Representative Jim Banks (R-Ind.) announced yesterday that he will present a bill to cut funding to National Public Radio (NPR). Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said she hopes to do the same in the Senate. We live in strange times, anything can happen in politics, and there may be no quicker way to look foolish than to make a prediction. That said: no, Congress obviously has no intention of cutting funding to NPR.
This latest wave of Defund NPR! sentiment follows an article by Uri Berliner in The free pressin which the NPR editor and reporter do so former NPR editor and reporter ever since resigned— claims the network “has lost America’s trust” by excluding unfavorable opinions from the center-left hive mind. I thought Berliner’s piece teetered between overstatement (it would have been more accurate, though probably less SEO-friendly, to replace “America’s lost confidence” with “has seen its niche get a little smaller”) and the statement too little (it ended with a plea Not cut funding to public radio, as Berliner believes “we need a public institution where stories are told and points of view are exchanged in good faith”). But at this point the details of his essay are almost beside the point, as the debate he has sparked goes far beyond what the article says. The evidence is that people used it as a springboard to demand a cut of NPR’s federal dollars, even as Berliner went out of his way to point out that this is not the outcome he wants.
And now the anger has spread, with NPR CEO Katherine Maher under fire for her history of left-wing tweeting. The troops are ready for battle. So why don’t I expect Congress to block the funding?
For three reasons. The first is the obvious one: Democrats control the White House, and there aren’t enough Republicans in Congress to override a veto, so at the very least this is unlikely to become law before 2025. A second reason is that it’s difficult to craft a bill that would cut NPR while leaving the rest of the public broadcasting ecosystem alone. As network defenders never tire of pointing out, NPR doesn’t get much done direct support from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). It gets a lot more money from member stations, which NPR doesn’t own, and which get money from CPB (and, often, from other government sources, since many of them are run by state universities).
This shell game isn’t an insurmountable problem, but it’s the kind of thing that has already tripped up lawmakers. Last year, for example, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) introduced a bill to prevent federal funds from flowing “directly or indirectly” to NPR, its television cousin PBS, or “any successor organization.” . Well, how do you define “successor organization”? There are already several public radio networks, some of which are quite old. If the Morning edition the team drops their affiliation with NPR and starts distributing the show via Public Radio Exchange, are they good?
The simplest way around these entanglements, of course, would be to write legislation that doesn’t seek to single out NPR and instead simply cuts off the Corporation for Public Broadcasting entirely. That it would prevent the money from moving. But this also brings us to the third and most important reason why I don’t think a defunding bill is coming anytime soon: No matter how much they huff and puff, the majority of the GOP has no serious interest in defunding public broadcasting.
Yes, there are some Republican officials who would rather see an openly liberal NPR that supports itself rather than a “balanced” system that relies on taxpayer dollars. I bet a libertarian-leaning legislator like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) would vote for it. But Massie is an outlier. If history has taught us nothing else, it’s that the most powerful Republican officials are usually not bothered by the idea of Americans being forced to subsidize opinions they don’t like. They just want the subsidies to go in a different direction.
Why do I say this? Because we’ve seen this process play out over and over again, and it always ends up pretty much the same way. In 1971, President Richard Nixon proposed a “return to localism” that would effectively overthrow the crew that ran PBS, and a year later he vetoed a CPB appropriations bill; then PBS shelved most of the programs the president didn’t like, CPB brought a group of White House-friendly figures onto its board of directors, and the president signed off on a budget increase. In 1994, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) suggested that he could “zero out” the CPB money; the main long-term result was that several conservatives obtained positions in public television. In 2005, a House subcommittee actually voted to cut CPB’s budget by 25 percent and cancel the remainder over the next few years; that time things ended with a former Republican Party chairman becoming CPB chairman, which got a higher allocation, not a lower one. I could list more examples, but I’ve already written that article more than once and don’t want to write it again. Suffice it to say that the CPB invariably survives these battles, that its federal support almost always increases, and that its infrequent budget cuts do not last long.
And – here we return to Uri Berliner’s article – one of the reasons this continues to happen is because the attack so often boils down to the idea that NPR and PBS are unbalanced. This is true, of course: large public broadcasting operations have always oriented themselves toward the dominant views of the social environment that produce them, and Berliner is surely right that this has intensified at NPR in the years since Donald’s election Trump president. But when bias is your primary complaint, you give broadcasters an easy way out. They would always rather make a gesture towards breaking even with some hiring or firing than see their money cut.
Is there a way around this problem? I think there is, but it would take a different approach to the fight. Instead of a strictly partisan battle, bring together an alliance of people (especially on the right) who are tired of subsidizing opinions they don’t like and people (especially on the left) who are tired of seeing those subsidies used as an excuse to insert the government into choices broadcasters’ editorials. Adopt a plan to transform CPB from a semi-governmental entity into a fully independent nonprofit organization, ending the federal role in noncommercial broadcasting.
There was serious talk of doing so soon after Gingrich’s attacks rocked the broadcasters. In 1995, the New York Daily News it even reported that a CPB spokesperson had “confirmed that all groups agreed on the need to establish an independent trust fund that could eventually replace federal funding.” Then CPB subsidies started to rise again, and the idea returned to the fringes of the political spectrum. So a push like this has already failed once. But the partisan approach has failed to detach these operations from the government many times. It can be difficult to put together a cross-party alliance, but sometimes it’s the only thing that can get the job done.
And yes, it is possible to engage people on these issues. Back when I spent a lot of time following the radical Pacifica radio network, I often encountered leftists who saw the CPB as a back door to government influence and thought they would be better off without it. On the other end of the spectrum, after writing a blog post on this topic in 2011, I received a couple of emails from Ken Tomlinson, who had chaired the CPB for two years under President George W. Bush. Tomlinson had hounded public broadcasting for being unbalanced, a crusade that had led to a major reshuffle of the system but no reduction in its federal support. He didn’t care how I described his efforts, but he was friendly and seemed to have come to the idea that the underlying problem was purse strings, not prejudice. “Bottom line, get your tax dollars out of the CPB,” he told me. “Not just NPR. CPB.”
Maybe one day we’ll get there. But if Banks and Blackburn can make it this year, I’ll eat a bag of NPR.