Democracy in America | NPR funding

If I am not for myself, who will donate to me?

NPR's curious position on its own defunding

By M.S.

NORMALLY, I would vehemently disagree with anyone trying to portray National Public Radio as a partisan liberal institution. But if we use the definition of "liberal" in the old saw, "someone who won't take his own side in a fight", then I think the evidence of the past few weeks is that, yes, NPR is a thoroughly liberal institution.

The description might apply to the resignations of Ron Schiller, NPR's top fundraiser, and Vivian Schiller (no relation), NPR's chief executive, earlier this month after Mr Schiller had the poor judgment to voice his personal support for Republican conservative fiscal policies. (Yes, he did, in that very conversation. For some reason that wasn't the comment that got him in trouble; I wonder why?) But actually I'm thinking of the episode "Planet Money" aired last Friday on the question of whether or not public radio should receive government funding. It was a pretty good show. It had Charles Wheelan, an economist at the University of Chicago, explaining why radio is a public good, and saying that he's a member of NPR in three different states, but that he's not quite sure NPR needs or ought to get government funding. It had Michael Munger, libertarian economist at Duke, saying that public goods can often be privately funded. It had Tim Harford, the "undercover economist", explaining that just because something is a public good, it doesn't mean the government ought to fund it, but that in the case of public radio, it was entirely possible that the government should be funding more of it, since there's no way in the context of a public good to assess whether or not the public appetite was really being met. (Coming from the land of the BBC, Mr Harford seemed to lean towards the view that it should, despite the overall laissez-faire tendency one finds in his writing.)

All in all, it was a classic example of "on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand" journalism. Entertaining, educational, somewhat frustratingly middle-of-the-road—classic public-broadcasting fare. You'd never have guessed that the question being discussed was "should we get funded, or not?" It's kind of amazing. As Ezra Klein writes, Republicans in the House look likely to achieve all of their initial budget-cutting objectives, and among those may well be the defunding of NPR. Yet NPR is able to dispassionately contemplate its own defunding as an object of intellectual curiosity.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? Well, tens of millions of public-radio listeners, certainly. NPR gets just 2% of its budget from federal grants; it gets most of its budget from listener donations and subscriptions from local public-radio affiliates. They, in turn, get about 10% of their budgets from federal funding, but no one has proposed defunding local public-radio stations. Yet. Just wait. They will. The intellectual question of whether public radio is the type of public good that ought to receive federal funding is a nice subject for a show like "Planet Money" to treat, in its personable, uncommitted, just-wondering drive-time voice. But that's obviously not what this is about. Conservative activists are going after public radio for the same reasons they've gone after ACORN and unions, and using the same tactics. The aim is to first stigmatise, and then cut off funding for an organisation that disseminates information and views they don't like. They've already done the "stigmatise" part of that routine to the entire mainstream media; if there were a way to cut off funding to the New York Times, Republicans would be trying it right now. I find it rather dismal that the 30-year effort to stigmatise public broadcasting as partisan seems to have succeeded. But given that it has, Mr Wheelan may be right: NPR may be better off cutting its strings from the federal government, so that it can operate in an environment free of political blackmail.

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