The fight over public broadcasting

The House of Representatives is
voting today on a bill that would prevent public radio stations from paying
their NPR dues with federal money. This follows the video that brought down NPR head Vivian Schiller and
senior VP Ron Schiller (no relation to each other).

Of course, the video was heavily edited to be blatantly
misleading--and this should come as no surprise. James
O'Keefe, the conservative activist behind the sting, has done this sort of thing before. Chris Rovzar finds O'Keefe's behavior perplexing:

At a certain point, liberal
institutions should start counting these O'Keefe videos as actual victories. If
he can't make a compelling video without absurd cutting and pasting, surely
these places are actually doing something right. At the very least, they'll
hopefully stop firing people the minute the "stings" are released and
start learning from their mistakes - something O'Keefe himself seems strangely
unwilling to do.

I agree that O'Keefe's targets need to handle him better.
But his approach would seem a lot stranger to me if it wasn't so effective.
O'Keefe released the 11-minute edited video and the two hours of raw footage
the same day, inviting viewers to "judge
for yourself." Taking comfort in this gesture of transparency, most
people didn't bother watching the longer video--raw footage of a two-hour lunch
is awfully boring, and the shorter version helpfully compiles all the
interesting stuff that was said.

Along with some that wasn't. But by the time the
discrepancies were thoroughly analyzed--by Scott Baker at Glenn Beck site the Blaze--the damage had been done. Which
was of course the whole idea. Well played, O'Keefe--that's some serious (and
seriously cynical) media savvy.

Last weekend, NPR's own On the Media focused on the organization's PR woes and threatened
funding. Much of the show was about the history of
public funding for broadcasting in the U.S., as the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting is on congressional Republicans' list of useful, trivially cheap
things the government should stop
funding. Hosts Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield went over the history with
NPR old-timers, questioned former senator Larry Pressler's charges of
unprofessionalism and pointed out that cutting the CPB would hurt small-market
public radio stations the most.

One of the more interesting moments came in Gladstone's interview with libertarian journalist Nick
Gillespie, who offered this comparison:

I think that the analogous model here is religion and
religious expression. We all want to live in a world where everybody can
worship whatever God they want but nobody is forced to pay for other people's
belief systems, whether we're talking about Presbyterians and Baptists or FOX
News enthusiasts and PBS tote bag holders.

Gillespie went on to insist that he's not concerned about
any media organization's sociopolitical leanings, only that they not be
taxpayer supported. The argument has a certain libertarian elegance, though
it's undercut both by Gillespie's red state/blue state examples and by the leap
he makes in calling media preferences "belief systems."

More importantly, there are larger differences between
FOX News and public media than the politics of typical viewers and
listeners--and it's hard to argue that our democracy would be better off if
more news outlets answered to ratings, advertisers and the whims of Rupert
Murdoch. To reiterate: less than one 8,000th of the federal budget goes to the
CPB.

Later in the program, Ira Glass came on to issue a challenge: instead of soberly
discussing the merits of public funding for broadcasting, On the Media ought to directly address charges that public radio's
news programming has a liberal bias--by looking at the evidence. It's one thing
to say listeners or even journalists lean left personally; it's quite another
to find bias in the actual story choices and reporting.

I plan to tune in next week to see what Gladstone and
Garfield come up with. At a minimum, it promises to be more edifying than a
video edited to intentionally misrepresent a fundraiser (not a journalist) and
embarrass his organization.