President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have finally delivered on a longtime GOP promise: defunding National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. Many taxpayers will celebrate that their hard-earned dollars are no longer going to ideologically biased, out-of-date media. Meanwhile, liberal commentators are losing their minds.
For example, liberal pundit Robert Reich claimed Trump was trying to “fire Elmo” and compared this action to slaveowners and the Nazis. (In reality, only 4% of Sesame Street’s funding came from the government, and it just signed a deal with cash-flush Netflix.)
Alternatively, New York Times journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro shared an NPR reporter’s post and absurdly decried the defunding as “another attack on freedom of the press in this country.”
In reality, taking away taxpayer money is not an attack on freedom of the press. Media outlets have no right to our money. They are, of course, largely free to broadcast however they’d like. Yet they will have to find a willing funder for their work now. That’s good, actually, and not at all inconsistent with a free press. If anything, fully separating state and media promotes true freedom of the press by disentangling any conflict of interest.
The other bizarre aspect of this “controversy” is that left-of-center voices are simultaneously arguing that taxpayer money only accounts for a minuscule percentage of public media’s funding — in NPR’s case, they estimate it at only 2% — and that the loss of funding is catastrophic. It really can’t be both. If taxpayer money truly only accounts for a small fraction of public media’s funding, why can’t wealthy liberal donors or consumers of their work pick up the slack in their budgets?
The truth is, NPR and PBS are deeply biased, implicitly partisan institutions. As ex-NPR editor Uri Berliner explained for The Free Press, the outlet warned reporters against using the (apparently offensive) term “biological sex” and pushed forward with woke verbiage like “Latinx” despite almost no actual Latino people using this terminology. Berliner, to his tremendous credit, was concerned about the seemingly near-total lack of ideological and intellectual diversity.
“I looked at voter registration for our newsroom,” he recounted. “In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.”
THE EPSTEIN CONSPIRACY THEORIES HAVE SOME GIANT HOLES
This groupthink has directly affected the quality of NPR’s work, from its atrocious handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story to its appalling pro-looting coverage of the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots to its abysmal COVID-19 coverage.
It is fundamentally unreasonable to expect the entire public to fund, even in small part, such a biased and hostile media. And there’s nothing authoritarian or censorious about promoting media independence — and asking liberal Americans to fund their propaganda machines on their own.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.