With conservatives back in power, public media is getting back to what it really excels at. No, not objective, impartial reporting. If NPR and PBS focused on that, they wouldn’t need to be so good at their side hustle: desperately lobbying Congress not to defund them.
Now that they’re good at. The lobbying efforts have worked every time conservatives have had power, going back to when President Lyndon Johnson created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the late 1960s.
Every Republican president after Johnson has tried to defund, dissolve, or reform public broadcasting. Yet the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is still standing, and NPR and PBS remain unreformed.
Weak Republican members of Congress always sweep in at the last second to save public media’s bacon. That is true even for some congressmen who sit in +30 and +40 GOP districts in states as red as Oklahoma and West Virginia, but who nonetheless act as if they’re afraid of their own shadow.
Sources tell me that NPR’s biggest member stations are taking the threat so seriously this year that they have produced an internal document that foresees four outcomes—and strategizes for each: 1. Congress claws back all funding immediately; 2. All funding is clawed back after two years; 3. Congress only cuts back half the funding; 4. Congress maintains the status quo. […]
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