The CEO of NPR Made the Best Case for Defunding It
Funding for NPR is no more, at least for now.
Early Friday morning, the House approved the rescissions package, which, among other things, clawed back over $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The vote capped off a long battle (decades-long, if you’re counting the times lawmakers promised to do it but didn’t follow through). But it’s a battle that, especially this time around, didn’t need to happen—because NPR should have rejected the federal funds from the outset. No one made a better argument for that than the CEO of the nonprofit, Katherine Maher.
“As far as the accusations that we’re biased, I would stand up and say, ‘Please show me a story that concerns you,'” she said Wednesday on CNN, “because we want to know and we want to bring that conversation back to our newsroom.” She echoed that sentiment on a different show on the same network, saying that “we are, of course, a nonpartisan organization.”
Her desire for introspection is nice. But the notion that there is a universe in which NPR is not biased, or that it can somehow become unbiased, is about as believable as the IRS sending you a fruit basket to commend you for filing your taxes.Â
Speaking of taxes, Maher’s implication—that NPR is deserving of taxpayer funds if it can remain sufficiently neutral—is self-defeating. Of course NPR is biased. All sentient beings are. It’s part of the human experience. Until we invent an all-knowing, perfectly judicious robot, every newsroom will be tinged with bias: whether i
Article from Reason.com
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