https://thespectator.com/topic/pbs-npr-received-public-funding-hearing/
Congress has been mulling the future of publicly-funded television and radio. Here’s a spoiler alert: that funding is toast.
There is no way a Republican-controlled House and Senate will keep pouring money into networks they believe hate them. They know that hatred is warmly reciprocated.
The debate about partisan bias at PBS and NPR is important – the bias itself is obvious – but that’s not the most important point. What matters most is that democratic governments have no business funding or controlling news channels directed at their own citizens. Those channels should be privately owned and operated. Every single one. They should not only be private: they should be beyond the scope of government censorship and intimidation, the kind the Biden administration exerted on social media giants during Covid.
Why is it important to end public ownership of radio and TV networks? Because that is the best way to encourage robust debate about public policies. In a constitutional democracy like ours, the proper role of a government is to foster that public debate by
Providing as much information as possible;
Avoiding the suppression of differing views unless they violate the law; and
Letting citizens and their elected representatives control the discourse without government interference, except to enforce the law
To facilitate that debate, public officials have a core responsibility: they should share information that citizens need. They should except only disclosures that would violate personal privacy or harm national security or ongoing law-enforcement operations. No one argues about this exception on privacy grounds. No one says those people abused by Jeffrey Epstein should be harmed again by the FBI releasing their names.
