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National Public Radio was created to get the news heard. It helped get radio stations in small towns. It provided programming with public dollars so that you could hear what was going on in the world.
And today, it’s no more than a liberal mouthpiece that continues to use public money to pay its executives large salaries.
And Juan Williams, formerly of NPR, has joined the chorus of those that want to take away that funding:
“They [Republicans] know NPR plays a vital role in providing quality news programming – from rural radio stations to in-depth coverage of foreign affairs. If the Republicans had their way, we’d only be left with the likes of Glenn Beck, Limbaugh and Sarah Palin to dominate the airwaves.”
With that statement Congressman Israel made the case better than any Republican critic that NPR is radio by and for liberal Democrats. He is openly asking liberal Democrats to give money to liberal Democrats in Congress so they can funnel federal dollars into news radio programs designed to counter and defeat conservative Republican voices. [Juan Williams Gives Up Supporting NPR’s Federal Funding – Say Anything]
When even those that support you turn on you, you know that it’s obvious what you’ve been doing. The funny thing is, these people say that they’re profitable, and they don’t exist just on Federal funding. So why don’t they prove it?
It is actually much more than a liberal mouthpiece it is the only decent source of news in the USA.
But I think it is fine for the government not to support providing access to decent news for the citizenry. It seems to me to clearly much better use of tax dollars than most of the other 99.9999% of spending government does. But if NPR can’t get a few rich people to decide it is worth supporting we can continue down the road to idiocracy we are on.
It is funny how much people focus on these amazingly tiny budget expenses in order to avoid dealing with real budget issues: health care, military spending, social security and taxes – nothing else has a significant budget impact. It makes perfect sense to stop wasteful spending. Focusing on things like NPR and stopping spending to save lives of starving kids overseas with the amazingly tiny amount of non-military aid the USA provides each year is just a distraction from looking at real issues.
I believe you could easily cut $400 BILLION a year before you would get close to things with that are close to as worthwhile as supporting NPR. So I certainly wish we would cut all the other stuff along with NPR but I don’t really mind us cutting the NPR. It is just a shame that the politicians are just using it as a distraction from making any actual cuts that matter. They have been playing the same games for decades and we seem to like it since we elect the same type of people every year.