THE USE OF PUBLIC MONEY FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING IS CENSORSHIP PER SE.

No matter how many times we tell you so, the Ministry of Propaganda is likely to carry on.

Never mind that the latest wicked witch of wokeness in charge of making drive time boring, Katherine Maher, looks like a Glenn Close stunt double.

Never mind that the organization continues to deflect when questions about how much sucking at the public teat it really does.

While NPR often claims that public funding accounts for only a small portion of its budget, the outlet’s parent company, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, received $525 million this year, $126 million of which went to public radio stations. Because much of NPR’s public funding is indirect, channelled through member fees paid by local stations, it is able to claim financial independence.

Maher’s social media had entered the spotlight in the days after NPR veteran Uri Berliner wrote a scathing critique of the outlet in The Free Press. NPR, he wrote, has a strong liberal bias and lack of viewpoint diversity, which has hurt its popularity and led to the mishandling of several key news events, including the Hunter Biden laptop story. The piece welcomed Maher, viewing her appointment with optimism, but the outlet’s response, including the suspension of Berliner, suggests his recommendations will not be heeded.

That article concludes, "The issue’s sudden dominance of the news cycle suggests Republicans may finally have the momentum they need to defund NPR."  That's an outcome National Review's editors would prefer, as they also award six Pinocchios to the grift's claim not to suck at the public teat.

If NPR wants to run a journalist enterprise that is dedicated to advancing progressive ideology, it should do so with income from sponsorships, donations, subscriptions, or other avenues — just like every other media organization. It should not benefit from subsidies from U.S. taxpayers.

NPR likes to argue that only 1 percent of its funding comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But as Howard Husock of the American Enterprise Institute has explained, this is highly misleading. The 1 percent figure refers to direct funding, but a much larger percentage of its revenue comes from local public radio stations, which use federal funds to purchase programming produced by NPR. In 2021, he notes, “NPR reported $90 million in revenue from ‘contracts from customers,’ a significant portion of its $279 million and much more than 1 percent.”

Admittedly, in principle, we don’t think that it is the role of the federal government to fund public broadcasting. But if the government is going to be subsidizing a news organization, that organization should at least be balanced with a mix of perspectives more representative of the country. When it fails to do this, any justification for continuing to support it out of the common treasury falls apart.

Chicago Boyz contributor Sgt. Mom would also like the propaganda agency to be weaned.

The new CEO for NPR, one Katherine Maher, appears to be a singularly unappealing progressive apparatchik, a neurotic child of ruling-class privilege without a single shred of a background or experience in journalism … but all the right progressive opinions. (I swear, I’d be a better fit for that job based on a DINFOS shake-n-bake course for print and broadcast journalism, followed by twenty years as a military public affairs specialist!) I’d also swear that Katherine Maher was another generated parody like Titania McGrath, but alas – she’s all too horribly real.

I do wonder if this might be the final straw that breaks NPR. For all their many awards, organizational self-regard, and incestuously close connections to the Washington power structure, they have also been hemorrhaging ordinary listeners in Flyoverlandia for years now.

She gave up on public radio many years after I did, with an assist from Pete Seeger.  And, yes, a few Republican legislators are crafting legislation to defund public radio.

Defunding NPR is a laudable goal, given the fact that it is a propaganda outlet being funded by the state. But this current initiative is a legislative version of tilting at windmills. For starters, Democrats control the White House and the Senate. There are not enough Republicans in either chamber to override President Joe Biden’s inevitable veto even if the bills moved that far.

The fact of the matter is that Democrats in the Senate and President Biden wouldn’t dare to strip NPR of funding, considering that it continues to propagandize to its audience on their behalf. It is also worth noting that government funding for broadcasting companies would be quite low on the list of voter priorities.

While many, if not most, Americans would agree that it is wholly inappropriate for the state to shell out taxpayer dollars to a blatantly biased news outlet, the issue is nowhere near as top-of-mind as inflation, continued aid being sent to other countries, and other critical problems Americans are facing.

Of course, it is also worth asking whether Republican lawmakers actually want to defund NPR or if they are merely posturing. Even without Berliner’s article, we already knew that the outlet was advancing the Democrats’ agenda. Why didn’t Republicans defund the institution when they controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress?

There might come a time when NPR is finally deprived of government funds. Unfortunately, that time is not now.

With Democrats being increasingly reluctant to go along with Republican votes of no confidence in the Speaker of the House, it's unlikely any would go along with a rider defunding public radio, even if it's attached to the next shutdown theater supplemental appropriation.

Ultimately, though, it is the reality that the use of public money for broadcasting is censorship per se, and being able to set the standards for the censors is more valuable than any libertarian principle.

The easiest way around such tangles, of course, would be to write legislation that doesn't try to single out NPR and instead just cuts off the Corporation for Public Broadcasting entirely. That would keep the money from moving. But it also leads us to the third and biggest reason I don't think a defunding bill will get anywhere anytime soon: No matter how much it huffs and puffs, most of the GOP has no serious interest in defunding public broadcasting.

Yes, there are a few Republican officeholders who would rather see an openly liberal NPR that supports itself than a "balanced" system that relies on tax dollars. I'd bet a libertarian-leaning legislator like Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) would vote for that. But Massie is an outlier. If history has taught us nothing else, it's that the most powerful Republican officials aren't usually bothered by the idea that Americans are being forced to subsidize views they dislike. They just want the subsidies to go in a different direction.

Why do I say that? Because we've seen this process play out again and again, and it always ends pretty much the same way.

Reason's Jesse Walker continues,

The big public-broadcasting operations have always tilted toward the dominant views of the social milieu that produces them, and Berliner is surely correct that this has intensified at NPR in the years since Donald Trump was elected president. But when bias is your chief complaint, you give the folks who run the networks an easy out. They would almost always prefer to gesture toward balance with some hires or fires than to see their money axed.

Karen, er, Katherine Maher might not be happy to go along, although such pivots, involving hiring a token or two, have worked before.  There might be a work-around, he continues, although perhaps it will take an encounter with the real debt ceiling to bring it about.

Is there a way around that? I think there is, but it would take a different approach to the fight. Instead of a narrowly partisan battle, bring together an alliance of people (mostly on the right) who are sick of subsidizing opinions they dislike and people (mostly on the left) who are sick of seeing those subsidies used as an excuse to insert the government into broadcasters' editorial choices. Adopt a plan to transform the CPB from a semi-governmental body into a fully independent nonprofit, bringing the federal role in noncommercial broadcasting to an end.

There was serious talk of doing this right after the Gingrich attacks shook up the broadcasters. In 1995, the New York Daily News even reported that a CPB spokesman had "confirmed that all the groups agreed on the need to establish an independent trust fund that eventually could replace federal funding." Then the CPB's subsidies started creeping upwards again and the idea moved back to the edges of the political spectrum. So a push like this has failed once before. But the partisan approach has failed to detach these operations from the government far more times than that. It can be hard to assemble a transpartisan alliance, but sometimes it's the only thing that can get the job done.

And yes, it's possible to bring people around on these issues. Back when I spent a lot of time covering the radical Pacifica radio network, I often encountered leftists who saw the CPB as a back door for government influence and felt they'd be better off without it.

Indeed not.  Your tax dollars can probably hire a lot more left-handed lesbian sewer flute players than a hippie commune in Berkeley can.