and let George Soros, the Tides Foundation, and other donors pick up the tab for the public affairs nonsense that NPR and PBS put out: PBS NewsHour, Frontline, NPR’s Morning Edition, Fresh Air, and the ironically named All Things Considered.
Congress created the CPB in 1967 with the Public Broadcasting Act. It has two jobs: to collect the monies that Congress appropriates for public broadcasting, $535 million in the continuing resolution that just passed, and distribute that money to PBS, NPR, and more than 1,500 radio and TV stations.
So one way to get rid of the CPB without meeting the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate would be to shrink it to an infinitesimal size. And we would be allaying the fears of the public media folks!
Again, this isn’t their real concern, just their latest excuse. The very appearance of Ulman at the hearing was in fact yet another desperate move to keep public funding alive.
Conservative presidents and Congresses have tried to get rid of public media since President Lyndon Johnson created it in the late 1960s as part of the Great Society because public media is so biased to the Left.
As I said in my testimony, what we have “today is a circular, undemocratic relationship: Democrats unanimously vote for more and more money for public media, and in exchange, public media heavily tip the scales in their favor. It’s a nice arrangement for them, but it must end.”
Executives at NPR and PBS really are concerned this time around, with Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency cutting down the bureaucracy. They have been strategizing with their lobbyists for months.
Ulman’s appearance was one of these desperate acts of misdirection, the form of deception that magicians practice at children’s birthday parties when they draw the audience’s attention away from one hand and divert it to the other. And what we have here is misdirection on many different levels.
First, public media executives wanted Congress and the public to think of Alaska Public Media as the only media outlet that will tell you when the lake is frozen and not think of Alaska Public Media as the stations that led with ugly stories that smeared Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) as an antisemite or attacked the administration’s effort to save children from puberty blockers.
Second, they want you to think of rural areas such as Alaska as the typical place for NPR and PBS consumers. In reality, as all research shows, the typical NPR listener is a purple-haired adjunct professor in some college town, perhaps teaching gender studies, who actually disparages rural places as “flyover country.”
But the ultimate misdirection at the hearing was the attempt to make people think that Ulman, the nice man from Alaska, is the real face of NPR, and not Maher, who wants to suppress ideas she doesn’t like, who calls President Donald Trump a racist sociopath, and who reminds many people of Chairman Mao Zedong at the height of China’s Cultural Revolution.
In that, they failed miserably. Republican members eviscerated Maher by just reading back to her her past social media posts and other utterances. A particularly brutal exchange between Maher and Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) went like this:
Gill: Do you believe that looting is morally wrong?
Maher: I believe that looting is illegal, and I refer to it as counterproductive. I think it should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Gill: Do you believe it’s morally wrong, though?
Maher: Of course.
Gill: Of course? Then why did you refer to it as counterproductive? They’re very different — very different way to describe it.
Maher: It is both morally wrong and counterproductive, as well as being illegal.
Gill: You tweeted, “It’s hard to be mad about protests in reference to the BLM protest, not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression.” You didn’t condemn the looting. You said that it was counterproductive. NPR also promoted a book called In Defense of Looting. Do you think that that’s an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars?
Maher: I’m unfamiliar with that book, sir, and I don’t believe that [I] was at [that] time.
Gill: You tweeted that you read that book, but —
Maher: I don’t believe that I did read that book, sir.
Gill: Do you think that a few years ago, NPR educated America about “the whole community of genderqueer dinosaur enthusiasts.” Do you think that that’s an inappropriate use of tax dollars?
Maher: I was not at NPR at the time, sir.
Gill: That’s not the question, though. Do you think that that’s an appropriate use of our tax dollars?
Maher: I think our tax dollars that we use are to be able to provide a wide range of perspectives.
Gill: I’ll take that as a yes.
NPR CEO REGRETS CALLING TRUMP A ‘RACIST’ AND ADMITS HUNTER BIDEN COVERAGE MISTAKES
Things went so badly for Maher that nobody should be surprised if, in yet one more attempt to keep Musk at bay, they find a way to get rid of her. But NPR has tried that before. In 2011, it fired Vivian Schiller as CEO after another scandal in the network, the firing of Juan Williams, and NPR did not get better. It got worse.
This is why I told the subcommittee, “Don’t try to mend public broadcasting. End it.”
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its board of trustees.