Loading your audio article
When you’ve lost Bill Maher and Jonathan Turley … maybe it’s finally time to fold the tent of public broadcasting at taxpayers’ expense.
Once upon a time, squandering bricks of public money to support a cultural and educational bulwark for those growing up in the hinterlands might’ve made sense. I myself recall watching the premier episode of Sesame Street with my younger sister on a cold, wet, gray November morning and listening to the sonorous voices of the Morning Edition and All Things Considered talking heads for many years, bookended by Prairie Home Companion and local blues and jazz programming on the weekends.
However, the advent of cable and the Internet made public broadcasting redundant. It also made the questionable ethics of spending collected taxes on a broadcasting empire unsavory. I won’t bore readers with the Roman Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity, but there’s also quite the secular libertarian argument for discontinuing public subsidies for PBS and NPR.
The arguments for tightening the government’s purse strings have shifted to the leftist tilt of the network’s programming, which seems disingenuous. To (mis)quote Warren Zevon, even Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite displayed the highway blues of political bias, which I pointed out to the chagrin of my journalism professors back in the day. Note the lede paragraph of today’s column, itself a throwback to the statement on Cronkite’s disposition opposing the Vietnam conflict; once the hawks lost him, the saying goes, the American public followed.
Maher and Turley are two liberals who make their respective livings plowing the progressive field. Both men have recognized that NPR’s Katherine Maher (no relation) and PBS’ Paula Kerger last week wore their liberalism on their publicly subsidized sleeves, collars, lapels and undergarments. Both men acknowledged that those who disagree with the two women’s political and cultural views shouldn’t be forced to help pay their salaries and those who spread their biases. Still, public monies spent on leftist indoctrination and liberal cultural propaganda is a luxury we can no longer afford.
If we ever could afford it. Regardless of the political leanings on display for the past 55 years, public subsidies for something the private sector already increasingly provides were a moral hazard well before former NPR staffer Uri Berliner wrote his infamous takedown of his former network’s bias a year or so ago.
Would my take be different if the publicly funded stations had evolved from a conservative point of view? Nope, not in the slightest.
Consistency is far more important.
The same goes for the case regarding the “battle plans” conducted by the current administration over the Signal encrypted app. It was wrong, plain and simple, but it’s also not everything the consistently outraged liberal media inflates it to be.
Yes, the previous Democratic administration made Signal’s use commonplace, but two wrongs still don’t make a right. Where was the left’s outrage over former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton’s homebrew server installed in her bathroom closet?
That was my first thought when The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg broke the Signal scandal two weeks ago. It wasn’t a “what about Hillary?” thought, but … hey, I thought the left didn’t consider external platforms for national intelligence business a big deal anymore.
In this century’s biggest lack of self-awareness incident, Clinton penned an NYT op-ed, calling the Signal misuse by Trump officials, correctly, “stupidity” and “dumb.” Fair enough, but the woman who only lies when her lips are moving or fingers burning up her keyboard doubled down by noting the Republicans’ “hypocrisy.” Seriously? The gall of a woman who commanded her minions to bleach her rogue hard drive boggles the mind.
But a wide berth is granted to those suffering from TDS, or as I like to pronounce it, “tedious.”
Not everything has to be breathlessly addressed like Terry Gross.
Bruce Edward Walker (walker.editorial@gmail.com) is a Morning Sun columnist.
