Tea Parties` Litmus Test for GOP: Defund Public Broadcasting

On June 30, 1972, two weeks after
the

Watergate burglars were

taken into custody, Richard Nixon vetoed a
congressional bill to double and treble federal funding
for public broadcasting.

Nixon`s stunning veto was
sustained. Yet he had only
"scorched the
snake, not killed it", in the

words of MacBeth.

Having escaped the ax, PBS and its
little sister, National Public Radio, with their
consistently leftist bias, grew fat on 40 years of
federal money.

Nixon would express regret he had
not followed the advice of those who urged him to
terminate taxpayer funding and force public television
and radio to compete fairly with private broadcasting.

Early in 2011, a Republican House
and a more Republican Senate will have a second chance
to succeed where Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush I
and II

failed to try — to

terminate tax funding of PBS and NPR.

This
vote will be an early test of the GOP`s claim that,
having been

burned in 2006 and 2008, it has learned its lesson,
that Big Government conservatism was a fatal attraction
and remains an oxymoron.

As any viewer of cable news now
knows, what has pushed NPR into the crosshairs of

Tea Party sharpshooters was its

egregious act of liberal bigotry against

Juan Williams, a 10-year veteran of NPR.

Williams, a

moderate-liberal African-American who worked for
The Washington
Post and now works at Fox News, was fired for
telling Bill O`Reilly that, when boarding an airliner
where Muslims are

wearing visibly Muslim garb, he gets
"nervous," he
gets "worried."

Whether Williams was fired for
harboring such feelings, or for having confessed them to
O`Reilly, we do not know. But NPR President Vivian
Schiller
said that if Juan did entertain such feelings, they
should have remained
"between him and his psychiatrist."

Schiller`s NPR calls to mind other
places where folks who confessed to thoughts offensive
to the regime ended up in insane asylums and
re-education camps, the

Soviet Union and

South Vietnam post-1975.

Yet, as this episode, like a flash
of lightning, suddenly illuminated the ideological
landscape at NPR, it is most welcome.

As for Juan, not to worry. He has a
new three-year, $2 million contract with Fox. He is
known to a larger national audience, and in a positive
way. He is widely seen as having been scapegoated by
bigots and bravely fought back.

But the reasons for defunding PBS
and NPR, and their parent, the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, are far broader. They involve not just
politics and economics, but principles and the
Constitution.

First, the United States government
should not be in the news business at all. Arguments and
debates about public affairs should be the province of
private citizens. If the government must engage in
propaganda in times of war or tension, to sell its
policies abroad, the home front should remain insulated
from that propaganda.

When director Bruce Herschensohn`s
brilliant

Years of
Lightning, Day of Drums about JFK`s White House
days was made by the United States Information Agency,
it was only by special dispensation that it was

allowed to be shown to the American public.

Second, a U.S. government that has
run back-to-back deficits of $1.4 trillion and $1.3
trillion cannot afford the luxury of providing news and
entertainment to a nation with hundreds of cable TV
channels and hundreds of AM, FM and satellite radio
stations, not to mention scores if not hundreds of
nationally syndicated radio programs.

Why should taxpayers have to fund a
government version of Al Franken`s Air America, when the
private version went belly up? Let the PBS-NPR elite
audience fund its own news and entertainment.

When public television first came
on air, there were three TV networks and few cities had
more than three TV stations. The case for public
television, that the people need
"alternative
programming," collapses when there are more channels
than most of us have heard of, tailored to every
conceivable taste and interest.

Consider now the

words of Thomas Jefferson:
"To compel a man
to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he
disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."

Yet, Congresses and presidents who
profess to revere Jefferson have voted for 40 years to
force conservatives to pay billions of dollars through
CPB, PBS and NPR to propagate leftist ideas that they
disbelieve and abhor.

In FY 2010 alone, CPB, which
funnels tax dollars to public television and radio
stations,

received $420 million. The special interests who
will fight to shelter these subsidies should not be
underestimated. In big cities and on many campuses,
there are powerful beneficiaries and articulate
advocates of public broadcasting who will paint as
troglodytes any congressmen who would poach on these
preserves of privilege.

Again, whether a Republican House
will zero out funding for public broadcasting will be an
early test of its character.

If it gives CPB only a haircut and
a pat on the head, the Tea Party folks should start
recruiting candidates to run against GOP incumbents in
2012.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan
needs

no introduction to
VDARE.COM readers; his book State
of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and
Conquest of America, can
be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book
is Churchill,
Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How
Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost
the World,
reviewed

here by

Paul Craig Roberts.