US Congress votes to kill federal funding of public radio

"The House of Representatives approved a measure Thursday to bar federal funding of National Public Radio. The bill also prohibits public radio stations from using federal grant money to pay dues to NPR."

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Teller

I’m firmly against Federal funding of religions, which NPR has become.
- Phikus
  
  How so? Or did you slip this past my sarcasm radar undetected?
- TEKNA2007
  
  > I’m firmly against Federal funding of religions,
  > which NPR has become.
  
  So? Fox is a cult, and its zombie adherents see a compassionate worldview as a disease to be eradicated. More NPR please.
  
  Conservatives whining about NPR can go home and play with all the welfare money they get from U.S. intellectual property laws.
Anonymous

Did everyone miss the part where this was PRESIDENT OBAMA’S IDEA? Buried at the end of the linked article. Stop huffing and puffing. I think we can find better uses for our dollars than “All Things Considered.”
- Stefan Jones
  
  “Did everyone miss the part where this was PRESIDENT OBAMA’S IDEA?”
  
  No, you have misunderstood the article.
  
  Reducing CPB’s funding is not the same as what the House GOP suggested today.
  
  Perhaps you’d understand the difference if you’d listened to All Things Considered?
- princeminski
  
  NPR (and National Endowment for the Arts, and other straw men for Know-Nothingism) has as much impact on the deficit as Saddam Hussein did on the 9/11 attacks.
Anonymous

I have heard the amount of the funding is best described “as a rounding error of a rounding error – .01% of the budget.”

But if you a politician you have to able to *say* you did something. Even if in the grand scheme it was insignificant.
awjtawjt

It’s just the right trying to cut the legs out from under the left. Have patience. In due time, we will cut their legs out from under them. The unions are set to surge, and some other forces for change in a couple years. You’ll see.
- Walt Guyll
  
  Sounds like you thing NPR is a leftish organization…
  - Anonymous
    
    It’s a factish organization. Right now they’re the only real opposition the Right has left.
    - Walt Guyll
      
      So the Feds should pay for opposition to one party? It sounds like you also think NPR is partisan.
      - Anonymous
        
        I’m saying that when one side is so far off the deep end that the truth acts against that party, trying to treat them impartially isn’t a virtue. But that hardly means telling the truth becomes a partisan affair; it has value far beyond the self-interest of political groups.
      - Walt Guyll
        
        And look at what you did. Told (what you imagine to be) the truth and without a federal grant.
        I love NPR. We should set it free.
zuben

It may be obvious to us that this bill has little to no chance of passing in the Senate. But besides the posture of GOP unity, there’s also a not-so-subtle, and now official, painting of NPR as a polarizing institution.

It’s much easier for Joe and Jane American to know what is patriotic and holy, and what to fear and loathe, when it’s painted in black and white for them. George W. Bush’s speech writers exemplified this tactic perfectly in the shock doctrines following September 11, 2001: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

If NPR was unknown to anyone prior, it won’t be any more. From here on, it will be part of some ominous Socialist Media Network that those liberals listen to. It is responsible for the draining of our economy, with Joe and Jane’s hard-earned tax dollars, only to spread its Liberal Agenda across God’s Country.

And lo, one last semblance of neutral, objective journalism is taken care of.

It’s a war of information. What better weapon than to demonize intellect, so that anything that conflicts with what people are told is Truth can be safely ignored as mere enemy propaganda. Or worse, that those conflicting sources of information should be targeted for their sedition, and their blood should water the great Tree of Liberty.
emmdeeaych

I hear there was an amendment offered to stop government advertising on FOX. It failed. Funny thing.
Tim

Makes sense. NPR reports real news, not the GOP agenda that FOX News does.

It’s remarkably stupid and wrong that they’re doing this, but I’m not surprised.
Fiddleback

Thanks for the update. I don’t want to seem nit-picky, but just the House stupidly voted to cut federal dollars for NPR, rather than the US Congress. I’ll be shocked and dismayed if the Senate votes that way.
- AirPillo
  
  Senate republicans can always attach this to an unrelated bill that democrats would otherwise be uncomfortable voting against, and that would muddy its’ prospects quite a bit.
- Anonymous
  
  That’s what I thought, too: thank God. This headline scared me. The linked article doesn’t clarify that the Senate needs to pass it, either.
Zan

The Fox News amendment failed because this bill was aimed at radio, not TV.
- Anonymous
  
  And we all know that Congress only adds Amendments to bills which are strictly related in nature.
- emmdeeaych
  
  I am sure that is the procedural reason given.
  
  Anything to further restrict the one branch of the broadcast spectra that the wealthy can’t buy outright.
Kaiguy

Even if this manages to pass the Senate, and thus Congress rather than just the House, it will be overturned instantly in court, as this is a law of attainder. Same thing happened with ACORN a few years ago – threatened to repeal federal funding, everyone and their dog pointed republicans to the constitution, died quietly.
Anise Shaw

Can we cut off funding to the US Federal Government yet?
Sam Lowry

Make Radio, Not Bombs
Anonymous

I hope LBJ haunts the hell out of em………..
Walt Guyll

Lots of upset commenters here. I wonder how many have donated to NPR…
Anonymous

So, by cutting all funding to NPR, they’d save 80 million a year. By buying ONE less F-35 fighter plane, out of the 2500 they’re building, they’d save 130 million dollars. The bush tax cuts for the rich have cost the country BILLIONS of dollars, that’s BILLIONS with a B. That could fund NPR for decades.

Funding NPR is a drop in the bucket. It’s a grain of sand on a beach of wasteful spending. Cutting it makes practically no dent in the budget. Giving the richest people on earth even more money has destroyed the entire economy. Waging pointless wars has put us trillions in debt. 80 million a year is nothing, it’s pocket change compared to the the thousands of millions the rich are pocketing.
Anonymous

oh but gawd forbid we cut funding for the military band that travels all over the world at 500 million. There in South Korea right now singing for a christian methodist church. This is disgusting and absolutely absurd.
bpratt

NPR’s own “On the Media” just had a guest (forgot the name, sorry) that argued that it would be just as well if the Feds stopped funding NPR. It’s just not that much of the NPR budget, and once done the Republicans would have to STFU about NPR about its “liberal bias”.

(Because, apparently, reporting actual news is something only liberals do.)
- JeffF
  
  “NPR’s own “On the Media” just had a guest (forgot the name, sorry) that argued that it would be just as well if the Feds stopped funding NPR. It’s just not that much of the NPR budget, and once done the Republicans would have to STFU about NPR about its “liberal bias”.”
  
  From what I have heard you need to pretty carefully parse a statement like that.
  
  1) NPR, national public radio, would be fine without federal funds. Such funds are minor for NPR itself. It would even be ok without grant funds. Science friday can probably operate without NSF grants, etc. In fact NPR itself would kind of like to not get federal government money because of the strings attached as long as it only thinks of its own organization.
  
  2) Large NPR stations would also be fine. Their budgets are also overwhelmingly not from the federal government. Live in a city, your NPR station is living on donations rather than government funds (another form of red county welfare there).
  
  3) Smaller NPR stations would be hit very hard. Many small, mostly rural stations get most of their money from the federal government. They might be gone. However I think it is more likely that they would make a lot less local programming and operate more as repeaters of NPR programming and NPR would restructure its fees so that the small stations could buy the shows as cheap as necessary.
  
  4) Consideration for the small stations may actually be holding NPR back from becoming more internet based, so NPR might itself benefit from a weakening of the small stations.
  
  The real losers would be non-internet connected listeners to small rural public radio stations, particularly their local programming would be devastated.
  
  I’m quite sure, however, that the strategists of the right are eager to cut such people off from one more information source not completely dominated by large corporations.
Anonymous

funny how they never care how much invading and occupying other countries cost.
Anonymous

I have never seen a bigger bunch of babies than I have since this Congressional lineup. How immature to blithely remove funding from one of the few worthwhile government efforts we have simply because they didn’t like what the executive said about them. Good grief, is this what the world is coming to? America, be prepared to be scraping the bottom of the garbage can soon, because we won’t be a super power much longer.
Stefan Jones

@Walt:

I do. Every year.

And I have no problem with my tax dollars supporting NPR and other public broadcasting entities. I don’t mind funding public TV and radio stations in rural areas I’ll never drive through much less live in.
msl87

This was passed in the House. It would also have to pass the Senate for it be considered “Congress,” which it won’t. The House nowadays is about symbolic legislation to appease a certain voting bloc, if it happens to pass any legislation at all, because they know their ridiculous laws won’t make it through the Senate and would get vetoed anyway.

Such is the state of government.
- Anonymous
  
  The House nowadays is about symbolic legislation to appease a certain voting bloc
  
  That “certain voting bloc” is a muddy green in color, very thin, and has pictures of dead guys on it.
  
  The USA has the best government money can buy, you know, and it’s only gotten better since voting machines eliminated actual public participation in elections. Now that people only cast symbolic votes, there’s no need for real representation! U-S-A! U-S-A!
traalfaz

I’m not surprised. They’re right, NPR is biased…towards intelligence. They do not want an informed populace.

By coincidence, today is the first day of the pledge drive here, and I bumped my pledge up a bit.
OrcOnTheEndOfMyFork

TBH, NPR should just have the guts to voluntarily turn down government assistance. That way their execs don’t have to quit every time they mutter truthfully that radical Republicans don’t like them.

At this point, the only real value in getting what little they do from the government is being a newsworthy political football. Of course, that may be all part of the plan.

And @zuben, Reagan may have famously given a speech about hoping someday Russians would be watching Sesame Street (they do!) but conservatives have been grumbling against public broadcasting for decades.
jjsaul

So… are they still carrying Rush Limbaugh on Armed Forces Radio?
Anonymous

I’ll admit, I have a bias towards education, and possess some Jeffersonian views on the importance of an informed electorate, but when they so consistently, at every opportunity, fight tooth and nail against the public good, who can deny that the Regressive Republicans have bypassed the level of quaintly misguided anachronistic ignorance and have graduated to actively being a full-blown force of evil in the world.

I’m not sure why this issue motivates me to actually voice an opinion on this, perhaps it is the absurdity of the whole “debate”. The CNN.com article on this story is illustrated with a picture of James fucking O’Keefe, for Christ’s sake!

I guess they are hoping to sell more FOXâ„¢ brand Rectal MucusÂ® Hair Gel in the near future.
jphilby

“House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said taxpayers no longer wanted to spend money on the content NPR provides.”

Rep. Cantor is lying about the wishes of a substantial majority of Americans. That’s his prerogative. These trolls have to settle for the fruit they can reach. Maybe middle America is learning a lesson about what it means to stay home on election day. I doubt it, but maybe.
Anonymous

Does this mean NPR gets to stop watering down its stories?
chgoliz

And how much do the for-profit radio stations pay for the right to monopolize a specific spot on our public airwaves? A mere pittance. If the pseudo-conservatives worship the free market system so much, why shouldn’t the government charge real market rates for our airwaves?

Setting aside public radio slots was supposed to be a fair compromise. This new knife twist is as much of a fair compromise regarding public assets as anything else the post-Reagan Republican party has been up to.
- cameronh1403
  
  But see that’s different, those stations tell the “Real News!”..you know the news the right wants to hear.
TEKNA2007

> the Republicans would have to STFU about NPR about its “liberal bias”

That would be really nice, but I’m not counting on it.
That Evening Sun

Beyond defunding NPR and Planned Parenthood, what ideas do the Regressives have about cutting the budget? None. This is a convenient time for the Regressives to take out some ideological enemies. Destroying NPR has nothing to do with reducing the budget deficit.

The Regressives claimed to be focused on reducing the deficit and creating jobs. Congress has been in session 72 days now, and we haven’t seen a single jobs bill from the House. We also know that with cuts of a million here and there to domestic programs and no cuts to the defense budget that the Regressives don’t really care about the deficit, either.

The real agenda? Torpedo economic growth which will in turn aid the Regressives in the 2012 elections. Nothing else. They aren’t working for your well being, America. In fact, the worse off you are, the better off they are.
jacques45

I still haven’t heard anyone who’s been in the Senate as Republican for longer than the last 3 months explain how the tax cuts for the wealthy (in defence of which they obstructed all Senate business) were more important than fixing the debt.
Stefan Jones

This isn’t about saving money, of course.

It’s about creating a information hegemony. Convservatives would like a media environment resembling that of Berlusconi’s Italy, including the ability of politicians to have their law breaking go unreported and for every alternative outlet to be marginalized.

As JeffF suggests, the first to go would be statons in rural areas, who thereafter would get all of their news from politically reliable outfits.

Orwell had it right sixty three years ago: Ignorance is strength.
OrcOnTheEndOfMyFork

Apparently there’s a lot of divisiveness between tea party Republicans and those a bit more moderate on just how far to cut government spending and it’s showing up on House votes. This “Kill NPR” bill was nothing more than a “team building” exercise to get the Republicans voting on the same side for a change. It has no chance in the Senate.
mfrankly

I’m too depressed to comment.
buddy66

Silly posturing. They’re playing to the Tea Party cuckoos. The House will pass all kinds of crap right up to the elections, knowing it’s all meaningless. The founding fathers would be delighted that their original plan to hamstring government works so well.
staxnet

Scary headline. I thought the Senate had flipped on us too.
Drabula

I’m an American who’s lived in the UK for 4 years now. Aside from the net I get all my news from BBC and Al Jazeera. If I ever had to go back to for-profit American-style entertain-o-news (we’re all so funny and perky!) I’d gouge my eyes out and stick hot pokers in my ears first.
- Anonymous
  
  Ha, this was marvelous! Thanks for reinforcing what I’ve thought about our news for some time. I don’t listen to BBC as much as I do NPR, but it probably is time for me to diversify.
Shithead

Truly a sad day for the USA.

I live in Southern Ohio where the typical rube thinks Fox news is fair and balanced.
cory

It’s obnoxious that we refer to representatives in the house as “congressmen”. I think it’s because nobody has bothered to come up with a useful descriptor for them; “representative” sounds too vague to be useful. Because of this, we get all kinds of bad headlines implying that the “US Congress” (which unambiguously means both branches) has done something which in reality only the House of Representatives, populated with Congressmen, has done.

And it’s a hugely important distinction, because the House puts up so much worthless crap like this, which the Senate or the president generally swats down.
- cameronh1403
  
  I was thinking ‘whores’ or ‘hookers’ since they do give a service for money…
  
  Just a thought..