Is it time to defund NPR?

The left-hand portion of the FM dial is a special oasis that grants financial advantages to a select group of broadcasters. 

The section between 88.1 and 91.9 can only be occupied by Non-Commercial Educational Licensed (NCE) stations. These stations operate with several government-granted advantages — they are tax-exempt, are free to accept underwriting funds, and may be awarded financial grants based on their status. 

In the Philadelphia area, we have a mix of NPR stations, and college stations that are independent, or have some NPR affiliation (like running NPR news feeds). The news, this week, of the winding down of The Corporation for Public Broadcasting does not spell the end of All Things Considered or Masterpiece Theater. Rather, this move by Congress can make NPR more responsible to their supporters.

The problem with the CPB is right in their own motto: A Private Corporation Funded by the American People” 

Back in 1967, a report by The Carnegie Commission on Educational Television prompted President Lyndon Johnson to sign The Public Broadcasting Act to create public radio and TV. The rationale for doing this included “Cultural Enrichment, Universal Access, and Civic Engagement”.

Over the past several years, NPR and PBS have found themselves on the front pages, and the news has been generally bad. This started with journalist Uri Berliner who resigned from a 25-year career with NPR in a very public way. Berliner claimed, among other things, that NPR’s reporting had become so politically biased as to make opposing (or even centrist) views impossible to express. The network, said Berliner, had shifted so far left that it was no longer an impartial outlet. Most surveys back up Berliner’s assertions, including studies conducted among NPR staff and associated stations.

This bias was cited as a reason for the federal government to claw back funding from public broadcasting. About $1B was slated for domestic public broadcasting, and an additional $8B claw back was for international broadcast funding such as Voice of America. 

Of course, there is nothing wrong with any broadcaster or news outlet being politically biased. Radio stations and newspapers are produced by people, and many people are biased, even when they hope they are not. Pew Research and More in Common data:

While only half of Americans are highly biased, journalism is generally made up of left-leaning people (78 percent of American journalists identify as Democrats or leaning Democratic). Even more shocking is that the majority of journalists disagree with the public in the need to tell both sides of a news story.

Fox, MSNBC, and many other outlets please their audience by being as politically biased as possible, which makes good economic sense. But they are not funded with tax dollars.

Then there is the question of the rapidly declining audience. NPR and PBS affiliates have been losing viewers and listeners for years. This drop has accelerated after the most recent changes in management.

Berliner asserts that many listeners have been turned off by the increasingly overt political bias of NPR programming, and this may be true. But there are other reasons for loss of listeners. Radio, in America, is consumed mainly in cars:

Since the pandemic, drive-time has fallen as workers have increasingly either worked from home, or no longer needed to go into the office every day. But the greatest competition for public broadcasting is digital. Cable TV and streaming services have decimated television broadcasting, while the explosion in podcasting has replaced radio programming. 158 million Americans (over half the adult population) listen to podcasts, with ad revenue approaching $3B in the US alone.

The financial system used by public broadcasting is not well understood by the public. For NPR, funding from the government first goes to the “Mother Ship”  (as staffers refer to it), but then most of the funds are granted out to local stations, which produce content that can be syndicated.

PBS, on the other hand, is primarily a distribution service (like any other streaming service) which licenses and then provides content to local stations. PBS had once dominated British show content, for example, but now faces competition from Acorn, BrittBox, Amazon Prime, and many others.

That said, NPR’s funding does not primarily come from the government. 

In fact, listener support has been growing for public radio, even as institutional funding has turned away.

This support has resulted in an increasingly healthy financial condition for local public stations.

Now let’s go back to the NCE part of the dial. Non-commercial stations do not need to be affiliated with NPR. Many stations operate without any federal funding — this includes colleges, churches, and other independent stations that are funded through their organizations, listeners, or both. The best example may be New Jersey’s popular WFMU, funded mostly by listeners. WFMU is fiercely independent. Their web site states: “WFMU does not accept underwriting or corporate sponsorships. We receive some support from foundations and government grants, as long as they do not contain conditions that determine our programming content or restrict our independence.” Besides their FM stations, WFMU has three separate streaming channels.

When President Johnson signed the law that began shoveling our tax dollars to public broadcasting, it could have been argued that with so few TV and radio outlets in many communities, additional sources of information needed to be funded in order to have a better informed public.

Today, the public is, if anything, over-informed. Younger people, in particular, get their news digitally. So, if a shrinking audience does not mind the political bias of the broadcasters they support (and in fact, support them more than ever), why not let them continue to do so?

If any state or community feels that they need a radio or TV station that emphasizes the local community, great — they should fund that, with voter approval. But to ask a taxpayer in Maine to fund a radio station in Nevada made no sense on any grounds. They can get their Upstairs/Downstairs fix in dozens of places. We are all free to contribute to our local non-commercial outlets, and we love the idea of doing so.

There is one more argument for public broadcast funding we sometimes hear — that radio and TV is a service like the post office, and USPS deserve taxpayer funding. Recently, a Forever stamp hit 78 cents a letter. You can guess how we feel about the value of public mail delivery.

It’s time to let this shrinking, biased audience alone to develop into wherever they want to go — with our blessings.

Just not our money.

Liz Terwilliger and Stephen Wahrhaftig are co-founders of the Pennsylvania-based advocate organization, Reform Congress.