It’s Time to Remove “Public” From Public Broadcasting

Federal funding and regulation is violating individual rights and enabling authoritarian tendencies.

This week I’m taking another break from the “Think Right or Wrong, Not Left or Right” serial with some thoughts on public broadcasting. If you missed my article “FasXism Paves the Way for China’s Eventual Decline and Fall” of a few weeks ago, you may want to check it out for a meta-perspective of the current China COVID demonstrations.

‘Tis the season for holiday specials. Take advantage of the 25% paid subscription discount while inventory lasts. The “Think Right or Wrong, Not Left or Right” serial is coming to an end, so you’ll get more commentaries from me on current events from a think right or wrong, not left or right perspective next year.

Cheers!

I’m a consumer of public broadcasting. I’m currently subscribing to Passport, PBS’s streaming app, so I can catch up on all the Ken Burns documentaries. And I used to enjoy NPR news and other programming: the longform, in depth reporting on a range of topics, the absence of talking head shouting matches, and a Prairie Home Companion before Garrison Keillor retired, especially his “News from Lake Wobegon” monologues. Admittedly, my taste is probably conditioned by my Swedish upbringing with subdued news reporting and other programming limited to two public TV and three public radio channels (it has long since changed to a more American model with cable and, more recently, streaming, but the public channels remain).

I’ve known for a long time that NPR journalists, like their Swedish counterparts, are overwhelmingly left-leaning¹, as is their audience. A 2019 Pew survey found that those who rely on NPR as their main political news source are 87% democrat or leaning democrat. But NPR definitely added a perspective that I appreciated. And being a critical news consumer, I was always on my guard. My antennas were up in search of the rest of the story—identifying the explicit or implicit biases behind the polished façade, the omissions, the questions not asked, the views not represented, the guests not invited.

But I have stopped listening to NPR. The outlet appears to have shed all pretense of balanced reporting. The “All” seems to have been removed from the NPR mainstay “All Things Considered.” The transition has probably been gradual—I suspect a generational shift may have contributed—but it definitely picked up steam with the Black Lives Matter movement and amidst the COVID pandemic. NPR has increasingly embraced a race, gender, and minority centric agenda. It has become so obvious that my detectoral exercises are no longer intellectually challenging. This trend is particularly noticeable in NPR programming, but it also permeates PBS, and programming and reporting by local public radio and TV affiliates.

I’m not alone. Critics spans the entire political spectrum. Conservative and libertarian organizations and individuals have criticized public broadcasting since its start in the late 1960s. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the republican congress under Newt Gingrich unsuccessfully tried to cut federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, (the umbrella organization that provides federal funding to NPR, PBS and local public broadcasting affiliates). The CATO institute argued for defunding in a 2012 policy paper which is as relevant today as when it was published. Back in January of this year The Heritage Foundation did the same. And in the past few years, center-left voices have been added to the chorus of critics. For example, in his recent YouTube/podcast series “All Things Reconsidered,” Peter Boghossian delves deeply into the NPR reporting biases. And Current Affairs just added to the progressive tradition of criticizing NPR (Neoliberal Propaganda Radio) for being in bed with corporate interests and for not being leftist enough.

If this were another media outlet like the commercial broadcasting or cable channels—CBS, Fox, CNN, MSNBC—I would simply tell everybody to chill, be critical consumers keeping the left-leaning bias in mind, and use the court of public opinion to affect change if a real or perceived misrepresentation of the facts is important enough to you: start a Substack newsletter or YouTube channel, become a TikTok influencer, write OpEds or letters to the editor, etc. With the proliferation of the internet, it has never been easier to make your voice heard and get your word out.

But public broadcasting has something that commercial channels don’t have: public funding and regulatory protection, which presents us with two moral/political problems.

First, your and my individual rights are being violated as we are forced to pay with our tax dollars whether we like it or not. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting receives federal subsidies to the tune of $500 million/year (during COVID they got another $250 million in two lump sums). In addition, public broadcasters don’t pay FCC regulatory fees for the radio and TV station spectrum they use, saving them $120-200 million/year. Furthermore, states and tax funded educational and other institutions are contributing to local public radio and TV stations. I haven’t been able to find a total dollar number, but it’s not improbable that direct and indirect tax payer and regulatory subsidies add up to around $1 billion (if anybody has additional details, let me know in the comments).

If not satisfied with what public broadcasting offers us, we can vote with our feet but only partially with our wallets: we can stop listening/viewing, we can refuse to contribute voluntarily at one of the insufferable pledge drives (or begging drives as my wife calls them), but we cannot refuse to pay our taxes without severe consequences.

Second, in a constitutional republic like ours, the complete separation of state and media is one of the most critical bulwarks against creeping authoritarianism. The fourth estate must stand on its own. Even the slightest suspicion that government funded media outlets are promoting certain political positions undermines the strength of our political system. I mentioned earlier that a large majority of public broadcasting employees are left leaning, and that the NPR news audience is 87% democrat. To this can be added that the audience is 75% white and 68% college educated, and that a disproportionate number are in positions of power in government, non-governmental organizations and educational institutions. It’s not unreasonable to think that the programming resulting from this employee/audience dynamic is reinforcing deeply held leftist political beliefs that slowly weaken the bulwark and contributes to moving the country in an authoritarian direction.

What’s the solution? Remove “public” from public broadcasting. First, remove federal subsidies. This will set NPR and PBS and their affiliates free from real and imagined suspicions of promoting a certain narrative at our expense. They may continue down the chosen path, but now as any other commercial outlets subject to the supply and demand forces of the marketplace. Second, level the broadcasting regulatory playing field by requiring them to pay for the broadcast spectrum like commercial broadcasters. Taken together, this will help restore both your right to not provide tax dollars for its funding and reinforce the separation of state and media critical to our republic.

If you are a voluntary contributor—a PBS “Viewers Like You” or the like—stop supporting public broadcasting with additional dollars (I will not renew my PBS Passport subscription). Send a note to NPR or PBS telling them why you’ve stopped, and what changes you’d like to see before possibly resuming. For the rest of you who are involuntarily providing tax dollar funding, contact your U.S. senators, representative, and state elected officials. Request that they advocate for the government to get out of financing and regulating public broadcasting. And feel free to steal with pride from or link to this article for ammunition.

1. I added this footnote on 12/5 (the article was published on 12/4) to provide my sources for asserting that NPR journalists are left-leaning, after a question from a reader. I asserted this by inference from a number of sources.

1. The Current analyzed and reported on political donations by public media employees in the 2020 election in this article. This analysis covers public broadcasting in general, not NPR employees specifically. As referenced in the article, NPR (and most major news outlet from what I understand) don't allow their employees to contribute to political campaigns, discourage or prevent private participation in political events, etc., for fear of being perceived as biased. Although, NPR eased their restrictions in 2021 as reported by this article.

2. A number of watch dogs attempt to measure newsmedia bias:

   1. AllSides publishes a Media Bias Chart. Here are their latest poll/analysis of NPR online opinion and NPR online news. 

   2. Media Bias / Fact Check (MBFC) has the following analysis of NPR.

   3. TheFactual (owned by Yahoo!) rates news sources on different criteria, incl. bias. This article discusses NPR, but the information appears to be at least partly secondary as both AllSides and MBFC are referenced.

   4. Biasly publishes a Bias Meter that covers NPR (may require free subscription).

Of course, you can question the methodology and suspect the watch dogs of being biased in their bias reporting, but reading up on their approach, they appear to take their role seriously.