A certainty of the media marketplace is that if there is content consumers truly want, money to produce and support that content will somehow show up.
Supporters of public broadcasting outlets PBS and NPR should start pondering how much demand there really is for the content those entities produce. If there is sufficient demand, funding mechanisms will emerge to keep them functioning, even without taxpayer dollars provided by the government. And if the demand is not there, then PBS and NPR should disappear.
It doesn't take a genius to read the smoke signals coming out of the recent congressional hearing about government funding of public broadcasting. A Republican-controlled Congress seems determined to slash government spending, and funding for PBS and NPR is an easy target.
Much of the hearing focused on charges of journalistic bias by the public broadcasting entities. That’s hardly a revelation. It’s a “water is wet” statement to say PBS and NPR have leaned decidedly to the left for some time. The AllSides Media Bias Chart acknowledges that reality. The Media Research Center, a right-leaning organization to be sure, has pointed out public broadcasting bias for years, but also has the research data to support its allegations. Long-time NPR editor Uri Berliner let all the cats out of the bag last year with a blistering essay detailing his organization’s journalistic corruption.
Despite the preponderance of evidence to the contrary, however, NPR CEO Katherine Maher and PBS President Paula Kerger showed up at the hearing determined to defend their organizations’ editorial objectivity. They came off as tellers of tall tales and lost their credibility in the process. The better argument for Maher and Kerger would have been to own their journalistic activism and simply point out that the First Amendment allows for it, which it surely does.
Maher and Kerger went into the hearings with few objectivity cards to play. Their non-coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election was difficult to rationalize. Maher, in particular, gave up the ghost in 2022 when she blurted out that “reverence for the truth might be a distraction.” That relativistic statement might fit perfectly fine in Maher’s worldview, but it comes off as tone deaf to most Americans and seems contrary to the vision of any sensible journalism outlet.
The establishment media, of course, rallied to the defense of NPR and PBS. The National Press Club issued a statement complimenting the outlets as “high-quality, unbiased networks” that have won awards from the Press Club. Given the low credibility ratings of the broader journalism industry, this kind of exuberant praise probably doesn’t help in the eyes of news ...
