Defund NPR

I am neither culturally nor politically in tune with National Public Radio, yet for some reason, I tune it in nonetheless. If you love NPR — or if you’re like me and find yourself listening to it until you just can’t take it anymore — don’t despair. It’s not going away even if Donald Trump makes good on his renewed threat to defund it.

There are a couple of reasons for that. The first is that direct Federal funding to NPR amounts to only about 1% of its $270 million budget. The other reason is that NPR will continue to get big support from liberal foundations, wealthy liberal individuals and businesses that want to market their stuff to upscale liberals. 

The real issue is more complicated. As explained in the Hill by a former Obama-appointed member of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Board of Directors, Howard Huscock, here’s how it works. The CPB is required to send much of its half billion dollars in annual funding from Congress to local public radio stations. But here’s the catch. Those stations are then in turn required to spend almost a quarter of those funds on national programing — which means they’re essentially required to send a chunk of their Federal money back to NPR to buy programs such as All Things Considered and Morning Edition. 

So, when NPR claims that they only get 1% of their funding from the government, they’re not being entirely honest. In truth, about a third of their money comes from the government, but it comes through the back door from those fees charged to local stations. In 2023, $90 million of NPR’s $279 million budget came from those fees. 

It gets stickier still when we realize that it’s now possible for listeners to bypass the local stations altogether and access their favorite NPR programs directly through the Internet. When I ask my smart speaker to play NPR it plays the national feed, not WHA or WERN. So, the local stations get stuck paying hefty fees for the national shows when their listeners can go directly to NPR and never hear any local programming. 

At the same time, local news coverage generally has been in a long, steep decline. So, here’s what makes sense. 

First, go ahead and eliminate the small amount of direct public funding to NPR. As former long-time NPR news editor Uri Berliner wrote in an excellent piece last year, NPR now represents the “distilled world view” of a tiny part of America. From where I sit, it’s an extremely culturally liberal view that has its place, but should not be subsidized by taxpayers. And, as I noted above, it will continue to get funding from the organizations and relatively affluent individuals who subscribe to that world view and only want to hear their beliefs validated, never challenged.

Second, free the local public radio stations from having to send any money back to NPR. They could if they wanted to, but they could also direct more of those resources toward what’s really needed, which is local news coverage. And, since their listeners can access the NPR shows directly anyway, many stations might decide to save the money and redirect it to local programming. 

This will result in some loss of revenue to NPR, but some of that will be made up by private funders and, if NPR has to tighten its belt, well, that’s what every organization has to do from time to time. 

Because many public radio stations are associated with, or at least located on, college campuses, there is going to be a liberal bias. As a political moderate, that concerns me. But, on balance, there’s enough good that comes from public broadcasting that I’m willing to put up with some amount of insufferable political correctness. (I guess I find some degree of insufferableness to be sufferable after all.) 

The conservatives are right about this one. NPR does in fact have a raging liberal bias — more so than it ever had — and taxpayers should not be forced to support it. I think one of the reasons I listen to NPR, even though I find it so annoying, is that it’s important to hear the voice from one side of the yawning cultural and economic chasm that is driving hard-right populism. I listen to NPR to learn what not to say. 

But withdrawing direct taxpayer support will not kill NPR and freeing up local public stations to spend their money on local programming will be a good thing for local news coverage.