NPR: Does it deserve taxpayer subsidies?

“Ron Schiller picked a very bad time to embarrass his employer,” said Jack Kelly in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Schiller, the head fund-raiser for National Public Radio, was recently caught in a video sting operation expressing his scorn for Christians, Republicans, and the Tea Party, while smarmily pleading for a $5 million donation from a fake Muslim organization. In branding Tea Partiers as gun-toting racists, Schiller—who has since resigned, along with NPR’s CEO—only illustrated what has been obvious all along: that NPR serves as “a propaganda outlet” for elitist liberals, and is thus undeserving of taxpayer support. With Congress looking to cut unnecessary spending, it’s obviously time to pull the plug on the $450 million that taxpayers pour into the Corporation for Public Broadcasting annually, which in turn provides about 2 percent of NPR’s funding. NPR is obviously the “Grey Poupon of federal subsidies,” said Debra J. Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle. We’re out of money and can’t afford it.

Of course we can, said Rodney Benson in CSMonitor.com. In the U.S., we spend less than $1.50 a year per capita on subsidizing public broadcasting, compared with upwards of $30 in other developed nations. And a recent study of 14 countries shows that public media create better-informed citizens, who are integral to the “vitality of our democracy.” Besides, it’s small public stations that “would suffer the most without the federal grants,” said Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune. The lion’s share of federal subsidies goes to these stations—it accounts for 10 percent to 40 percent of their budgets—and it’s likely they would go dark if NPR were zeroed out. This would be a shame, since these mostly rural outposts are still carrying out public broadcasting’s original 1967 mandate to “bring more news, information, and cultural choices to all Americans.”

But in 2011, NPR has a substantial donor base and a loyal audience of 26 million listeners, said Victor Davis Hanson in National Review Online. So let “the federal training wheels come off.” In the end, NPR will be far better off if it doesn’t have to answer to Republicans or politicians of any party, said Matt Welch in CNN.com. It could ask liberal philanthropist George Soros for a few hundred million bucks, or stage “the mother of all pledge drives.” It’s simply not fair to “force taxpayers to fund the listening habits of people who hate them.”

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