A Big Win for NPR

It looks like the showdown in the Congress over National Public Radio is going to end in a big win for National Public Radio. That at least is what one can take from the reports out of Washington in respect of the legislation that is being fast-tracked in the House by Congressman Eric Cantor. The legislation, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, “doesn't cut any money from the federal budget. Rather, it prohibits NPR and its local affiliates from using federal dollars to produce programming or purchase content from other member stations. Affiliate stations could only use taxpayer money for administrative costs, under the bill.” Given that money is fungible, it strikes us as unlikely the measure will change things. "They'll just have to keep strict accounting," the Journal quotes a spokeswoman for the bill’s author, Representative Doug Lamborn, as saying.

It’s a classic Congressional dodge, all the more so because the restrictions are likely to fail the the Senate. The fight over NPR, in any event, has nothing to do with the strictness of its accounting. For our part, we’re not even concerned so much over content. Public radio clearly has a bias that is far to the left of the taxpayers from whom NPR wants tens of millions of dollars a year. And it’s not funny that its fundraisers were caught on videotape as laughing about it being called National Palestinian Radio. But under our system of a free press, private institutions have a right to say whatever they want to. So it is off the point to suggest that restricting the money from going to programming addresses the underlying issue with NPR. The real reason to cut funding for NPR and, for that matter, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting more generally, is that with the advent of the internet and cable, there is no longer a shortage of spectrum by which film and voice can be delivered.

So what is the logic of the singling out NPR to get federal funding for administrative uses? Why not help, say, Fox News with its administrative funding? Or the struggling New York Times Company? Or the thousands of entrepreneurial startups that are bidding to do quality programming and can deliver it even to rural areas more efficiently? They all are burdened by administrative costs. Our reading of the Constitution is that it would be a stretch to find an enumerated power that authorizes the Congress to subsidize radio broadcasting, even left-wing radio. But even if Messrs. Cantor and Lamborn could find an enumerated power to use, they would still run into the First Amendment. That’s the real rub. It prohibits the Congress from abridging the freedom of the press, and the press in America is a competitive scrum of privately owned and funded institutions. Underwriting some of them but not others cuts abridges the freedom of the others, and with the rise of the Internet and cable, there’s no need — or excuse — for it.

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This editorial has been updated from its original version.