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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Maybe it is because I am European and I come from a different political culture, but a lot of these actions make no sense to me.

It is NPR public and at the same time insanely left wing? It is simple, you are the government! You decide who staff the NPR and PBS and whatever! Are the journalists there unsatisfacted? They will leave or bow. Is the problem classical music or traditional western music or whatever? Fund another national public broadcast who will do these things!

I understand the libertarian political culture, but leaving these things at the force of the market will help only the left, not the right.

you are the government! You decide who staff the NPR and PBS and whatever!

This was called the Spoils System, which (as Wikipedia will helpfully tell you) was fought and eliminated in the US for being a hotbed of cronyism and nepotism. If this process also incidentally eliminated the electorate's ability to put any kind of break on bureaucratic sclerosis or culture drift, well, it's a short encyclopedia article, no room to mention everything.

The public broadcasting situation in the US is complicated. NPR and PBS aren't so much monolithic entities like the BBC but amalgamations of local stations. Congress created NPR and PBS and set requirements for member stations. The member stations can't be commercial and are often owned by public universities or nonprofit corporations that exist solely to run the stations. The member stations in-turn chose directors to run the national-level organizations. Member stations also produce most of the content, some of which airs locally and some of which is nationally syndicated. The government's only active involvement is through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. CPB board members are political appointees, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, but like other independent government agencies the board members are subject to terms and can't simply be fired (although I'm sure there's some impeachment process that's never been invoked). That being said, the board seats are apolitical and most presidents simply reappoint whoever's currently serving, regardless of political party. That's because CPB's power is basically limited to distributing its funding among local member stations. They don't produce any content or make any editorial decisions, they just deal with funding. And this funding is what's at issue when conservatives talk about eliminating NPR and PBS.

It should be noted, though, that this funding makes up surprisingly little of the overall public broadcasting budget. Member stations only get about 10% of their funds from CPB grants. The rest comes from donations from individuals, businesses, and private foundations. Every public station has a "pledge season" a couple times a year where they interrupt programming to incessantly beg for money for a couple weeks. It should be noted that most of the content on these stations isn't notoriously left-wing. On PBS it's basically limited to NewsHour, the nightly news program, and that isn't even that far to the left. On radio most of the content is either music, locally produced programming, locally produced programming that is syndicated nationally, and independently produced programming. The notoriously left-wing part of NPR is the daily news magazines produced by NPR itself, Morning Edition and All Things Considered. And at that it's mainstream urban left-wing, not radical left-wing. NPR itself, though, gets little to no money from the government directly; its budget mostly comes from syndication fees paid my member stations to air its content. The reason it leans left is that most of the people who donate to member stations are educated PMC lefty urbanites, and he who pays the piper gets to call the tune. If NPR decided to go MAGA its member stations would stop paying for its content and if they didn't, they'd see their donations dry up pretty quickly.

The USA is different in part because of highly successful private enterprises with a right wing slant.