Anna Gomez Is Wrong About Defunding Public Broadcasting

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.  

 

Forget Dismissal of CPB's Directors, Just End the Government Subsidies

By Randolph May

President Trump is attempting to fire three of the five members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's board of directors. Congress established CPB as a non-profit corporation "which will not be an agency or establishment of the United States Government." CPB is challenging the attempted dismissal of the directors in court.

CPB may be a private corporation, but it was created by the government, and it's funded by the government. And its directors are appointed by the president and subject to Senate confirmation. So, whether the president may dismiss its directors at will presents an interesting question, obviously more difficult than that presented by the president's authority to fire the heads of executive branch agencies.

But amidst the current controversy regarding whether, in this age of media abundance, government funding for public broadcasting should be continued, little attention has been paid to the provision in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, under which CPB was created, that declares that the Corporation shall facilitate programming "obtained from diverse sources" and "with strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature."

In evaluating whether CPB directors should be retained or dismissed, a relevant consideration should be the extent to which they have made any efforts to ensure compliance with the "objectivity and balance" requirement in the programming CPB facilitates. The statute put it on their "job sheet," so to speak.

Considering the long-standing pronounced leftist tilt of the programming of PBS and NPR, the recipients of CPB's government funds, I'd say that the directors – maybe many of them from all political stripes – haven't done a very good job in overseeing compliance with the "objectivity and balance" stricture.

So, a question more fundamental than whether the president has authority to dismiss CPB's directors is whether, in this present age of media abundance with outlets catering to all conceivable audiences and interests, taxpayers should continue to be required to subsidize public broadcasting. As I explained in this op-ed a short time ago: "It's Past Time to End Public Broadcasting Subsidies."