OPM - Press Edition
In my never-ending effort to drive home the point that politics is, at its root, about Other People's Money, I present the latest installment of the OPM files.
In case you missed it, a long-time and now-former employee of NPR ran an expose of that media outlet's systemic bias and its deep-rooted aversion to journalistic objectivity. That Free Press article had reverberations far greater than many expected, with laughably earnest 'rebuttals' from other NPRers, and with the light-shining on a whole lot of lunatic commentary from NPR CEO Katherine Maher.
Calls to defund NPR have emerged from the usual places. NPR, in turn, offered up disingenuous and misleading assertions that it only gets 1% of its funding from the government. Yes, direct government funding is that low, but as much as a third of NPR's ~279M revenue comes from "customers" that include local public television and radio, which are in turn funded by, you guessed it, the government.
Several tens of millions of dollars may seem like noise when our federal government spent $6.1 trillion last year, but one politician's noise is a thousand households' annual income.
The outrage is over the government funding what has become a highly partisan, and therefore political, news outlet, but we should step back and ask...
By what authority does the government fund any news organization??
I don't see anything in the Constitution authorizing this.
I do see language protecting freedom of the press, however. As we all know, he who pays the piper calls the tune, and a government that pays for news reporting would be saintly beyond any government that has ever existed if that money arrived totally string-free. State-sponsored news is the stuff of totalitarian governments, not of free societies.
Alas, the fact that it has taken gross partisanship, rather than NPR’s more traditional left-bias, to prompt questioning this misuse of public finds is disappointing.
That too many Americans are sympathetic to other government efforts to fund the regulation of news and opinion outlets is beyond disappointing.
A limited government of a liberty-based nation has no business either funding news outlets or supervising their content. No matter whether those outlets are blatantly partisan, lightly biased, or absolutely impartial.
Previous iterations of the OPM files:
Always OPM - Dig into any political matter, and you get to the same root.
Our OPM Culture - If someone else has money, how can I get at it?
OPM - Sports Edition - Billionaire sports team owners bribing or blackmailing politicians to pay for stadiums with your tax dollars.
OPM - Censorship Edition - The hysterics over Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the Best-and-Brightest’s loss of censorious power.
OPM - TERF Edition - How Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists helped shine the light on the hidden motives of trans-activists.