Here’s some quick thoughts on President Trump’s Executive Order attempting to cut funding to PBS and NPR (here’s a Reuters article with the facts).

1. This order is probably not lawful and will likely get hung up in the courts. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been appropriated funding by Congress, and it was set up to act independently of political interference and distribute funds to public media sources like NPR and PBS.

2. The government portion is a minority of the overall funding of both NPR and PBS, which also get funding from sponsors, donors, and members. So although the overall existence of NPR and PBS are unlikely to be jeopardized if the cuts go through, both NPR and PBS have local radio and TV affiliates, the smaller ones of which would likely experience hardships.

3. The underlying complaint by the White House, per a statement, is that NPR and PBS are “radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news’.” This complaint is, in our view, exaggerated.

NPR and PBS have a variety of news programming (web, audio, and TV) with varying degrees of bias from middle to skews and strong left. The chart above shows NPR’s website and individual audio programs, and the chart below shows PBS’s website and individual TV programs. It would be fair to say NPR and PBS overall are left-leaning. But they are not radical or “far left,” and their content generally scores high for reliability (PBS especially so).

Further, the local NPR affiliate radio stations (see below) tend to have even higher overall reliability and lower overall bias scores, as most local news outlets do.

4. Reasonable people can disagree whether the U.S. government should provide any funding for public media, especially if it has strong bias toward one political side. I personally think the U.S. government should fund public media because of our constitutional commitment to a free press. Such funding plays an even stronger role in other democracies, and in the U.S. it should be part of a diverse press funding mix (to include private for-profit and non-profit media entities funded by mixes of advertising, subscriptions, and philanthropy).

When government funds public media, it should of course allow it to remain independent of political pressure. What to do about the bias? I think the market sufficiently identifies it, as evidenced by the existence of rating companies like ours and the audiences that the outlets retain or repel.

5. But practically speaking, given the level of government and partisan reticence, I don’t think it is likely that the U.S. government will ever follow the models of other democracies and embrace strong public funding levels. NPR and PBS should probably seek to replace the minority government portion of its funding quickly to protect the local journalism they enable, and it appears they are actively trying to do so.

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