A documentary on the Vietnam War or climate change will by necessity involve opinion. The nature of public affairs itself, however, tends toward politicization.
#Hourly news npr series#
Teaching children to count can be done in a neutral fashion, as can a cultural series on Shakespeare. Problems inevitably arise when taxpayers are asked to fund the work of journalists. The difference here is taxpayer involvement. Many if not most journalists (not just taxpayer-funded ones) echo the opinions of the elites, whom they tend to use as sources.
Writers and announcers for NPR may be unaware of other perspectives and their own biases. One such critique made by colleagues at The Heritage Foundation points out that the study in which that claim is made does not stand up to scrutiny. That framework would ignore – perhaps because they have not heard – conservative critiques of that assertion. Public broadcast apologists might counter that with 97 percent of scientists endorsing “the consensus opinion on man-made global warming,” the unsustainability of refusing to follow the Paris Agreement is a scientific fact. In this case, they might argue that “sustainability” is not an ideologically loaded term but simply a synonym for “action on climate change.” After all, at American Public Media – the second largest producer of public radio programs after NPR – stories about energy on the show “Marketplace” are reported by the “Sustainability Desk,” a unit set up by the liberal Tides Foundation to look at climate-related stories through the lens of environmental and social justice. NPR and PBS deny they are biased and insist they just report the news. Even the liberal godfather of public broadcasting, Fred Friendly of the Ford Foundation, understood that “we must avoid at all costs any situation in which budgets of news and public-affairs programming would be appropriated or even approved by any branch of the Federal government.” During the debates throughout 1967 leading to passage of the bill, Senator William Springer included a ban on opinion because he felt that “the fastest way to get it changed to something else was to get it into the business of editorializing.” His colleague Senator Norris Cotton also warned that if public broadcasters ever exhibited such a bias, Congress would make life “very uncomfortable” by shutting down “some of their activities in the Appropriations Committee.” Legislators at the time fought hard to keep public affairs out of a purportedly educational endeavor out of fear that including it would be constitutionally dubious, and that taxpayer-funded opinion would generate political controversy. 7, 1967 – we mark the half-century anniversary this year – he warned against it degenerating into services that “could mislead as well as teach,” which is regrettably where we find ourselves today. When Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which set up public broadcasting in the United States on Nov. Pledged as “a vital public resource to enrich our homes, educate our families and to provide assistance to our classrooms” by Lyndon Johnson in his 1967 State of the Union address, what was then known as educational television quickly morphed into something its originators in government insisted it would not become: a liberal forum for public affairs and journalism. In mid-1971, less than a year after the Public Broadcasting Service was created, a 35-year-old lawyer in the Nixon White House warned that conservatives were being “confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences – that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC.” That lawyer was Antonin Scalia, future Supreme Court justice, whose judicial rulings and observations would make him a conservative icon.
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