By Randolph May
Unsurprisingly, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez was quick to condemn Congress's decision to defund "public" [read: government-funded] media. After the Senate acted, she issued a statement claiming the action "is a key step in a coordinated campaign to silence public media, and the latest attempt by this Administration to censor and control speech."
She calls the defunding a "one-sided attack on free speech."
Commissioner Gomez's condemnation perhaps would be more worthy of consideration if she had given even a mere nod in the direction of acknowledging the pronounced left-leaning bias in public broadcasting's programming, especially that of NPR. You won't find any such acknowledgement in her statement, or I suspect in any of her other declamations.
It would take much more than a short blog post to catalogue all the instances evidencing NPR's leftist bias. But for a short primer, please see long-time (25+ years) NPR senior editor Uri Berliner's piece in the Free Press highlighting some key examples, such as NPR's steadfast refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story and insistence that the Wuhan lab leak theory regarding COVID was nonsense. And, as Mr. Berliner says, NPR's reporting on the contentious issues of climate change, the war in Gaza, and gender identity treatments for adolescents "leaned on moralizing and emotional certitude more than rigorous factual analysis."
So, while Ms. Gomez talks about "silencing those who report the news accurately," absent some acknowledgement – even a teensy, weensy one – that there have been legitimate issues of bias in public broadcasting's programming that needed to be addressed, her entreaties ring hollow. And this is especially so because we're talking about taxpayer-funded broadcasters, not private media outlets.
Ms. Gomez characterizes the defunding of public broadcasting as a "one-sided attack on free speech" by the Trump administration. Putting aside whether her accusation regarding one-sidedness squares with reality, she should acknowledge this truth: There are important differences between "public" media and private media when it comes to how the government should respond to claims of political bias.
It is not an attack on free speech for Congress and the president to decide that taxpayers should not be required to fund speech claimed to be politically biased. On the other hand, there may be – as Commissioner Gomez has suggested many times – threats to free speech protected by the First Amendment if the government, whether the Trump administration or any other, threatens private media outlets with adverse consequences based on the content of their programming.
That is the ground on which Commissioner Gomez should stand.