It’s not the bias, but the principle: No public funds for media

SACRAMENTO—I was in middle school when our English teacher asked students where we find trustworthy news. I smugly suggested “non-biased” news publications and received a well-deserved dressing down. Didn’t I know that every publication has biases? Every editorial decision—from story selection to sources to sentence structure—inevitably reflects the writer’s preference or bias, he noted.

Point taken. I remembered that lesson when I pursued a journalism career. I’ve worked on news pages, but found opinion writing more freeing than trying to suppress my own point of view. The media have since changed dramatically, as the internet, social media, talk radio and cable news have swamped Americans with alternative sources, thus bypassing traditional gatekeepers.

The new media environment seems more opinionated than ever, yet one old debate—dating to the Reagan administration—has come to the fore. That’s the battle over federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Founded in 1967, it provides tax funds to NPR, PBS and their member stations. Congress recently voted to slash that $1.1 billion (over two years), which will go into effect after Donald Trump signs the budget. He previously called for such cuts.

Now that cuts are coming from Congress rather than executive order, I’m all for it—even if the president’s rationale is typically ill-tempered. An official White House statement said that the outlets “spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’” Trump was upset by NPR’s lack of coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the run-up to the 2024 election. His statement cherry-picked examples of “trash” news segments, including a Valentine’s Day feature on “queer animals.”

Public broadcasting supporters point to myriad noteworthy, uplifting and unobjectionable programs, ranging from “All Things Considered” to “Sesame Street” to “Planet Money,” but there’s no point debating the biases of specific programming. With the exception of perhaps “Car Talk,” I’ve always found NPR and PBS acquired tastes that I never managed to acquire. Of course, those networks are biased. Everything is biased. In my opinion, they don’t spread radical viewpoints, but cater to the preferences of their affluent, culturally-liberal listeners.

Government shouldn’t fund any media. It’s not a proper use of tax dollars. Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to fund viewpoints they abhor. Any media’s funding source obviously distorts its coverage. I once spoke to a group of reporters about a donor-funded journalism outfit that I managed. They were fixated on our donors. I finally said something to this effect: “Go back to your editor and pitch an investigative story about the business practices of the largest advertisers in your newspaper and get back to me.” They broke out laughing, but understood.

The NPR and PBS subsidies aren’t huge in the context of nearly $7 trillion in federal spending and a host of more anger-inducing subsidies, but that’s not the point. It’s hard to get too worked up about the coming funding cuts upon closer examination of the overall NPR and PBS budgets. (Ironically, NPR has published some of the most even-handed coverage of the funding-cut issue.) Its recent report notes that, “NPR receives only about 1% of its operating budget directly from the federal government. Other revenue includes donations, returns from its endowment and corporate sponsorship.”

NPR, the report adds, also receives 30% of its funding from programming fees from member stations—and they receive 13% of their funds from the federal government. No organization likes to see tighter budgets, but such relatively modest cuts don’t justify the hysteria. Most traditional media operations have seen vast reductions in their advertising revenue over the past decade or more, so PBS, NPR and their member stations will just have to tighten their belts like everyone else, expand their corporate sponsorships and come up with new revenue sources.

Maybe they can widen their listenership by limiting their stories about why cannibalism is “perfectly natural.” Or not. If taxpayers don’t have to contribute to the networks’ budgets, then it’s of little concern to us—and certainly not to a presidential administration—what they broadcast or publish. Viewers can just choose one of the many privately funded disseminators of click bait, political conspiracies or other garbage. It’s not even that hard to find something trustworthy and illuminating amid the plethora of modern news choices.

Ben Sheehan, who hosts a civics podcast that streams on PBS, argued in a recent Daily Beast column that the cuts are a threat to local news coverage: “In light of these cuts, consider making a donation to your local PBS or NPR affiliate. Because if the government won’t take care of us, it’s up to us to take care of each other.” Government doesn’t take care of us, of course, but he’s right that it’s up to public-broadcasting’s supporters to pick up the slack. It might even help taxpayers and lead to better programming, which is just my biased opinion.