NPR Says Lack of Government Funding = Government Control

“Good judgment prevailed as Congress rejected a move to assert government control over the content of news.” – National Public Radio

So spoke the government financed news of the failed efforts to sever government ties. Good god, how Orwellian can the government news get? If NPR can tell us with a straight face that severing federal funding and cutting NPR completely off from the government like every other radio station and news outlet (except PBS) is “an unwarranted attempt to interject federal authority” into the news, then NPR is a step away from fooling around with the laws of arithmetic.

The House voted yesterday 239-171 against stripping NPR of government funding, with Republicans voting unanimously to cut NPR loose. Following the vote, NPR unleashed the aforementioned series of knee-slappers, which also included the positioning of the no-conservatives-allowed (or Juan Williams) station as a solution to America’s “increasingly fractious media environment.” NPR then stressed that we keep funding “this essential tool of Democracy,” reminding us that before public radio, America was not a democracy.

The delicate balancing act attempted by NPR regarding its finances is an interesting sub-narrative in the unfolding saga of defunding the organization. One the one hand, they try to lowball the percentage of their funds that comes from government, both federal and local, to make the case to taxpayers that NPR is a small burden on them. They frequently claim that NPR headquarters only receives 1 percent of its funding from tax dollars, but a report by the Congressional Research Service “found that taxpayers fund at least 4 percent of NPR’s budget.” NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller also frequently claims that “member stations receive about 9 percent of their funding from tax dollars,” but a simple study by the American Thinker’s Mark Browning of information from NPR’s own website estimated that “local NPR affiliates derive something like 41% of their funding from taxes, either directly or indirectly.” Browning’s examination, adding it all up, “brings [the] total of taxpayer support for the entire NPR budget to around 23%.” Perhaps NPR really is fooling around with the laws of arithmetic.

On the other hand while NPR dramatically lowballs the total funding they receive, to make the case for continued funding they have to simultaneously argue that the “1%” to headquarters and “9%” to local affiliates they claim they receive is extremely important, and “a critical part of keeping those stations vibrant,” so they “take these calls for defunding very, very seriously.” In other words, we’re so self sufficient that we get most of our money from elsewhere and really don’t need your money, but keep funding us because we really, really need your money.

In terms of the federal budget, NPR’s annual funding is probably smaller than an awful lot of individual earmarks. Defunding the organization won’t do much for the deficit, but it will help. More importantly it is a simple matter of accountability. Government absolutely should not be asserting government control over the content of the news, and that is a fundamental American principle. Another fundamental principle is that government should never spend money for which there is no accountability to government. Why should taxpayers spend a dime on an organization that is only accountable to corporate donors and someone as shady and anti-American as George Soros?

Is this the kind of Democracy preserving service taxpayers should be paying for?

Hat tip: Newsbusters