Ending Interest-Group Politics

Relax about NPR/PBS. Each will survive and thrive, we are assured.

Donald Trump’s decision to end taxpayer support for government media is far more than a budget cut. It’s a philosophical reassertion of freedom, reports the WSJ’s James Freeman.

Mr. Freeman maintains that Public Broadcasting always was in conflict with US traditions of free speech.

Another Bureaucratic Disaster 

In 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act into law, “highbrow” was born. Educational, literary, scientific (no commercials) broadcasting was on, off, and running.  But how did that justify a government-subsidized broadcaster? PBS’s record shows that such highbrow programming had a lasting audience. Just look to PBS’s fundraising successes for validation.

Can the government, which is forbidden to “establish” a church or to censor speech, presume to establish a taxpayer-supported broadcasting system? Not surprisingly, this system soon became the voice of the political establishment, offering a consistent narrative in favor of more government action, government programs, and government solutions…

By shifting a budgetary line item, Donald Trump has refused to allow the federal government to act as the grand editor in chief. Trump also rejects the paternalistic assumption that without federal funding, the American people “will be left ignorant, uncultured, or misled.”

In the Daily Economy, Walter Donway soothes the public broadcasting outrage. The media landscape is vast,” he notes. Freedom, to Donway, means no government supervision, no subsidies, and no anointed “public” channels.

The First Amendment is vibrant. And we have a president who seems, at least this time, to have remembered government’s role in the realms of information, ideas, opinions, artistic judgments, and entertainment: Get out of the way.