Text of Letter from MRC's Brent Bozell to House and Senate Leaders Urging an End to Taxpayer Funding of NPR
Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 When Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, it began with an idealistic notion of serving all Americans and presenting fair and balanced news and information. It would be nonpartisan and all-inclusive. But NPR and PBS have never lived up to that ideal. For decades, they have been a liberal sandbox, often run by executives with Democratic political and family backgrounds. Rather than serving all Americans, public broadcasting has been, in a sense, a large ideological pork barrel.
The utter insularity of this "public" broadcasting
system was dramatically exposed in a March 7 posting on The Daily Caller website, in which NPR's then-top fundraiser, Mr. Ronald
Schiller, unleashed a barrage of anti-conservative rhetoric in a hidden-camera
exposé at a business lunch in Washington.
"The current
Republican Party, particularly the Tea Party, is fanatically involved in people's
personal lives and very fundamental Christian - I wouldn't even call it
Christian. It's this weird evangelical kind of move," Schiller said. He later added
that the grassroots Tea Party movement isn't "just Islamaphobic, but really
xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white,
middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it's scary. They're seriously racist, racist
people."
The original idea
of public broadcasting cannot be reconciled with this display of contempt for
the so-called fanaticism, xenophobia, and racism of the taxpayers who subsidize
the present system.
NPR (and to a lesser extent
PBS) frequently boast of serving large and loyal audiences, which sounds a
little odd for a non-commercial system. But that loyalty is not simply to
classical music or to Sesame
Street. It is a fidelity to liberal
attitudes like Schiller's, that liberalism coincides with education,
sophistication, and wisdom.
In today's
remarkably rich and varied communications environment - and today's dire
federal fiscal straits - there is simply no reason to continue government
funding for a Corporation for Public Broadcasting, especially a CPB that
defines its role as establishing a "firewall" against taxpayer complaints about
biased or inaccurate content.
It has been 44
years since Congress established the public broadcasting system, and the
dramatic revolution in information technology makes the scarcity argument of
the 1967 Act utterly obsolete. Congress's requirement for fairness in public
broadcasting has been disregarded since the system's very first days.
The resignation
of Vivian Schiller doesn't change a thing about NPR. They are still a radical
left-wing toy for the likes of George Soros and they still don't deserve a dime
of taxpayer funding. A government that is broke should not be in the business
of funding a left-wing playground.
Sincerely,
L. Brent Bozell III
President and Founder
