Liberal NPR, PBS? Why should tax money pay to influence culture?

The public media community around the country is outraged by the recent firing of two top staffers from Alabama Public Television. The commission that manages the network fired the executive director of APT along with his top assistant. Publicly, both sides just said there was a disagreement about the future direction of the network, but there was much more going on.

Conservatives who control the commission had asked for the network to consider showing a controversial 10-part series by a Texas minister named David Barton who considers himself a historian. (His only educational credential is a degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University.) The American Heritage Series presents this man’s view of the United States as a Christian nation and tries to debunk any notions that the Founding Fathers weren’t dedicated Christians.

The professionals at Alabama Public Television reviewed the material in Barton’s series and outlined why it was a bad idea and possibly illegal. The matter was supposed to be discussed at a commission meeting, but the commission went into executive session and fired the two instead.

At first blush, it seems that the story is simply that conservatives were unjustly trying to push their views onto the professional staff and fired them when they wouldn’t go along. That’s obviously what happened, but there’s a bigger issue here to me.

Why is it that it’s an outrage for conservatives to try to force nutty views onto a tax-funded channel, but it’s not just as much of an outrage that anyone’s views are promoted using tax money?

I love a number of public radio programs. The best two shows on the air today, as far as I’m concerned, are WNYC’s Radiolab and WBEZ’s This American Life. (If you don’t listen to either of them, I highly recommend you start. Both are endlessly fascinating. Subscribe to their podcasts on iTunes and never miss and episode.) In part, they’re funded by tax dollars, which I hate.

When public radio and public television were founded, they were founded on the premise that there was only a niche market for “quality” programming, so government had to make sure it was produced. Even if you buy that argument, we live in a world today where almost everything is a niche. If it was once a justification for taxpayer funding of minority views, it’s no longer a justification. The media market is vibrant. And as more and more things move online, it’s easier than ever to make a minority viewpoint available to the people who want to find it.

I don’t want David Barton’s revisionist history being aired with my tax dollars. The guy is a nut without an intellectual leg to stand on. (Here’s an article that outlines some of Barton’s gross distortions.) So I’m happy to condemn conservatives who are using their power to get him onto the air. However, I’m equally happy to condemn people who use my money to air progressive left views or middle-of-the-road views. I condemn anyone who takes my money without my consent and uses it to air anything, even if I agree with them.

The real problem with funding NPR and PBS and all the various public media isn’t the views that they air. Yes, I think the views represented on their shows tend to be solidly to the mainstream left, especially in the news programming. But even if they were absolutely even-handed — and even if they aired nothing but views I agreed with — the problem would be that government is funding a mechanism that influences our culture.

Taxpayer dollars are being used without the consent of the people they were taken from. And decisions are made about what to air by people who are indirectly employed or sponsored by government. Both of those are much more serious issues than the specific views being aired.

Even if you believe there was ever a justification for public broadcasting, that time is long past. There’s plenty of room in the free market for views of every kind. Let’s cut off funding for public media and let them decide how to survive on their own — with advertising or donations or whatever they want. There’s a market for much of what public radio does — and some of it is really excellent work. Let’s let it stand alone in the market and succeed or fail on its own merits.