In July, National Public Radio’s CEO cried and hollered, claiming her organization could not possibly survive without government funding.
This week, however, the same news organization claimed that on its first day functioning without taxpayer dollars, it was performing as well as ever — possibly even better.
In other words, NPR’s critics were right all along about defunding. NPR never needed those dollars. It just wanted them.
“Today marks the first day in public media’s history without federal funding,” the newsgroup said in a statement on Oct. 1. “It’s the beginning of a new chapter — but we’re not going anywhere. With your help, we’ll continue to bring you honest, rigorous journalism that doesn’t bend to the interests of shareholders.”
The statement added, “We’ll still hold a microphone to American voices that might otherwise go unheard. And we’ll always stand behind our First Amendment right to a free press. Your donation on this historic day protects one of the last places where America comes together to hear itself, understand one another, and acknowledge that we belong to one always-changing story.”
In a graphic uploaded to Facebook, NPR also declared, in all-caps, “WE WON’T BE SILENCED.”
Newsroom staffers offered the same boast elsewhere on social media.
“This is the first day since NPR was founded it has not had federal support,” beamed NPR host Scott Simon. “And we’re here, strong, vital, and with an audience of millions we will keep on serving, no fees, no paywalls, and across all divisions. We hope you’ll support your local stations to serve all America.”
Host Leila Fadel also declared on NPR’s first day free of government funding, “We will not easily be silenced. We will continue to be advocates for the truth — for facts. We will ask the questions our listeners, the American public, want the answers to, even if those we’re asking don’t like our questions.”
First, this is a bit rich coming from an organization that had been so eager to participate in the censorship campaign against the New York Post after the latter broke the news just before the 2020 election of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop, filled with corruption allegations embarrassing to former President Joe Biden. Not only did NPR have nothing to say about the efforts to censor the Post’s reporting — which included Twitter and Facebook banning the story entirely from their platforms — but NPR went a step further, announcing and bragging even that it would not cover the laptop story at all.
NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride explained in 2020 that, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” For additional context regarding what NPR considers to be a “waste” of “listeners’ and readers’ time,” it once assigned three reporters to byline an 800-plus-word report on the supposedly racially problematic legacy of the thumbs-up emoji.
This is beside the point, though. The point is that NPR’s bragging this week should be cited forevermore to prevent any attempt by NPR to claw back taxpayer funding.
NPR never really needed those government bucks. It just preferred the easy, guaranteed payout. As with PBS, the funding was never essential. Like PBS, NPR always had a viable commercial product and an audience. It has always been capable of surviving on its own, more easily than many independent news organizations, despite claims to the contrary by NPR’s CEO and its supporters.
NPR just didn’t want to compete in the market like everyone else.
Taxpayers are no longer on the hook to pay for a specialized style of stilted news reporting and breathy radio commentary — as it should be. Taxpayers should not be on the hook to pay for any news, let alone reporting that explicitly disfavors 50 percent of those footing the bill. No one is “silencing” NPR. What happened to the New York Post during the 2020 election was “silencing.” That’s not what’s happening here with NPR. It is not a victim. It simply has to operate like everyone else now, competing in earnest for ratings and advertiser dollars.
That doesn’t make NPR different. It makes it normal.
But now that we know NPR can (and evidently always could) operate without government assistance, the real question is: Where do we go for a refund?
Becket Adams is a writer in Washington and program director for the National Journalism Center.