Defunding NPR Is Good, Actually

The federal government should not be in the business of funding domestic media, partisan or otherwise.

Just this week, Congress passed a $9 billion rescissions package – essentially clawing back funds that were previously appropriated, but that the current Congress no longer wishes to spend. Rescissions packages are historically normal, but have been in short supply over the past decade or so, where the growth of government has proceeded unchecked under both Republican and Democrat administrations. In this case, most of the package was making permanent the temporary cuts that were recommended under Elon Musk’s DOGE project.

The biggest line item being slashed in this package is foreign aid, namely USAID, our primary agency for disbursing and monitoring such spending. As I have written in the past, foreign aid is an incredibly important part of our ability to remain the world’s primary geopolitical power. Still, it does require massive reform to reorient itself behind that goal, instead of merely funding progressive priorities that often clash with our ability to project power and influence. This package moves in that direction, even if in a way that may not always be perfect. But these sizable cuts – making up about $8 billion of the total $9 billion clawback – are not earning the majority of the coverage. What has gotten the bulk of the legacy and progressive media establishment in a tizzy is the remaining $1 billion, which was funding public media, notably NPR and PBS.

Outlets from the New York Times to CNN have been presenting these cuts as delivering the fatal blow to the best possible, most nonpartisan media there is: public broadcasting. They’ve argued that removing this funding will leave rural communities bereft of news and weather reporting. They’ve argued that cutting federal funding will destroy the public good of nonprofit broadcasting and leave us with a wasteland of purely partisan content. They’ve even claimed that slashing federal subsidies will eliminate important children’s programming like Sesame Street, a PBS staple for decades. All in all, they see this as a five-alarm fire that only bolsters the case that the Trump administration is acting in a fascistic manner by reducing the public’s ability to access real news in a slew of misinformation.

But is any of this true? Not in the slightest.

First, both of these organizations will survive without federal funds, in spite of the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. PBS receives about 15% of its revenue from these grants, while NPR only gets 2% of its annual budget from federal coffers. In fact, executives in both of these organizations tout the fact that they are primarily supported by donors and not government largesse. They repeatedly state that government spending is not make-or-break for their very survival, or at least they did before these cuts were seriously on the table. Now, apparently, everything is on the line. But this reeks of desperation and cynicism.

There are no shortage of philanthropists or foundations that could use but a small portion of their riches to support these media organizations in near-perpetuity. The stations themselves could open up to advertisements, they could raise money from smaller local donors, or they could license more programming to other networks for a fee. The latter option is a huge revenue generator. For instance, PBS licensed the rights to Sesame Street to Max over a decade ago and made a hefty sum, all the while retaining broadcast rights to new content they didn’t even have to create. There are myriad revenue generation techniques that private media uses to great effect, from ads to subscriptions. The only thing stopping public media from joining the 21^st century is federal largesse; gladly, that may be coming to an end.

Next, the idea that Americans simply cannot live without publicly-funded nonpartisan media like NPR is itself a total joke. Americans are some of the richest people on the planet. We have access to ten thousand lifetimes’ worth of information at our fingertips. We can get high speed internet anywhere on Earth, beamed to us from satellites in orbit. And we have the freest, broadest information marketplace that mankind has ever seen, where anyone can be a journalist, commentator, or consumer at any point in time. There is no need whatsoever for the government to fund media in an age when media oversaturation is more of a problem than media deserts. And that would be assuming that public media is studiously neutral and nonpartisan. In reality, that could not be further from the truth.

Both PBS and NPR are rife with left-wing bias in their programming, hiring, narrative shaping, and reporting. PBS is better than NPR in this regard, but that is a bar so low that a roach couldn’t limbo underneath it. PBS routinely gives favorable interviews to Democrat politicians while confronting Republicans, it turned William F. Buckley’s venerable Firing Line into a liberal lovefest, and it promotes progressive cultural messaging in many of its programs, for both children and adults. But that pales in comparison to NPR. One cannot turn on a local NPR station for one of its marquee programs without encountering massive left-wing bias. Racism, transphobia, Islamophobia, climate change, American imperialism, and social justice are perennial topics of conversation. NPR called the coronavirus lab leak theory a hoax, refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop saga, and have parroted every Hamas lie since October 7, 2023. Nearly everyone who works there, from the canvassing-for-Biden CEO to the front-line reporters, are hardline progressives. They are about as biased as a news organization can be.

Frankly, though, the bias doesn’t matter when it comes to their supposed right to federal funding. I would be more than happy for the government to remove its subsidies even if NPR were a conservative or neutral outlet. The federal government has no business whatsoever in funding domestic media. Its intervention in the media market is antithetical to the traditional American understanding of freedom of the press and looks even more absurd in an era of media ubiquity. NPR has no more right to taxpayer dollars than you or I. Removing this subvention is not a squashing of speech or press freedom; it is a restoration of both. The only media that government should be involved in funding is unabashedly pro-American foreign media, intended to influence subject populations under enemy regimes. Think Radio Free Europe during the Cold War, not NPR during the George Floyd riots.

Cutting federal spending on domestic areas in which it should never have been involved is an unalloyed good. Slashing taxpayer outlays on biased public media fits that bill exceptionally well. Now NPR and PBS can actually be funded by ‘Viewers Like You’ instead of taxpayers who derive from them no benefit whatsoever.

Welcome to the free market, folks. Come on in, the water’s fine.