Ever since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and National Public Radio (NPR), their longstanding tagline tells the story: “This program is sponsored by viewers like you.”
Translated: The taxpayers.
When it comes to actual donations from “viewers like you” they amount to a rounding error.
Truthful and impartial broadcast media can not only survive but thrive when done properly and incentivized by a free market.
CPB will receive $1.07 billion from Uncle Sam over the next two years. A friend claims that such monies are a drop in the bucket for a federal government that yearly spends over $6 trillion. It is this type of reasoning that grows the national debt by $1 trillion — every 100 days.
Enter President Donald Trump whose executive order cancelled all future federal funding for public broadcasting. You would think Trump was taking a flamethrower to the Smithsonian.
The left went apoplectic with the thought of Big Bird unemployed and bringing with it the end of democracy. The left’s laments are archaic and tedious just like that condescending voice that introduces a syncopated interlude of classical music leading up to any one of PBS’s melodramatic British mini-series.
Having worked in commercial radio for years, public broadcasting always had a goaded Soviet Pravda feel where boat loads of tax dollars underwrite leftist propaganda masquerading as “news.” Public broadcasting is where the government-funded gatekeepers decide what is newsworthy and what isn’t. Rather than broadcasting in the public square, CPB is holed up in a luxury box intoxicated on leftist dogma serving as the mascot media outlet of the Democrat Party.
Trump declared that public broadcasting’s trifecta tax drain does not “present a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.” This is one instance where Trump is understating a plethora of evidence.
NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher’s testimony before Congress showed nothing but contempt. Moreover, Maher on X is donning a “Biden for President” hat and once described “reverence for the truth” as a “distraction.” Maher then went Malcom X by promising “to use all means available” to fight Trump’s executive order.
Still not convinced.
In 2021, NPR declared the Declaration of Independence to have “flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies.” The following year, NPR abandoned its longtime July 4th tradition of reading America’s most famous document in favor of equality.
Other outlandish programming for “viewers like you” included an NPR investigation on why the thumbs-up emoji is racist and how there is “limited scientific evidence of physical advantage” between male and female athletes. Another one featured what “queer ducks” can teach teenagers about sexuality in the animal kingdom.
To little fanfare and no surprise, when the media bias rating website All Sides surveyed NPR listeners, it found they align with “left-wing thought and/or policy agendas.” While all taxpayers contribute to NPR, only one side of the political spectrum is being served.
When 25-year NPR senior editor Uri Berliner reported that registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans 87 to 0 in NPR’s newsroom and then argued in The Free Press how NPR went progressive and lost the public’s trust, his days were numbered. Berliner stated he could not continue working for NPR where he felt disparaged and subsequently joined The Free Press last year.
Commercial radio must innovate and has done so for decades, or they go dark. Why should public broadcasters be exempt and supported by tax dollars? If they are as good as they claim, let them stand on their own merit.
The crux of the problem is how the federal government is involved in plenty of things it has no business in. A publicly funded broadcast network is just one example.
Truthful and impartial broadcast media can not only survive but thrive when done properly and incentivized by a free market. Will public broadcasting possess the moxie to answer to viewers like you?
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