Last Thursday, Senator Stevens, the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, held a hearing on government-sponsored video news releases. It has come to light that a few federal agencies have for many years helped finance and produce VNRs, short news segments to be played on local news broadcasts usually without any disclosure of their provenance.

In some polite circles, the government uses slick video productions to publicize its achievements. To others, government-supported VNRs are simply propaganda.

The underlying truthfulness or bias in a government VNR is not the central issue. Rather, in a free society, countless competing interests vie to persuade us of the validity of a particular point of view. No view is without an advocate or an audience. One additional governmental voice adds little to public discourse, but paradoxically subtracts much by discouraging other points of view. In Cuba, few people would publicly disagree with the words printed in the state-sponsored press, regardless of their truthfulness.

Senator Stevens, a Republican of Alaska, and many of his colleagues in Congress want the government to disclose its role in VNRs, if not stop the practice altogether. However, disclosure begs the deeper question: Why is the government involved in producing programming that the private sector can and will produce on its own? Congress might want to take a broader look at federal influence on broadcast programming, particularly programming directly subsidized by public broadcasting.

The federal Corporation for Public Broadcasting was established in the 1960s when there were far fewer radio and television stations than today, and when practically all television stations were affiliated with one of three networks. Then, one could credibly argue that some important programming could not be distributed. With the Internet, satellite and cable services, and CD and DVD players, suggestions today of limited distribution of programming make no sense.

Two weeks ago, the New York Times set off a firestorm by alleging that the CPB was reviewing the content of public broadcasters for political bias. CPB provides $400 million annually in federal funds for public broadcasting.

The Times might have reviewed the CPB’s underlying statutory authority, which emphasizes the “nonprofit and nonpolitical nature of the corporation.” If CPB were aware of political bias, it must lawfully seek to root it out. Yet the Times seemed as much interested in preserving prevailing political views of public broadcasting as in discovering whether political views in public broadcasting might have a predictable slant. Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of CPB’s board, has been conspicuously invisible since being vilified by the Times.

The real issue with public broadcasting, as with VNRs, is not bias, but the awkwardness of the underlying public funding. Many Americans of all political stripes are troubled by both government financing of programming and broader government review of political content in programming. Each is an unseemly role for government – combining these powers in one agency is a formula for disaster.

CPB distributes approximately $250 million annually directly to local public broadcast stations and $100 million annually for programming. These federal funds account for only a small part of public broadcasting’s overall budget. Hundreds of public broadcast stations rely on many other sources of funds: commercial underwriters, state and local governments, private grants, and listener donations.

The financial numbers for public broadcasting beg an obvious question: Why does the federal government need to fund programming directly at all? Federal funding is not the primary source of financing for programming seen and heard on public broadcast stations. Yet the mere existence of that funding puts the government in an untenable position of being both the financier and censor of public broadcast programming. Remove the financial role, and the impetus for much of the censorship role will follow.

Many of us enjoy classical music and other programming on public stations. Even if federal funding disappeared, public broadcasting and most of its programming would survive.

Most countries have governments that fund or heavily influence some portion of newspapers, broadcast stations, and other primary means of disseminating information. Sadly, for several decades our government has been, albeit on a small scale, financing programming both for public broadcasting and VNRs. It is past time to get our government out of these businesses.

Mr. Furchtgott-Roth is a former FCC commissioner and president of Furchtgott-Roth Economic Enterprises. He can be reached at hfr@furchtgott-roth.com.