NPR's Public Funding

While NPR consistently says that it doesn't receive "direct public funding."  It does receive 45% of it's operating capital from it's member stations.  Those stations receive some 65% of their funding from local, state and federal tax dollars...so when liberals claim, using talking points provided from the NPR website how it doesn't get money from Uncle Sugar, they're merely being disingenuous.

While I listen to NPR's local classical music affiliate, I've long since given up on listening to the political and liberal tripe offered up on any of the 3 other stations that peddle it's wares.  For most of 24 years, I regularly donated (albeit small) sums of my hard earned dollars to various NPR stations in the towns I've lived in, I stopped in 2003 after the rantings of the "News" division became so pronouncably biased against anything that might have even leaned to the right of the political spectrum. 

In an excellent article on Pajamasmedia.com, Benjamin Kerstein makes this rather astute observation, relating to WHY NPR's supporters are so vociferous in their defense of the network.

Of course, every subculture has its objects of affection. Punks and hip-hop fans have their music, Trekkies have their TV shows and movies, hipsters have mumblecore, etc. The difference, of course, is that unlike NPR, none of these are funded largely by coercive means. And this says something, I think, about the liberal mentality. Put simply, liberals constitute the one subculture in the United States that consistently and often willfully mistakes its specific and particular preferences for universal truths.


The simple truth that liking something does not give you the right to force others to buy it for you is lost on a subculture that sees its likes and dislikes as moral imperatives that impose benefits and obligations on society as a whole. NPR is only one, relatively minor, expression of this, but it is a telling one, if only because, for those outside the liberal subculture, it is so obvious and glaring. The blatant hypocrisy and bad faith with which NPR has acted in regard to Juan Williams is, in microcosm, the hypocrisy and bad faith with which it acts in regard to all American taxpayers. And it should be obvious to all, even those who lack the most rudimentary capacity for self-reflection, that to act in such a manner toward those who are, in fact, paying your salary, is neither a smart nor an informed thing to do.

The time has come to defund a whole raft of programs and end it's tax exempt status...simply because we as a nation can no longer afford to pay for them.  This is merely one of those programs.  If NPR's product is of sufficient popularity and viability, then in the commercial market place it will thrive...but it's it's not, then it too will end up on the dust bin of unprofitable business models.