DeMint Plans Legislation to Slash Funding for Major Public Broadcasting Outlets
Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said he plans to introduce a bill to end taxpayer funding of public broadcasting. The action comes on the heels of NPR’s firing Senior News Analyst Juan Williams over comments he made about Muslims in an O'Reilly Factor appearance Monday. Williams’ comments “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices,” NPR said Wednesday. The incident “shows that NPR is not concerned about providing the listening public with honest debate of today’s issues, but rather with promoting a one-sided liberal agenda,” DeMint said Friday.
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Cutting government funding for public broadcasting could help trim the nation’s debt of more than $13 trillion, DeMint said. Since 2001, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has received about $4 billion in taxpayer money, and NPR and PBS receive about 15 percent of their total budget from federal funding, he said. NPR and PBS “should be able to find a way to stand on their own,” DeMint said. “If CPB is defunded, taxpayers will save billions."
In June, Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., introduced similar legislation calling for an end to federal funding of CPB after fiscal 2012. “While the Corporation for Public Broadcasting airs several quality programs, it is perfectly capable of standing on its own two feet and not on the financial shoulders” of taxpayers, he wrote his colleagues Thursday. A spokeswoman for Joe Barton, R-Texas, the House Commerce Committee’s ranking member, asked why NPR still needs an involuntary contribution from taxpayers’ pockets after 40 years. “Count us among the people who believe the middle-aged NPR needs to get a paying job and move out of the house."
Passing such legislation could mean the end of high-quality public programming, some public broadcasting officials said. Americans consider public broadcasting among their most trusted sources of news and information, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters said. “This is not about free speech, as Sen. DeMint argues,” it said. “This is about controlling the airwaves” and “controlling the information that the American people have access to.” NPR, PBS and CPB did not return requests for comment.
Public broadcasting should be worried, said Kevin Howley, a media-studies professor at DePauw University in Indiana. As the cancellations of the PBS programs Now and Bill Moyers Journal show, “these sort of attacks can shape funding, as well as programming decisions in public broadcasting,” he said. Jerry Franklin, the president of Connecticut Public Television, said: “It’s amazing we still have members of Congress who believe if we clip Big Bird’s wings, curtail educational efforts and eliminate the hundreds of life-enriching … CPB-funded projects across the nation, the commercial market place would step right in and replace those unique projects. We will lose them forever if Senator DeMint gets his way."
"Regardless of what you think about Juan Williams’ dismissal, calling for the defunding of NPR is like asking for the death penalty in small claims court,” said Josh Silver, Free Press president. The U.S. has one of the lowest levels of federal funding of public media in the developed world, he said. “What Congress should be doing is figuring out how to raise more money to build a truly world-class public media system in America.”