Public Media Is Plenty Conservative
The Republican protection racket strategy for NPR and PBS will never end
The push to defund National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is just the latest effort in a decades-long mission by conservatives to bully public media into further capitulations to carry more water for their hateful, anti-education, undemocratic ideology.
Last week, Donald Trump added his EKG-like signature to an executive order to remove federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which partially supports both NPR and PBS, ginning up yet again the right’s attack on public media.
You know, because journalists are “the enemy of the people” and education is “woke.” We have that on the authority of the felonious man-child who play-acts being president when he’s not wasting millions of taxpayer dollars cheating at golf. (Now, there’s some waste, fraud, and abuse DOGE should have seen immediately. How did they miss it?)
Back in March, Trump also issued an executive order to defund the Voice of America, the radio news organization created during World War II to provide reliable news that millions living under autocratic rule worldwide would otherwise never hear.
As reported by the Associated Press, a federal judge stayed Trump’s order, remarking on the government’s case, “Not only is there an absence of ‘reasoned analysis’ from the defendants; there is an absence of any analysis whatsoever.”
Let’s absorb that again: An absence of any analysis whatsoever. You know, like everything Trump pretends to do when it comes to “governing.”
As noted in a recent piece by Julie Hollar in FAIR, this ritualistic fight has been going on since NPR and PBS were created, under the aegis of the CPB, in 1967. NPR and PBS are already plenty conservative structurally, with boards comprised largely of wealthy white men and corporate underwriting nudging reporting to the center-right, even without the additional push of Republican hyperbole about “intractable liberalism” on NPR or concerns about Bert and Ernie’s relationship.
Working the refs. It’s effective, and not just in sports. More conservatives than liberals appear as guests, as NPR continues its decades-long attempt to appease the right. The CPB capitulated to right-wing critics yet again this past October when they hired a team of special editors to vet every story before it goes out on the air.
But, as Harvard and everyone else fighting back now well understand, no level of capitulation is ever enough when Trump is using his official government role to extort you, er — “offer you protection.” Capitulating to autocrats just makes them demand more.
Just ask NPR and PBS.
NPR and PBS clearly take their role as public media seriously — to a fault, many progressives would say. Hollar in another column notes how NPR nearly breaks its back bending backwards to be “balanced” even on non-negotiable core democratic rights, like free speech. But they are giving, according to Hollar and many others, a false impression of what constitutes free speech and censorship:
If college Republicans, anti-abortion activists or the Moms for Liberty feel constrained by peers harshly criticizing them or not inviting them to speak at public events, that’s not censorship; that’s ideas being contested in the public arena. Their right-wing perspectives still have many, many places to be heard, including the huge right-wing media ecosystem.
As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte tirelessly points out, protecting free speech is not about protecting the feelings of people who complain they are being “cancelled” because of their bigoted views or opinions that are ignorant of settled facts or are nothing more than purposeful propaganda.
Republican attacks against public media are insidious. As Peter Hart in FAIR noted 20 years ago, in working the refs while also controlling the purse, the right found a no-fail strategy:
With each successive attack from the right, public broadcasting becomes weakened, as programmers become more skittish and public TV’s habit of survival through capitulation becomes more ingrained.
People attracted to journalism are almost certainly more “liberal” in their worldviews because they have had a liberal (meaning varied) education. Choosing this idealistic path, they are then trained to follow the best journalistic practices to do their very best to ensure what the founders thought was essential for a democracy: an informed public. (That’s why the amendment to the Constitution was, you know, the first.) But that doesn’t at all mean that what they report always or even often has an actual liberal slant.
But to Republicans who are always busy ratcheting what is acceptable farther to the right, simply being educated or being tethered to reality makes one an elitist, a liberal.
In his new “On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR,” journalist Steve Oney recounts the truly liberal-minded (and chaotic) beginnings of a public-spirited educational national radio service devoted to telling human stories not heard on commercial radio:
Young, brainy, upper-middle-class, politically liberal, artistically adventurous and typically white, the NPR archetype was taking shape.
But, as Oney writes, if NPR and PBS were sometimes failing in their journalistic mission to bring enlightening, detailed, human-centered information to the public, it was not because the programming was too liberal; they were failing in not being as diverse as public media was chartered to be, with few people of color or progressives in sight.
Indeed, over the decades there has been no lack of conservative voices on PBS, from “Firing Line with William F. Buckley,” “The McLaughlin Group,” and “Wall Street News Tonight” to conservatives like David Brooks beating up on moderate Mark Shields nightly on “The News Hour With Jim Lehrer.” Several future Fox News “personalities,” such as Tucker Carlson, started on public media.
Full disclosure: one summer while I was in journalism school, I volunteered at KBIA, the NPR affiliate in Columbia, Mo., making sure that the feeds for “Adventures in Good Music” and “All Things Considered” got recorded to reel-to-reel tapes — even doing a little splicing — while also playing classical music and reading public service announcements. It’s a nice memory, though it wasn’t without fraught moments. (I said fuck under my breath once in frustration about something I’d forgotten to do before seeing, to my horror, that the mic light was on. Yes, the phone started ringing.)
In this country, the question of fairness in media goes back more than a century. In the nascent age of radio in the 1920s, President Herbert Hoover took the surprisingly progressive step to ensure that the government had a role to play in the growing medium of mass communication. As historian Jill Lepore writes of Hoover in “These Truths”:
The chaos of the early airwaves convinced him that the government had a role to play in regulating the airwaves by issuing licenses to frequencies and by insisting that broadcasters answer to the public interest. “The ether is a public medium,” he insisted, “and its use must be for the public benefit.” He pressed for passage of the Federal Radio Act, sometimes called the Constitution of the Air. Passed in 1927, it proved to be one of the most consequential acts of Progressive reform.”
This idea of promoting fairness specifically in broadcasting, a limited resource, on radio and on television, was extended by the Fairness Doctrine in 1949, which mandated that different viewpoints be aired on issues of public importance. In the 1960s, it was used by Democrats to put pressure on right-wing radio stations, especially in the South, that were promulgating segregationist views. It was fought over for decades, until it was dispensed with by the FCC in 1987 under President Ronald Reagan.
The fight then turned to curtailing the number of radio and television stations one company could own, until the Telecommunications Act of 1996 settled that and brought us the likes of the conservative Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns nearly 300 television stations where news anchors deliver “must-read” editorials, and the also conservative iHeart Radio, from which airwaves conservative talk show jocks have spewed disinformation, misogyny, and hatred of the political opposition, following the Rush Limbaugh model, for decades, worsening our polarization.
Political and religious zealots will never rest easy if any American is getting accurate news or being educated by people who value all humankind, as well as animals and nature.
Fairness may indeed be an impossible goal, but with Fox News and its even more extreme imitators and right-wing “bro” podcasters and radio jocks, not to mention evangelical Christian radio, the conservative voice (more often, the extremist right-wing) has plenty of outlets. And, again, the conservative voice is more than represented by public media.
But it’s never enough.
At least not for the likes of Leonard Leo, a radical Catholic who remade the Supreme Court by providing two Republican presidents with Federalist Society–indoctrinated judges. He is working to do the same, with a lot of dark money, to every aspect of American culture.
Political and religious zealots will never rest easy if any American is getting accurate news or information from people who value all of humankind, as well as animals and nature. Trump tried to banish the Associated Press from the White House Press Corps because the AP simply continued to refer to the historically accurate Gulf of Mexico, while he trots out that shameless smiling firehose of disinformation every day as his press secretary.
Conservatives who are comfortable with the un-American (and decidedly un-Christian) bullshit spewed by Trump and his acolytes should no more gather the news than they should govern; they don’t believe in the work.
Public media is freely available to all Americans. Although when you drive through rural America you’ll often be hard pressed to find an NPR station among the Christian and far-right ones, public media manages to reach 99% of all Americans, most crucially in rural, Native American, and Island communities, areas that otherwise would not have sources of fact-based news and educational programming.
Do Republicans in Congress really want to defund NPR and PBS? Likely not, because that would end their protection racket strategy that has reliably pushed public media to include ever more conservative voices. They enjoy the game of watching the hated “elites” (i.e., educated, humanistic people) squirm, while getting just what they want.
With great dramas, documentaries and music programs, as well as stalwarts like “NOVA,” “Nature,” “This Old House,” “Antiques Roadshow,” and “American Experience,” not to mention “PBS Kids” educational programs that help children begin learning before they are of school age, PBS is a dream compared to what is available on commercial and cable television. With the threatened cuts in federal funding, all of the programming is at risk (which prompted some wag to post an “Open for Work” status on Elmo’s LinkedIn profile.)
The PBS NewsHour does its job and is leaps and bounds better than the networks’ nightly news programs, which long ago devolved into superficial coverage of politics, weather events and salacious crimes (with “good news” story to top it off), and covers stories in much more depth than 24/7 cable news outfits like CNN can manage. Even so, it could be better at providing more news that progressives and other underserved groups would find speaks to their views.
And even in its ever-bullied state, NPR still provides news with far greater depth and breadth than any other mainstream source. While many conservative radio and podcasters sound like the Voice of the American Confederacy, NPR is the Voice of America for America — doing its best in a political environment hostile to expertise, empathy and reality itself to educate all citizens and live up to the greater ideals of the founders.
If public media were not irritating to conservatives who are aiding and abetting — if not actively cheering on — the country’s descent into dehumanizing authoritarianism, it wouldn’t be doing its job. It’s one of the best things America has to offer and should be protected.
Oney includes the mission statement for NPR, written by its colorful first director of programming, Bill Siemering, which concludes,
National Public Radio will not regard its audience as a market or in terms of its disposable income, but as curious, complex individuals who are looking for some understanding, meaning, and joy.
That still sounds good to me.
