Renewed Calls to "Defund Woke NPR"
What's behind the right's renewed calls to cut or eliminate public broadcasting, and the personal attacks on NPR's CEO?
The 24/7 conservative grievance machine has taken aim once again at public broadcasting, specifically National Public Radio (NPR). Republicans say the network is mostly staffed by progressives, and its listeners are mostly urban and affluent coastal elites. While some conservatives seem to appreciate what public radio contributes in their local districts, others are renewing a decades-old call to cut or eliminate NPR funding, or suggest it should be decentralized. These criticisms of a taxpayer supported media network began long ago, in the 1970’s as public broadcasting in America was born.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was formed in 1967 after President Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act and National Public Radio (NPR) started in 1970. Attempts on the right to cut or eliminate federal funding of public broadcasting started in 1972 when Nixon vetoed a Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) appropriations bill – but he changed his mind after PBS eliminated programs he didn’t like and White House-friendly figures were put on the CPB governing board. Nixon ultimately signed a budget increase.
A White House staffer gave NPR staffers a stern warning during the Reagan administration, and then in 1994 House Speaker Newt Gingrich talked about eliminating public broadcasting funding after which several conservatives got public TV speaking gigs. A House subcommittee voted to cut CPB funding by 25% during George W. Bush’s term in office, but once a former chair of the Republican National Committee became chair of the CPB, it actually received more money.
After Nixon made his threats, the system was still standing but all but one of the programs he found objectionable left the air. After the Gingrich-era battle ended, Fred Barnes, Peggy Noonan, and Ben Wattenberg all found themselves with new gigs at PBS—and following an initial cut, the CPB's budget crept back upward. The funding fight five years ago took place against the backdrop of a conservative appointee atop the CPB crusading for a more right-friendly PBS and NPR. Now the Republicans are getting ready to retake the House and possibly the Senate. With the Juan Williams spat, the party has found a familiar way to flex its muscles. – JESSE WALKER, Reason, Radio Theater
A Reagan and George W. Bush appointee, Kenneth Tomlinson was named Chairman of the CPB board in 2003. He opened an investigation into Bill Moyers’ PBS program without informing the board. Tomlinson helped raise funding and other support for to underwrite The Journal Editorial Report, a PBS program by the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. During his two-year tenure he sought to increase conservative programming on PBS and NPR calling for “a program schedule that's not skewed in one direction or another.” Tomlinson created ombudsmen at PBS and NPR to monitor network bias.
In 2005 former Chair of the Republican National Committee Patricia Harrison was appointed president and CEO of the CPB. In 2011 Republicans moved to cut NPR funding after a conservative commentator was fired but the Senate would not approve that bill and it would have been vetoed by President Obama.
Over four years of the Trump administration there were budgets proposed that would have drastically cut or eliminated funding for public broadcasting, but there was a lack of support in Congress. Many elected officials have realized time and again that there is broad support for local public radio back in their districts, some of which don’t have alternative sources of local news, and politicians enjoy having appearances on public affairs programming. CPB CEO Patricia Harrison lobbied for an increase in funding and ultimately the agency received a $7.25 million increase in funding in 2020 even though Republicans held both houses of Congress.
As the writer Jesse Walker points out… “These standoffs never end with public broadcasting getting defunded. The point of the exercise isn't to cut NPR loose; it's to use the threat of cutting NPR loose to whip the network into line.”
Said another way, it does seem that many conservatives prefer to have some control over public broadcasting, as opposed to completely defunding it. But the far right wing of the party would just as soon be done with it, and last week the House Committee on Energy and Commerce conducted an oversight hearing to examine allegations of ideological bias at NPR. The inquiry was scheduled after former NPR editor Uri Berliner published a long critique of the radio network on a popular conservative news site, suggesting the conservative audience has dwindled over the years and that the network had revealed its bias in coverage of the Trump/Russia investigation, stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and its entire Covid coverage. Berliner suggested the NPR staff in Washington, DC were all Democrats and that there is a lack of a “diversity of viewpoints” at NPR.
Republicans on the House Committee were quick to renew calls that NPR was a “progressive propaganda purveyor,” claiming that the network no longer has a “diversity of viewpoints.” At the hearing suggestions were made to cut funding from the network and/or to reroute funding to local affiliate stations to improve local coverage, and another call to monitor the political affiliation of its reporters.
The committee also heard from public media analysts that regardless of what the funding levels are for public broadcasting, those providing oversight in Congress or the leadership of the CPB should remove themselves from making editorial decisions at the network. They heard statistics that the funding for public broadcasting in the United States is about $3.16 per capita, compared to European countries where that figure can be between $80-120 per capita. And they heard that instead of defunding NPR that funding be increased in a way that expands and rebuilds the public broadcasting system to meet the needs of local communities, perhaps with recruitment efforts to hire a diversity of viewpoints at local stations.
Other NPR staffers have responded to the Berliner article – Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep suggested his analysis may have made a larger point that “too many elite journalists share similar backgrounds, and think the same way in assigning and shaping stories,” but that it’s a much more subtle issue that has more to do with a reporter’s background, education and experience and less to do with partisan registration.
There are conservatives who have believed for years that the government just shouldn’t subsidize an American public broadcasting system at all, while there are other conservatives who are happy to subsidize broadcasting – just a different kind of broadcasting with different reporters and hosts. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris (R-Washington):
“It’s not the role of Congress to tell NPR or any news organization how or what content it should broadcast or print. My concern here is why American tax dollars need to supplement a news organization that so clearly does not want to reflect the diverse views of Americans.”
Others have suggested allowing taxpayers to choose whether to support public broadcasting on their tax forms. And there have been voices on both sides that endorsed a vision to eliminate federal funding and privatize CPB as an independent trust funded by a non-profit private endowment that no longer would rely on Congress for funding.
But at a time when local journalism is in a precarious state with corporate commercial media networks struggling financially and countless reporters are being laid off, two analysts appearing at the House panel supported the idea of decentralizing NPR, and increasing funding that would be directed to increasing coverage in local communities, possibly cutting back on network programming. Several committee members pointed to the decline in local coverage of their representatives in Congress, and one made the point that healthy democracies in other countries have recognized the importance of public media in informing the public and prioritize its funding in their budgets.
Only about 1% of NPR’s funding comes directly from federal funding – the rest comes from corporate sponsors and listener/viewer donations. But local NPR stations pay NPR for programming from federal funds they receive from CPB, and so federal funding becomes about 30% when taking those fees into account.
There was criticism of new NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who was invited but did not attend the committee inquiry. Maher said she had an NPR board meeting to attend that had been scheduled for over a year. Committee members criticized her for a lack of courage for not showing up to the hearing, and for posting personal tweets that seemed to indicate her Democratic political beliefs.
Ms. Maher is a former CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia) and is Board Chair of Signal Foundation, responsible for the secure, private Signal Messenger app.
In my next post I’ll explain how conservative activists have personally targeted Ms. Maher, long criticized Wikipedia as a source of objective information, and have coordinated an attack of the cybersecurity protocols of Signal.
AI is already polluting our culture
Has it occurred to you that there’s an increasing amount of garbage on the internet? AI chatbots that routinely get things wrong? AI-generated images, AI-boosted Google search results, AI-generated articles. The AI of the present is nowhere close to the hype and at the moment the learning models seem, well, stupid. Here’s a great episode of NPR’s On Point looking at how the world of synthetic culture detracts from our humanity.
Fair and balanced?
As a normie my first impression of a toxic, biased news network isn’t NPR. Jon Stewart describes what he calls the ‘cultural grievance and vicitimization machine,’ which has created a weaponized environment where “outrage is the engine of our modern media economy.”