NPR loses. The First Amendment wins.

Boston Globe

5 days ago

It is a tiresome myth that the media are supposed to be unbiased. The First Amendment, which prohibits governments from 'abridging the freedom … of the press,' was crafted in part because the framers of the Constitution knew perfectly well that journalists cannot help bringing strong views to their work, that those views shape their coverage, and that it is no business of the government to decide what constitutes fair and accurate reporting.
No — the reason to defund public broadcasting is that it should never have been funded in the first place. A government barred by the Constitution from 'abridging' the media ought never to have involved itself in subsidizing the media. Congress's vote to cut the flow of dollars from the Treasury to NPR and PBS was long overdue. As Walter Donway wrote in The Daily Economy, the rescission vote 'strips away the illusion, cherished since the late 1960s, that in a free country with a free press, government can somehow act as a neutral arbiter of public information.'
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Yet right up to the last minute, the CEO of NPR, Katherine Maher, kept trying to save her network's federal funding by insisting that 'we are, of course, a nonpartisan organization' and promising to iron the bias out of its journalism.
'As far as the accusations that we're biased, I would stand up and say, 'Please show me a story that concerns you because we want to know,'' she said during a Wednesday appearance on CNN.
I'll be happy to take Maher up on that request but her plea misses the point. NPR cannot be unbiased. And even if it could, that wouldn't entitle it to taxpayer dollars.
That NPR leans left is not the problem. What is a problem is that its journalism has repeatedly fallen short of its own professed standards of accuracy, fairness, and intellectual honesty.
Take, for example, NPR's handling of the story about Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election. The network flatly refused to cover the revelations emerging from the laptop,
Yet the laptop and its contents were
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Or consider NPR's
In reality, the photographs at the center of the story were egregiously misconstrued. An investigation by the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that no migrants had been struck. But NPR, like other outlets, did little to correct the record or to grapple with how avidly it ran with an inflammatory and unfounded accusation.
On issues of race and the COVID-19 pandemic, NPR's record has often been problematic. It dedicated
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When it came to COVID's origins, NPR leaned heavily into the narrative that the virus emerged from a wet market. The possibility that it might have escaped from a Wuhan lab engaged in gain-of-function research was almost 'immediately dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory,' Berliner wrote. Indeed, NPR went so far as to even declare in April 2020 that the
As late as 2023, when even the Biden administration was inclined to accept the lab-leak hypothesis, NPR was still
These and
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Just as — to be fair — every other media outlet does.
Which brings me back to the key point: Even if NPR hadn't dropped the ball on these stories, even if its reporting were as careful, accurate, and objective as is humanly possible, it still would not warrant a nickel of government money. Freedom of the press means that government must not tell journalists what to say or punish them for saying the wrong thing. It also means that news organizations must make their own way in the marketplace of ideas, sustained by their audiences, their advertisers, or their benefactors — not by the public treasury.
NPR has always described its work as indispensable. With the government out of the picture, it can finally prove its value in the only arena that truly matters: the free marketplace of ideas. If it can sharpen its journalism, confront its own biases, and earn the loyalty of more listeners willing to pay for it, so much the better — for NPR and for the nation. A free press thrives when it stands on its own feet, not on the public dole.
This article is adapted from the current
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