OPM - Public Broadcasting Edition

A quarter century ago, when former Navy SEAL and professional wrestler Jesse "The Body" Ventura served a stint as governor of Minnesota, he cut state funding for public broadcasting. Of course there was much local sturm und drang, but I vividly recall his claim that the state's funding amounted to 2% of the entity's total budget and that (I paraphrase) any business should be able to handle a 2% revenue cut.

This came to mind after I heard that Trump cut, via executive order, funding to NPR and PBS. I spent a couple minutes trying to determine how much federal money goes to those entities. Unsurprisingly, modern technology, including AI, could not get me a straight answer. Superficially, only about 1% of NPR's budget comes from the Feds, but a much larger chunk comes from public stations, which are supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which is taxpayer-funded.

Trump's EO addresses both.

Naturally, the people running PBS and NPR are displeased.

Naturally, fans of PBS and NPR are also displeased.

Setting aside questions of authority and statutory mandates for now, my primary interest in this is the sense of entitlement I see in the displeased.

One comment I saw on social media paraphrases as "I want my tax dollars to fund NPR." My first reaction was "well, goody for you. I don't."

My second reaction went elsewhere. "Why don't you contribute more of your own money to NPR, then," was my other internalized retort.

Internalized and rhetorical, because I know that "my tax dollars" actually means "other people's money spent the way I want, as well." The sentiment "I want..." doesn't extend to consideration for what others want. It's a hypocrisy no different from that of a millionaire claiming he doesn't pay enough in taxes, so tax rates on such as him should be raised. Why not simply cut a check?

Then there's the matter of entitlement. People will claim a "right" to public broadcasting, ignoring that nothing that requires the fruit of someone else's labor can ever be deemed a right. Again, and by now regular readers know this is my mantra - it's always about Other People's Money. Calling something "important" or "a right" is a salve that masks the hard reality that people are perfectly fine taking from others to serve their personal wants.

Yes, public broadcasting has gone deep into the bias pit, and that is why Trump is trying to de-fund it. For me, the bias isn't the problem, the federal funding is. I don't see where the Constitution authorizes the Federal Government to fund media, and I see a parallel with the concept of a State religion in the public funding of news reporting entities. No matter the measures taken to try and inhibit government influence, it's still public money being used to propagate opinion. It bears mentioning that all news reporting involves some degree of opinion. Even the driest, most non-partisan outlet still curates what it reports, and curating is itself a form of opinion.

I say, let NPR and PBS pursue private funding by whatever means they desire. Once the shackles that come with federal funding are removed, they can be whatever their viewers wish them to be, and produce whatever content their supporters wish to see, read, and hear. If they thrive, great. If they fail, so it goes. No matter the outcome, our tax dollars shouldn't be part of the evolution.

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A footnote: This is from a recent missive from NPR's Public Editor:

Could NPR exist on individual donors alone? No. If it did, it wouldn't be considered public media; it would be private nonprofit media. And that wouldn't solve the root problem that drives this conversation. There's a growing group of local nonprofit media companies across the country. Most have extensive policies to ensure that the news serves the needs of the audience, not the funders, whoever they are. That's because the lines get blurry between small individual donors, large individual donors, philanthropies and corporate donors. NPR's policies have served as a model in this area.

Do you see the issue? "serve the needs of the audience, not the funders" is exactly the sort of entitlement to OPM that I wrote about. The "audience" is implicitly more deserving and more important than the people from whom money is forcibly taken to fund NPR. Marxist logic at its finest, a telltale of the inherent biases in the people running NPR, and a dismissal of anyone who doesn't believe that tax dollars should be used outside the bounds of our Constitutional framework.

It's also circular logic that evades the question asked. By defining NPR as inherently publicly funded, the author tautologically asserts that absent public funding, whatever entity would continue would not be NPR, even if its content was exactly the same.