Support federal funds for National Public Radio

The past several weeks have been bad ones for National Public Radio, as congressional Republicans continued their relentless effort to cut the organization’s funding. It is important that  the public be cognizant of the political motivations behind many of these proposed spending reductions. Under the guise of fiscal prudence, Republicans have deemed federal money for NPR wasteful, but in reality that verdict is the result of shrewd political calculation. If Republicans manage to slash federal funds for the program they will damage news media standards and lower the level of public awareness in America, all to cut an almost negligible expense from the federal budget and strike against a media outlet they view, incorrectly, as an adversary.

Although NPR would likely survive without federal support, the consequences of removing the program’s funding would have far-reaching impacts. Stations in large cities could continue to operate, but the decrease in funding would probably result in the closure of many stations in rural communities, which are often heavily dependent on federal funding. Many of these rural areas and small towns have lost their local newspapers in recent years, leaving people to get their local news from the Internet or talk radio sources, both of which can be unreliable. The need for NPR is greatest in these regions, yet the rural stations are precisely the ones that Republicans would shutter with the new budget cut.

Besides the practical implications, the elimination of funding for NPR is bad in principle. Ever since Richard Nixon demanded the elimination of government funds for public broadcasting in 1971, conservatives have been looking for a chance to gut the institution because of its perceived liberal bias. But their assumptions have no basis in reality. There may be progressive employees at NPR, but they more than compensate for possible bias in their coverage. According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a media watch group, NPR invites more conservatives to speak on their shows than liberals. According to Paul Farhi of the Washington Post, there are more self-described conservative listeners to NPR than there are conservative viewers of FOX News.

The American media needs a publicly funded news outlet. Public funding provides a different kind of incentive system for journalists—NPR’s journalists are not only responsible to donors and a corporate board, but also to the federal government and the populace. Private news organizations have no such responsibility. They are businesses in search of ratings and profits, and that often means the public receives sensationalist news, devoid of nuance and boiled down to soundbytes of screaming partisans. The elimination of federal funding for NPR has nothing to do with fiscal prudence. NPR receives a little under $100 million of federal funds each year, a miniscule portion of government expenditure.  The “zeroing-out” of NPR’s funding is irrational, and the most responsible path for Congress to take is to back down.