When you think about who is going to be hit the hardest by pollution, whether it’s conventional air water and soil pollution or climate change, it is very often low-income communities and communities of color. The undercutting of these kinds of protections is going to have a disproportionate impact on these very same communities.
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Corporation for Public Broadcasting
CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING
Mike Gonzalez
k very Republican President since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) of taxpayer funding. That is significant not
just because it means that for half acentury, Republican Presidents have failed to
accomplish what they set out to do, but also because Nixon was the first President
in office when National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service
(PBS), which the CPB funds, went on air.
In other words, all Republican Presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake. As a 35-year-old lawyer in the Nixon White House, one Antonin Scalia warned that conservatives were being “confronted with along-range problem of significant social consequences—that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC.”*”
All of which means that the next conservative President must finally get this done and do it despite opposition from congressional members of his own party if necessary. To stop public funding is good policy and good politics. The reason is simple: President Lyndon Johnson may have pledged in 1967 that public broadcasting would become “a vital public resource to enrich our homes, educate our families and to provide assistance to our classrooms,”** but public broadcasting immediately became a liberal forum for public affairs and journalism.
Not only is the federal government trillions of dollars in debt and unable to afford the more than half a billion dollars squandered on leftist opinion each year, but the government should not be compelling the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “To compel aman to furnish contributions of money for the propagations of opinions which
he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”*°
A DEMONSTRATED PATTERN OF BIAS Conservatives will thus reward a President who eliminates this tyrannical situation. PBS and NPR do not even bother to run programming that would attract conservatives. As Pew Research demonstrated in 2014, 25 percent of PBS’s audience is “mostly liberal,” and 35 percent is “consistently liberal.” That is 60 percent liberal compared to 15 percent conservative (11 percent “mostly conservative” and 4 percent “consistently conservative”).°° NPR’s audience is even to the Left of that, with 67 percent liberal (41 percent “consistently liberal” and 26 percent “mostly liberal”), compared with 12 percent conservative (3 percent and 9 percent “consistently conservative” and “mostly conservative,” respectively). That may be an acceptable business model for MSNBC or CNN, but not for a taxpayer-subsidized broadcaster.