What's Behind the GOP's War Against NPR?

According to one school of thought, the fashion cycle -- society’s evolving sense of what’s hip and trendy -- lasts roughly two decades, explaining why shoulder pads and floral dresses have come back with a vengeance in recent months. And it seems our nation’s politicians have taken a page from the fashion playbook to stage their own unpleasant ’90s revival: the return of the culture war against public broadcasting.

Then, it was Newt Gingrich and the 1994 class of conservative Congress members calling to de-fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (the federal funding mechanism for NPR and PBS) amid concerns over liberal biases in public broadcasting.

Today, it’s Newt Gingrich and the 2010 class of conservative Congress members calling to de-fund NPR amid concerns over liberal biases in public broadcasting.

What’s old is new again.

The latest battle against public broadcasting gained momentum from what should have been a straightforward affair. In late October, NPR and Fox News analyst Juan Williams, who has a history of sharing offensive and vaguely racist views on air, finally went too far, saying in an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor that people in “Muslim garb” make him “nervous” and “worried.” Some people have argued that NPR had been looking for a reason to fire Williams for some time, and the O’Reilly incident was merely an excuse to do so. Regardless, NPR executives showed Williams the door, noting that his remarks “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.” Within 48 hours, Williams had accepted a new $2 million contract from Fox News.

And almost immediately Republicans had (re-)broadcast their rallying cry: “End public funding for NPR!”

Was NPR indelicate in its handling of the Williams affair? Possibly. But that’s not why GOP members latched onto the story. Rather, they saw the incident as a perfectly timed opportunity to further their far-right agenda.

You see, just days before the Williams firing, NPR had accepted a $1.8 million grant from the Open Society Foundations, the charitable organization launched by billionaire financier George Soros. In an interview with Politico, Republican Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona articulated the GOP’s well-documented feelings about Soros: “Open Society Foundations is essentially another name for George Soros, who is a committed leftist, one-world-government ideologue,” Franks said, citing NPR’s acceptance of the grant as “evidence of an underlying, hardcore left-wing bias that begs my ability to articulate.”

Between the Williams firing, the grant from a left-leaning foundation (though a relatively small one in the grand scheme of NPR’s $162 million budget), significant midterm wins by Republicans and a nationwide focus on spending cuts, the climate was perfect this fall for an orchestrated attack on NPR. An initial attempt by Republicans to force a vote on the issue failed in mid-November, but you can be sure the fight isn’t over. Republicans, now in power in the House, continue to beat the anti-NPR drum, coming at the issue from two angles:

1. The “NPR doesn’t need government money” argument: Budget hawks like House Minority Whip Eric Cantor have pointed to the Open Society grant and long-time NPR donors like the Bill & Melinda Gates and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foundations as evidence that NPR is able to raise more than enough money without the help of the government.

And there’s some truth to that argument. Indeed, the vast majority of NPR funding comes from non-government sources. Only about 2 percent of its funds come directly from the federal government, via grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts. What NPR relies on much more heavily are corporate and foundation dollars, contributions from individual listeners and dues from member stations, which themselves receive only about 15 percent of their funding from federal, state and local governments.