Getting Beyond NPR

The resignation of Vivian Schiller as president of NPR, nee National Public Radio, offers a chance for the Congress to take a top to bottom look at our national public broadcasting system, and the way we would recommend doing it is through the lens of public choice theory. This is the theory that holds, in essence, that government is the competitor of the private sector. It has its own interests, and they innately include growth.

Public choice theory would suggest that the growing sentiment against NPR has only partly to do with the fact that the hard put-upon taxpayer has to underwrite its biases. Rather the key point is that NPR has emerged as a competitor of privately-owned and operated broadcasting systems, particularly now that cable offers essentially unlimited channels. NPR is also the competitor of private entrepreneurs seeking to raise capital for quality journalism.

Increasingly it is also competing with a beleaguered newspaper industry that is turning to the Web only to discover that NPR is there with its own print— that is, online text — edition, subsidized by the taxpayer. So much for the notion that NPR was established to provide educational broadcasting amid a limited spectrum. The network seems far afield of what President Lyndon Johnson spoke of when he signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967.

None of this was referenced in the statement from the chairman of NPR’s board of directors, Dave Edwards, in which the ouster of Ms. Schiller was announced. Her leadership had become associated with a cataract of scandal. Only the latest is the emergence of the film of one of NPR’s fund-raisers seeking to curry favor with two individuals posing as wealthy individuals close to the Muslim Brotherhood wanting to make a financial contribution.

Before that there was the scandal over the firing of Juan Williams, which shocked the best of American journalists. It also led to the departure from NPR of the executive who fired him — the network’s Senior Vice President for News, Ellen Weiss. That episode had already ignited in the Congress a move to defund NPR, and with the Republican accession in the House and the current budget crisis, it already seemed there was a danger to funding NPR at recent levels.

In the lastest tape, recorded by internet pranksters posing as associates of the Muslim Brotherhood wanting to make a major donation to NPR, an executive of the network is seen and heard suggesting that NPR would be better off without a public subsidy. That seemed to horrify the NPR brass. For whether or not NPR would be better off without the subsidy, it is clear that the American taxpayer would be better off.

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No doubt there will be a temptation now for partisans of taxpayer subsidized broadcasting to hope that the ouster of Ms. Schiller will be enough to satiate the Republicans who have been so critical of the partisanship of the network. We hope not. The issue, in our view, has never been about any individual. Even a mature leader, inclined to keep a tight rein on fundraisers, would not solve the public choice issue. The right move is to move expeditiously in the Congress to wean all so-called public broadcasting off state subsidies and let it compete in a free market. And the lesson in the latest episode is to be on guard against new efforts to involve the state in the funding of local news councils and against other efforts of the government to compete against the free — meaning privately owned — press.