What would you say if I told you that you must contribute financially to Complete Colorado, and if you don’t we’ll send people with guns out to confiscate your “donation” by force, and also we’ll publicly call you a horrible person who violates the First Amendment?
Hopefully you’d tell me to pound sand.
There is no such thing as a First Amendment right to take other people’s wealth by force to fund your speech. Indeed, forcing others to fund your speech actually violates their rights to free speech. The right to speak entails the right not to speak and to not lend support to ideas and viewpoints with which you disagree or simply do not wish to support.
While I morally may ask you “pretty please” to help fund Complete Colorado, and even to mark your donations specifically to help support my amazing columns, I may not, morally, threaten violence against you for not contributing.
But, somehow, among many people on the oh-so-tolerant left, threatening people with violence if they don’t contribute to Colorado Public Radio, Roaring Fork Public Radio, KSUT Public Radio, and National Public Radio becomes a self-righteous crusade.
Lest you be tempted to accuse me of hyperbole over my use of the term “violence,” go ahead and try writing a letter to the IRS explaining why you’ll be reducing your tax payments below legal requirements, and see what happens. (Tip: Don’t actually do this.)
Government funding of news media also is inherently corruptive. A primary function of news journalism is to hold elected officials and bureaucrats accountable. To the degree that journalists collect their paychecks through government transfers, those journalists have an incentive to protect those transfers and to shield the hands that feed them. Journalists are supposed to be watch-dogs, not lap-dogs.
Credit where credit is due
If you’ve kept up on the news you can tell where I’m going with this. I’m going to criticize the lawsuit lodged May 27 by the radio stations listed above against the Trump administration to protect their taxpayer subsidies. Before I do that, though, I want to publicly express my admiration for Steve Zansberg, the Denver attorney on the case representing the Colorado stations.
Zansberg also is the president of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, an extremely important organization pushing for transparency in government. (Notably, it “is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit that relies on membership dues, grants and gifts.”) I don’t always agree with CFOIC, but usually I do. The Independence Institute (which publishes Complete Colorado) has worked in tandem and directly with CFOIC on various issues.
I also want to praise Colorado Public Radio (CPR), which has maybe the most impressive newsroom in Colorado. Its reporters include Bente Birkeland on public affairs, Sam Brasch on the environment, Jenny Brundin on education, John Daley on health, Ben Markus on investigations, and Allison Sherry on justice. CPR also acquired Denverite, which features the work of Kyle Harris among others. I get CPR’s news email daily.
Unlike some, I do not denounce CPR for a “liberal bias.” For one thing, I consider myself a liberal of the classical tradition. But CPR just isn’t very biased in any direction. For the most part CPR selects stories worth covering and presents the relevant facts about them.
I opened up the CPR web page on the morning of June 4 and found top-page stories on Coloradans with old credits getting associate degrees, the governor signing a bill to reduce rape kit backlogs, Dave Young running for Congress, a possible grocery strike, and measles. This is solid news reporting.
True, CPR exhibits a mild center-left bias, if you wish to call it that. Anyone want to bet what fraction of CPR’s staff generally votes Democrat rather than Republican? Generally, CPR is produced by and for highbrow Democrats and left-leaning independents. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
A publication’s political orientation helps determine what stories it covers and how it covers them. A couple of CPR’s stories on the page as of June 4, the one on measles and another on fluoride, push back against Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s health initiatives. I think RFK is a crackpot with no proper business influencing health policy, so I like CPR’s stories.
I also would say that CPR’s story on the possible strike has a pro-union bias and that its story on the National Endowment for the Arts has a pro-subsidy bias. But the stories also offer relevant facts about the topics at hand and so are useful even to people with conflicting political views.
My argument, then, is not that CPR should not receive tax dollars because CPR is biased or bad. I like CPR. Indeed, long ago I promised to contribute to CPR as soon as it stops taking tax dollars, and my promise still holds. My argument is that no media outlet should receive tax dollars because it’s wrong and corruptive for government to force people to fund media.
Trump’s executive order
Donald Trump issued a May 1 executive order directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stop funding National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, partly on grounds “that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”
I agree with Trump when he says, “Government funding of news media in this environment [of abundant, diverse, and innovative news options] is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”
But Congress holds the purse strings. Congress created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I don’t think Congress should have created the entity in the first place, but it’s Congress’s job to direct it or change it.
In addition to issuing his order, Trump is pushing Congress to back him up. As NPR reported June 3, “Trump asks Congress to wipe out funding for public broadcasting.”
The lawsuit
The lawsuit challenges Donald Trump’s “Executive Order that violates the expressed will of Congress and the First Amendment’s bedrock guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association, and also threatens the existence of a public radio system that millions of Americans across the country rely on for vital news and information.”
The lawsuit says Trump’s order violates the First Amendment because it “expressly aims to punish and control Plaintiffs’ news coverage and other speech the Administration deems ‘biased.'” But the entire problem is that Congress directed tax funds to radio media, thereby creating an inherent entanglement between government and content creators. Declining to subsidize an organization is not “punishing” it.
The gigantic issue that the lawsuit evades is that forcing people to fund media—compelled speech—is the fundamental violation of the First Amendment.
The lawsuit says, “Congress enacted the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 (the Act) because it determined that broad access to free, high-quality, independent public radio and television programming produced and aired by private entities for the benefit of all Americans was a public good.”
I agree that “high-quality programming” is a public good, in the sense that it generates benefits for people beyond those paying the bills. But not everything that is a public good should be government subsidized. My column is a public good. TedEd videos (which my child loves) are a public good.
It is humorous to me how people who accuse me of “market fundamentalism” blindly assume that cries of “public goods” can justify any and all government subsidies. But most types of public goods get along just fine without government “help.”
Only a fool presumes that government responds to public goods with perfect information, perfect incentives, and perfect outcomes. In the real word, politics is driven by biased actors and special interests. Government subsidies are at least as likely to produce market inefficiencies as solve them. And appeals to “public goods” often mask government violations of people’s rights.
The lawsuit continues, “The Act created the infrastructure for a public radio system that, today, reaches approximately 99 percent of the U.S. population over the airwaves and, in doing so, serves the same fundamental purpose—to foster an engaged and informed citizenry—as the First Amendment.”
True, government recognition and protection of people’s right to freedom of speech tends to foster an engaged and informed citizenry. But the fundamental purpose of the First Amendment is to protect people from government force. Compelling people to help finance speech they do not wish to support is a violation of their First Amendment rights. The claim that subsidizing certain forms of speech serves the same purpose as protecting people from government interference regarding their speech makes a mockery of the First Amendment.
Public radio could survive without subsidies
Ben Markus reports for CPR: “Colorado Public Radio reported that federal grants make up about 5 percent of its projected revenue for fiscal year 2025, $1.4 million. The lawsuit says that rural or remote stations though receive 50 percent or more of their revenue from federal grants.”
That’s not quite what the lawsuit says. It says, “For some local public radio stations in rural or remote areas, CPB grants constitute 50 percent or more of their operating budgets.” The word “some” here is important!
Kelly McBride, NPR’s public editor, responded to the claim that “less than 1% of NPR funding is [from the] federal government.” McBride replies, “The ‘less than 1 percent’ claim is an accurate but incomplete description of NPR’s government funding. The member stations that license NPR’s content receive an average of 10 percent of their funding from the CPB.”
Okay, so NPR gets less than 1% of its funding through federal subsidies, CPR gets around 5%, and local stations usually get around 10% but in some cases get half or more.
The upshot is that most of this work would continue just fine without federal subsidies.
Public radio’s distortions and political manipulations
The response of NPR and CPR to the proposed funding cuts demonstrates precisely why federal subsidies always were a bad idea. Federal funding puts the organizations in the position of waging political campaigns for the funding and of distorting the relevant facts toward that end. This proves my point: government funding of news media is inherently corruptive.
A CPR email of June 5 urges recipients, “Act Now: Congress Could Cut Public Media Within Days.” Stewart Vanderwilt, President and CEO of Colorado Public Radio, pleads with listeners to lobby their members of Congress on behalf of CPR. This shows that government-subsidized media necessarily cannot be independent of the government it is supposed to monitor.
A June 3 NPR article by David Folkenflik and Deirdre Walsh about Congressional funding is blatantly biased. It starts with a protest image with messages including, “No bullying of PBS and NPR.” The seventh paragraph of the piece quotes NPR president and CEO Katherine Maher as saying that pulling funding for NPR “violates . . . the First Amendment.” That is about as audacious and self-serving of a lie as you could imagine.
Not until the twenty-third paragraph do the NPR writers concede, “Asking Congress to claw back funds, however, is unquestionably legal.” Apparently Maher did not get the memo.
When first I opened up McBride’s NPR article, NPR pushed a political ad urging me to “take action” and urge Congress not to “claw back federal funding for public media,” “the greatest threat to the NPR Network in history.” These sorts of self-serving political appeals are gross.
McBride herself illustrates how NPR distorts the language to manipulate the political debate. The vibe of the political campaigns is that government subsidies are necessary for public radio to exist. “Public Radio Silenced,” warns the American Coalition for Public Radio.
This clearly is not true, given that federal subsidies make up only a small fraction of most stations’ budgets. But, McBride says, “Public media is, by definition, media that is funded by the government.” This is a manipulative semantic game. What matters is not whether the services in question are “public” according to this narrow definition, but whether they would continue to operate largely as they currently do without federal funding. Obviously, they would.
Set public radio free
There’s no reason why public radio cannot be converted to voluntarily funded nonprofits. This is what should happen. As NPR and CPR have demonstrated in spades, government funding of news media is inherently corruptive. Those journalists working for NPR and CPR who have any self-respect should demand their independence from government interference, which means their independence from government funding.
