When taxpayers believe their taxes are being misused, they demand accountability and pressure their elected officials, who then turn that pressure on the public broadcaster. This is why government and the press must exist separately if the latter is to be an independent check on the former. Changing the funding from annual appropriations to the BBC-style excise tax on television sets and radios that was proposed in the s would not fundamentally change the equation; such a tax would still be imposed by government, and it would also be increasingly impractical in the age of the Internet.
All taxpayer funds are raised coercively, which is why the government must act prudently when deciding what to do with the extracted funds. The courts have held that Congress has the right to appropriate funds for ends that not all citizens agree on — say, a war — as long as those ends contribute to the public good and general safety. However in the area of expression, the courts have emphasized the need for balance. In Wisconsin v.
Southworth in , the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of mandatory university student activity fees used to support student groups that engaged in expressive activity.
As Justice Samuel Alito explained when he wrote the opinion in the Harris v. Quinn case:. Public universities have a compelling interest in promoting student expression in a manner that is viewpoint neutral … This may be done by providing funding for a broad array of student groups.
If the groups funded are truly diverse, many students are likely to disagree with things that are said by some groups [emphasis mine]. Thus, the issue of bias makes its entry. In insisting on objectivity and balance and banning editorializing, the drafters of the Broadcasting Act seem to have had a good sense of the Constitution.
When they let their guard down, NPR, PBS and their parent organization, the CPB, admit that their workforce is overwhelmingly progressive[] but reject that such lack of intellectual diversity has an impact on their output.
For that to be true, however, one would have to believe that liberals are fully conversant with conservative perspectives and ideas. More importantly, it would also have to be true that practically every Republican and Democratic leader since has been fundamentally wrong concerning their own political interests, the former in criticizing public broadcasting and the latter the opposite.
The argument that populating a newsroom with liberals will nonetheless produce objective reporting was well articulated on Sept. Bob Garfield : You and I both know that if you were to somehow poll the political orientation of everybody in the NPR news organization and at all of the member stations, you would find a progressive, liberal crowd, not uniformly, but overwhelmingly.
Ira Glass : Journalism, in general, reporters tend to be Democrats and tend to be more liberal than the public as a whole, sure. That journalists are more liberal than the public has been proven by countless studies. Washington Post media writer Erik Wemple did a good job of compiling many of those studies in a Jan. Its very existence is a rebuke to a profit-driven society.
He asked questions that would never have even occurred to the other moderators. The conservative commentator Arnold Steinberg, who in his youth in the s worked for Fred Friendly, raised the same point.
Of course it is, and everyone knows it. The free-market economist Milton Friedman also had a documentary series in the s. Buckley and Friedman, however, spoke of feeling like outsiders at PBS. Audiences have never been in any doubt. They competed mercilessly inside this environment, but at the end of the day they had million Americans to divvy up.
This oligopoly, moreover, relied on a finite spectrum, giving the industry the look of highly regulated utilities. The presidents of ABC, CBS and NBC supported the creation of public broadcasting in Congressional hearings, arguing that commercial TV was incapable of producing the educational and cultural content that Johnson and the Carnegie Commission wanted because such programming did not appeal to mass audiences.
The belief that broadcasters interested in profit were too crass to deliver education and culture permeated the creation of the CPB. You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending.
And most of all, boredom. The same reason was given for broadcasting to low-density rural communities with underserved audiences that only government-subsidized broadcasting could serve. The commercial networks, in other words, were after advertising dollars, and the drafters of the bill promised that the CPB would not compete for those. Today, Leonard H. Cable, satellite and the internet have transformed this world, and what purpose the CPB serves that could not be served by others is hard to imagine.
Will has a point. Any public-spirited person looking for information on radio or television that would help make her a better-informed citizen can find everything she needs on the commercial dial. In terms of the in-classroom help that the former teacher at the little schoolhouse in Cotulla wanted, what we have today is if anything too much choice. I am always excited to learn about new technology, but overwhelmed at how much there is out there.
It is hard to find time to research it all, especially all the new education apps. The rapid growth in critically acclaimed commercial U. Technology, in fact, has made public broadcasting redundant.
The removal of that overhead would relieve the taxpayer of his burden. As it is right now, public broadcasting gets about 35 percent of its revenues from taxpayers, a figure that includes The numbers are better for public radio, which is less than half as reliant on CPB appropriations as public television.
Finally, public broadcasters have an unfair advantage over their commercial competitors: Their reliance on taxpayer support helps them avoid automatic dial turning when an upcoming commercial break is announced. Everyone in the radio business knows that when we go to a commercial break, radio listeners around the city are changing the channel.
Some come back a few minutes later. That reality obviously drives our ratings in a downward direction. NPR never hits that wall. Their ratings in the D. Liberal area, to be sure. Public broadcasting walked away from the promised emphasis on education and cultural promotion when it embraced public affairs, which conservatives have come to view as political indoctrination on the public dime. Public broadcasting figures such as Ira Glass say they want the bias measured, but attempts by Brookhiser, Tomlinson and Mann to do just that have been shut down after cries of censorship.
Anything done on the public dime comes with accountability. The only solution is defunding. In an Oct. Doing so is not practicable and may not even be possible. How can public affairs be separated from education and culture in a Ken Burns documentary or a NOVA program that constantly hammers home climate change?
It would require the constant monitoring that liberals have decried for decades. It would solve nothing. The solution is to allow the whole package to go off public support and over to charitable foundations, corporations and individuals.
Clearly, with some creativity, a taxpayer funding shortfall could be made up. The membership model has been shown to work it sustains the foundation where the writer works, where corporations account for around four percent of funding and government for zero. Corporate sponsorships are already working and could bring even more funds. Conservatives have sometimes demurred on the question of handing PBS and NPR over completely to private sector actors.
Liberal and conservative views are already funded by the private sector, at MSNBC and Fox for example, where they compete in the market place of ideas.
The goal here is not to suppress one side or the other but to remove the tyranny to which Jefferson referred. Download the PDF. He left journalism to join the administration of President George W.
In his new capacity he writes on national identity, diversity, multiculturalism and assimilation, as well as foreign policy. Gonzalez was born in Cuba and left at the age Gonzalez got his first regular reporting beat in , covering high school sports for one summer for The Boston Herald.
He went to work for Agence France-Presse in , reporting from around the globe for the news agency for six years. Between and , he served in the same capacity for the European edition in Brussels, before returning to Hong Kong as editor. On April 15, John Nielsen reported, several days ahead of the pack, that the Clinton administration would sign the Rio de Janeiro biodiversity treaty that had been deep-sixed by George Bush.
Good job. Breaking a single story in a week is hardly going to put the fear of God in Peter Jennings or Max Frankel. Not even the most delirious NPR staffer would make that claim, of course.
To which the only sensible reply is: So what? Being the dominant radio news organization might have meant something in the days when Ed Murrow was broadcasting live accounts of Nazi air raids from London. But for the past 30 years, radio news has been on the scrap heap. A poll released earlier this year by the National Association of Broadcasters showed that only 16 percent of Americans consider radio an important source of news, compared with 69 percent for television and 43 percent for newspapers.
Newspapers offer their readers depth and eclecticism. Television offers its viewers drama. Radio offers its listeners—well, not much. A headline service, to let them know what they can see on the evening news or read in the morning paper or find on CNN at any time of the day or night.
Whether longer is better is a debatable point. I was listening to Morning Edition the other day on the way to work, and they ran this story on a ballet company for autistic children in South Africa. It went on for seven, seven-and-a-half minutes.
And finally I was thinking to myself, Who cares? When NPR tries to cover hard news, its stories—even when they stretch on for six or seven minutes—are rarely long enough to rise above the sort of shallow sound-bite once-over for which television is so justly criticized.
He reported that the interim appointee, Bob Krueger, would probably get into a runoff. But beyond that, it was pretty murky. For what? Well, the only thing Burnett had time to mention was that Krueger broke with Clinton over gays in the military. Leader: state treasurer Kay Bailey Hutchison.
Sorry, gotta move on. Where is he in the polls? But if seven-and-a-half minutes is too little for hard news, it is assuredly too much for most NPR feature stories. Bad journalism happens on the quarter hour at NPR. Bad journalism is, often, policy at NPR. The dull scripts, so formulaic that even the reporters privately make fun of them.
Last year, when NPR was running a long, long, long series of stories on local people shunted aside by development in Latin America, several reporters formed a pool. The infatuation with ethnicism, to the extent that NPR stories are sometimes barely comprehensible.
It is the nature of the businessman. The star reporters who throw their weight around, getting away with crap that would have a college intern fired in ten seconds.
Circle-jerk journalism, when reporters interview reporters. The Post —and, as far as I know, every other news organization in America—reports the news by reporting the news rather than interviewing other reporters about the news. At best, these pieces were flaccid. I would be interested in what an economist thinks about the value-added tax.
I might be interested in what a merchant thinks about it, or a truck driver, or a housewife. I am emphatically not interested in what an NPR reporter thinks. But several of the interviews with reporters developed into something considerably worse than flaccidity.
When Bob Edwards talked to Bill Sloat, a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter covering the inmate takeover of a maximum-security prison in Ohio, NPR used the opportunity to pass along unattributed rumors and speculation that Sloat could never have gotten past his own editors.
Now, nobody will confirm that. First, the Democratic candidate had just survived a brutal and highly publicized primary election. So everyone already knew he was black. Second, everyone already knew he was black anyway, because Mississippi is the most race-conscious place in America. Third, the majority of the voters in the congressional district are black. So is Mike Espy, who resigned the seat to become secretary of agriculture. Instead, the Republican embraced the black vote, spoke frequently of his respect for Martin Luther King, and tried to appeal to the social conservatism of rural black voters by pointing out that his opponent was a liberal from the city.
The Democrat, by contrast, made race an explicit issue; he campaigned in large part on the platform that black people could only be properly represented by a black congressman. He won. The practice of putting reporting positions up for sale.
Of course, hearing a string of uniformly, gorgeously unusual names one after the other can have a different effect. Finally, he wrote a song about it. A turtle named Ira Glass lives in Queens, and somewhere out there roams a chihuahua named Mandalit. Kai Ryssdal had, at one point, a namesake goat. A man was once sitting in a Missouri theater next to a woman named Korva Coleman, and he thought she was the NPR reporter. She had just changed her name to Korva Coleman because she thought it sounded cool.
Sylvia has had a cow in Cambodia named after her, and a restaurant in Salem, Oregon. Others just like that cozy round way she pronounces her name. Italian Americans write in to say that hearing Sylvia pronounce her name correctly inspired them to do the same. But could even Sylvia's name be improved?
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