The New York Times recently reported that NPR and PBS are bracing for a funding battle under the new administration.
While there’s been talk about defunding NPR and PBS for years — who can forget Mitt Romney being accused of wanting to “fire Big Bird” during his 2012 presidential bid — there’s reason to believe it could actually happen.
One reason is pretty obvious. “Elon Musk is gunning for public media,” reports the Times.
It’s no secret that Musk has a beef with NPR, which he labeled “state-affiliated media” in 2023, prompting NPR to quit Twitter. (It’s also clear that NPR has a beef with Musk, whom they cover with a barely concealed hostility, the most recent example being the 1,000-word treatment they devoted to Musk giving a “Nazi salute” when he extended his arm to thank those in attendance at a celebration for President Donald Trump in Washington, DC.)
Musk will find plenty of allies in his quest to defund NPR and PBS.
For years, conservatives have bristled at NPR’s slanted political coverage and cultural commentary, which promoted books teaching parents how to make toddlers “woke.” Calls to defund grew more intense during the pandemic, a period that saw much of NPR’s journalism turn into polemic and obscurantism, including an article that directly compared Americans who believed COVID-19 may have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology to QAnon conspiracy theorists. (The CIA now agrees that COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak, but NPR has yet to label the Agency QAnon kooks, to my knowledge.)
The complaints go beyond conservatives and libertarians, however.
In 2024, one editor who described himself as a Sarah Lawrence-educated, Berkeley-minded, Subaru driver “raised by a lesbian peace activist mother” resigned from NPR in protest. He went on to publicly scold NPR for abandoning “straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president” for journalism that “veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.”
Media can take sides in presidential elections. Taxpayer-funded media may not.
Still, there are plenty of arguments (good and bad) to continue funding NPR and PBS.
Both media outlets do some pretty good journalism at a time when good journalism is in decline. Additionally, anyone who does a quick Google search will find an abundance of evidence showing NPR and PBS receive only a small percentage of their revenues directly from the federal government.
Howard Husock, a senior fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, last year wrote a piece for Fox News in which he described efforts to defund NPR as “quixotic” and misguided. Husock didn’t defend NPR, which he described as “an echo chamber…with a liberal spin.” But he argued that in the unlikely event that such a defunding effort succeeded, it would likely make NPR’s bias worse.
“A defunded NPR would almost surely become a culture war martyr,” Husock wrote. “We should expect major left-liberal big philanthropy — including the Ford, MacArthur and (George Soros’) Open Society Foundations — to rush to fill the gap, followed by Carnegie, Hewlett and a host of others,” many of which already sponsor NPR programming.
When even conservatives like Husock defend these public expenditures, it stands to reason that NPR and PBS could dodge the executioner’s axe once again. This would be most unfortunate.
Yes, NPR and PBS do some good work. But the idea that taxpayers are funding media at a time when the world is drowning in media — podcasts, movies, radio, Twitter, YouTube, cable news, movies, and more — is nonsensical. This is doubly true when one considers the US government is $36 trillion in debt.
People who say defunding NPR and PBS isn’t going to balance the budget have a point, of course. We’re talking about relatively small revenue streams here (though everything looks small when you’re talking about a $2 trillion annual deficit).
Still, that one-to-two-percent figure comes with caveats. While it’s true that NPR typically receives around two percent of its budget directly from the federal government, federal dollars account for an enormous percentage of NPR’s overall revenue.
Paul Farhi explained more than a decade ago how the game is played.
“Washington plays a critical role in public radio’s finances,” Farhi explains in the Washington Post. “Congress passes millions of tax dollars through the federally chartered Corporation for Public Broadcasting to NPR’s member stations, which in turn use some of those funds to buy programs from NPR.”
Through this complicated, bureaucratic payment system, NPR receives station fees that typically account for 40 percent of its annual budget (perhaps a bit less in recent years). Considering that NPR has an operating budget of about $300 million, we’re talking about more than $100 million a year.
Again, this may not make a massive dent in the federal deficit, but few would deny there’s something unseemly about taxpayers ponying up their hard-earned dollars so NPR can pay hosts $500,000 salaries.
Also, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there’s a purpose to all this spending.
As the saying goes, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” Those who control these tax dollars are in a sense purchasing the allegiance of those who shape the ideas, opinions, and thoughts of the American public. They are in a very real sense the political allies of the DC bureaucracy and political establishment.
This is what makes government-funded media so sinister. It undermines the independence of media organs. Americans instinctively recognize this. We laugh at the crude propaganda machines of other nations and can tell you about the propaganda efforts of Goebbels; many of us even can remember the ridiculous messaging of Baghdad Bob. Yet far fewer Americans seem able to recall the US government’s long history of using propaganda, which grew more sophisticated over the years and involved planting disinformation at news outlets.
The bottom line is this: the government has no business funding media (though it clearly has a desire to not just fund media but control it).
I don’t want to go into the whole social contract thing, and start quoting Hobbes and Locke, but the raison d’etre for government is that it’s supposed to fund “essential services” that markets can’t provide.
To accept the premise that the government should be funding media outlets destroys the whole idea that government should be limited. You might as well argue that the government should be funding the Dallas Cowboys.
Put aside Husock’s arguments of utility, and his belief that congressional hearings can help bring NPR to heel and make it a less-partisan media organ. Look instead to first principles. The Founding Fathers had a clear philosophy on the proper role of government, and funding media operations isn’t something you’ll find enumerated anywhere in the Constitution.
Defunding NPR and PBS and all government-sponsored media isn’t just about saving taxpayers money, and it’s certainly not about placating Elon Musk.
It’s about restoring the federal government to its proper role.