Goodbye and Good Riddance to the CPB

(New English Review) – Hallelujah! Early this month the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it would disband. That was due to congressional passage of President Trump’s rescissions package which, among other things, eliminated the nearly $1.2 billion CPB funneled biennially to National Public Radio and television’s Public Broadcasting Service.

Background: In 1967, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act mainly to carry educational broadcasting to remote areas often out of range of commercial radio and television. But as bureaucracies do, CPB mushroomed, eventually forwarding taxpayer largesse to approximately 1,500 radio and TV stations. And, “Sesame Street” aside, educational content was submerged by left-of-center news and cultural programming.

Hence, then-Rep. Doug Lamborn’s (R-Colo.) repeated though unsuccessful efforts in each new Congress from 2010 through 2022 to defund NPR. Sen John Kennedy (R-La.) put it this way last March: “I support the First Amendment, but they don’t have an inalienable right to report these things using opinion journalism that no fair-minded American can construe as anything but representing one point of view with your tax dollars.” The death-knell began to sound a month later when Trump issued an executive order asserting neither PBS nor NPR “presents a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”

In addition to charges of bias, critics argued that since expansion of communications bandwidth, growth of the Internet and program streaming, the original rationale for public broadcasting no longer existed. Virtually no one anywhere with a smart phone, lap top or new television is out of range of hundreds of TV channels or thousands of radio stations.

But besides the overwhelming availability of radio and television choices, beyond the necessity of shrinking the federal debt of $38 trillion—$115,000 for each American—chronic illegality also required elimination of taxpayer subsidized broadcasting. NPR and PBS never had to comply with the Telecommunications Act’s mandate, per 1992 amendments, of “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.”

None of the three—CPB, NPR or PBS—ever established regular reviews to demonstrate compliance with the objectivity and balance standard. Instead of annual audits based on journalistic guidelines of accuracy, objectivity, balance, context and absence of conflicts of interest, the two networks cycled through ombudsmen, standards and practice editors, and even rare wrist-slaps from CPB’s inspector-general. But they never substantively demonstrated compliance.

NPR’s anti-Israel bias epitomized public broadcasting’s chronic dismissal of its objectivity and balance requirement. The slant became so undeniable during miscoverage of the second Palestinian terrorist intifada (2000-2005) that 13 members of Congress, all Democrats, sent the network’s then-president, Kevin Klose, a letter of criticism.

In response, NPR did not at long last institute a substantive annual review. Instead, it hired two public relations firms and sent Klose on a speaking tour mostly targeting Jewish audiences.

Backstory: Then working as Washington director of CAMERA, the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, I had helped draft the congressional letter. When Klose attempted to soft-soap the national Jewish Council on Public Affairs meeting in Baltimore in 2003 with statistics about NPR’s balanced roster of Palestinian and Israeli voices, I responded that the formulaic NPR story on the conflict “balanced” two Palestinian and two Israeli sources. The Palestinians would be one extremist, one “moderate,” and the Israelis one anti-government figure and one official spokesman, who would get the least airtime. So, a three-to-one “balance” in voices ensuring the anti-Israel side got almost all the airtime.

Klose recognized another audience member while network ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin turned crimson.

CPB, on the other hand, responded to critics by instituting an annual “Open to the Public” hearing of listener and viewer grievances. In 2004, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), one of the originators of the Klose letter, and I were among those addressing CPB at its “Open to the Public” session. We spotlighted NPR’s congenital failure to meet the Telecommunications Act’s objectivity and balance requirement. The corporation dutifully folded those complaints into a yearly self-laudatory review and sent the lot to a largely disinterested Congress.

More than 20 years later, years of chronically one-sided programming on issues including immigration, racism and law enforcement, CPB, NPR and PBS’ shell game with taxpayers’ money is up. Finally, and good riddance.