The case for defunding NPR and PBS is about a lot more than bias

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President Trump is right that PBS and NPR fail to reflect the โ€œpublicโ€ mood in any honest way.

Back in 1969, television personalityย Fred Rogersย famouslyย convincedย a group of skeptical senators to continue funding public television to the tune of $20 million. โ€œWell, Iโ€™m supposed to be a pretty tough guy,โ€ ranking Sen. John Pastore fromย Rhode Islandย told Mr. Rogers near the end of the testimony, โ€œandย this is the first time Iโ€™ve had goosebumps for the last two days.โ€ Theย short speech was allegedly so convincing, itโ€™s often heralded as an illustration of how to use emotional intelligence to connect to an audience.

At the time, public television was relatively new. The 1964ย Democratic Partyย platform was the first to promise โ€œeducational televisionโ€ programs funded by the federal government. Then again, there were only 82 channels in the entire country. A major metropolis had, if they were lucky, five stations that only ran programming a few hours a day. I can remember such a world myself. So perhaps then it made sense to offer Americans the neglected educational programming rather than just Bonanza or Bewitched. Though, to be honest, public television doesnโ€™t seem to have made us much smarter.

In any event, just as large swathes of society were handed to the state, Lyndon Johnsonย signedย the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which argued that it was in the common good โ€œto encourage the growth and development of public radio and television broadcasting, including the use of such media for instructional, educational, and cultural purposes.โ€ (Iโ€™m certainly not a public media aficionado, but itโ€™s difficult to think of a single program offered by PBS or NPR that is indispensable to the public.) By that time, theย Federal Communications Commissionย had already allocated over 200 stations for โ€œnoncommercial educational television.โ€ย National Public Radioย was created in 1969. Since then, Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio have championed the American Leftโ€™s political and societal ideals.

By David Harsanyi

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