National Public Radio Turmoil

As you might know, National Public Radio has been going through a tough week.  The traditionally liberal, federally funded radio station’s president and CEO resigned Wednesday to limit the damage caused by a fellow executive that degraded the right-wing Tea Party as “seriously racist”.  Ron Schiller then went on to call most of America “uneducated”.  Because the Republicans have a House majority, there has been pressure to cut of federal funding of public radio and television.

How were these comments recorded?  Some top executives were out to lunch with who they presumed to be potential donors.  Schiller also stated that NPR would be “better off without federal funding”.  You’d expect to hear this kind of talk from conservative talk radio hosts, but to hear this comment come out of an NPR executive’s mouth is rather shocking.  The donors were in fact posing as Muslim activists, referring to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio”.     

Just two months ago, NPR publicly admitted to firing analyst Juan Williams over his comments regarding Muslims.  Then, NPR apologized to Rep. Gabrielle Gifford’s family after it falsely reported the congresswoman’s death.    

Despite the obvious hit that NPR has taken in the past few months, they are not the entity that will take the worst hit.  It is small public radio stations that will have the most to lose.  If the spigot of federal funding is turned off, NPR runs the risk of losing small stations nationwide that depend on that money for about 30 percent of their budgets.  

Needless to say, federal funding for NPR should not be a priority in a time when the state and federal governments are attempting to trim their budgets.  While NPR does provide informative programs, it is an interesting debate nonetheless.  Should federal funding for NPR be ended?