PBS and NPR Were Unfit for Purpose

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, July 18, 2025

 

Earlier in the week, Rich wrote:

 

The government shouldn’t extend its favor to a few select outlets.

 

Especially when these outlets are so blatantly and pervasively biased. NPR and PBS provide left-of-center content for left-of-center audiences under the guise of objectivity. As many legacy media organizations have long demonstrated, there is a business model there, but it’s not one that deserves or needs taxpayer support.

 

Usually, when discussing this topic, I never reach the question of NPR’s virtues, because, as an agnostic rule, I don’t think that the federal government should be funding media outlets. But we ought not to skip over the point Rich makes here, which is that if the federal government is going to fund media outlets — and it has now for quite a long time — those outlets absolutely cannot look like NPR and PBS.

 

Americans have a First Amendment right to say whatever they want — including via organized institutions (such as this one). They do not have a First Amendment right to receive federal funding while they do it. To insist otherwise would be to create an anti-democratic mandate that forces Congress to spend money on outlets its members dislike on the supposition that declining to do so would constitute viewpoint discrimination. Naturally, if the government announced that it intended to provide a subsidy to every media outlet in America, and then refused to give the money only to National Review because it didn’t like me, that might pose a problem, depending on the circumstances in which that decision was made. But that’s not what has happened here. NPR and PBS are exceptions, not the rule. They are, in effect, the only beneficiaries of the government’s imprimatur and largesse. If, as it has, the government wishes to withdraw those endorsements, it absolutely can.

 

And, on the merits, it absolutely should have done so. Again: as a taxpayer and a citizen, I have no interest in helping to fund media organizations. But if we are going to have them, they should not be filled with people who openly despise around 70 percent of the country. Private institutions do not need to be representative. Government institutions do. And NPR and PBS are not. They are, in their news departments at least, run by unhinged, supercilious extremists, who give no impression of even having been to the country that they have been charged with covering. I don’t want to pay for that, and, thanks to Congress, for a while I will no longer have to.