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Should PBS & NPR lose Public Funding ?
NPR’s firing of Juan Williams Wednesday has ignited a firestorm, leaving some politicians wondering
whether the organization should lose its public funding, and many in the media questioning the real
reason behind the news veteran’s axing.
In comments to CNN, former Arkansas governor and fellow Fox News contributor Mike Huckabee said that
the hasty dismissal of Williams amounts to censorship, which is unacceptable from a publicly-funded
organization.
“NPR has discredited itself as a forum for free speech and a protection of the First Amendment rights of
all and has solidified itself as the purveyor of politically correct pabulum and protector of views that lean
left,” Huckabee said in a statement provided to CNN.
“It is time for the taxpayers to start making cuts to federal spending, and I encourage the new
Congress to start with NPR,” Huckabee said. He added that he will refuse all interview requests from
NPR as long as it remains publicly funded.
While Huckabee is the first high-profile figure to call for an end to NPR’s public funding since the Williams
incident, the charge isn’t anything new. In June, the Daily Caller reports, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-
CO) introduced legislation aimed at ending government funding for the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting (through which federal funds are funneled to NPR) after 2012. Not surprisingly,
the measure stalled in the Democrat-controlled Congress.
“This is an organization that can stand on its own. Why in the world, in the era of trillion dollar deficits,
should the taxpayer have to subsidize it? It doesn’t make sense,” Lamborn told the DC. “I would love to
defund NPR completely. Not because I don’t like it … but because it can stand on its own.”
Defunding the news outlet, however, has incited a bring-it-on-type response from NPR. In response to
Huckabee’s remarks, NPR blogger Mark Memmot posted the following: “For the record, here’s a link to
charts that break down where NPR and its member stations get their money.”
Those charts reveal that for fiscal year 2008, 5.8 percent of its revenues came from “federal, state, and
local” government. The point seems to be that federal funds are not a big part of the organization’s
coffers, an insinuation that supports Rep. Lamborn’s charges.
Liberal financier George Soros recently donated $1 million to the liberal group Media Matters,
as well as $1.8 million to NPR.
Yet NPR’s boldness may be for another reason: its reporting style and ideological stances
have caught the eye of liberal financier George Soros. Earlier this week, Soros’s Open Society
Foundations donated $1.8 million to NPR. That money will fund the hiring of 100 journalists “to
bring greater transparency and accountability to the workings of state capitals across the
country.”
With funders such as Soros, public funding may be unnecessary.
Yet that funding raises serious questions about the integrity of NPR’s reporting. Soros’s
funding is historically linked to liberal organizations throughout the country, including Media
Matters, the Tides Foundation, Democracy Alliance, Moveon.org, and the Center for American
Progress.
Also, the fact that NPR’s firing of Williams comes during a week when Soros-funded Media Matters and
the Tides foundation are calling on advertisers to boycott Fox News and Glenn Beck, has not gone
unnoticed.
The suggestion that Williams’s history of Fox News appearances led to his dismissal is not a radical idea.
Last year Politico reported NPR brass pleaded with top political correspondent Mara Liasson “to
reconsider her regular appearances on Fox News because of what they perceived as the network’s
political bias”: