Dog Days at NPR

National Public Radio has taken a number of hits in the last few months. Ron Schiller, the fund-raising exec from NPR who recently resigned, was depicted on a video with what he thought were potential donors, but were actually guys posing as Muslims. He apparently made statements in a private conversation that were against official NPR policy ("NPR would be better off without public funding"). He seemed to laugh at their jokes ("NPR stands for National Palestinian Radio"). He appeared to say things he thought they would agree with ("Tea Partiers are racists."). None of this was said on-air, or by a reporter, or an editor, or an announcer. It was basically a sales guy saying the sorts of things sales guys always say to win an account.

And, it turns out, the video was heavily edited, making Schiller appear to say things that he never did. Schiller actually said positive things about the GOP and his own history with the Republican Party. And who was the investigative journalist that helped uncover this? None other Glenn Beck, as reported on his website, The Blaze. And this isn't the first time the "journalist" who made this video has played this trick: Jame O'Keefe did the same thing to Shirley Sherrod, getting her fired as well.

What Schiller said shouldn't have been enough to get him fired. But Schiller let himself get duped by not doing his due diligence on potential donors, and caused NPR great embarrassment. If he had checked these guys out, he wouldn't have fallen for their trick. He was not only a victim of a gotcha moment, like the governor of Wisconsin was a few weeks ago, but of a heavily edited video that completely misrepresented what he said. Still, I would have fired Schiller for doing bad research, wasting his time on phonies, and missing an opportunity to expose NPR's detractors as liars, not because he insulted Tea Partiers' delicate sensibilities.

So, really, all this episode does is paint O'Keefe as a dirty, mendacious crook, and NPR executives as timid and afraid to insult conservatives in any way possible.

It was much the same with Juan Williams. I would have fired him because he was working for a competitor, Fox News. Fox appears to have it in for NPR and CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting), viewing them as serious competition. Does it really make any sense for NPR to employ a man who's dishing inside dirt to someone who wants to see their funding cut? I've listened to NPR for 30 years, and a couple of years ago I noticed that Williams' tone had changed completely. He was parroting right-wing talking points when he subbed for Daniel Schorr on the Saturday morning news analysis spot. I didn't know it at the time, but he was working for Fox. If I was at NPR I too would have been looking to cut him loose ASAP. They probably thought his fraidy-cat comments on Muslims were a good excuse. Wrong. They should have fired him months or years earlier when he went to work for a competitor.

Some people think that there's a vast right-wing conspiracy against NPR and CPB. There's not. There are many conservatives and businesses who donate millions of dollars to CPB, PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) and NPR. David Koch, for example, donated $7 million to the PBS show Nova. If he really believed PBS was that bad, he wouldn't have done that. Hundreds of other millionaires and corporations donate to NPR, CPB, PBS and local public radio and television stations across the country.

The "controversial firings" and "embarrassing antics" of NPR employees are rather tame compared to revelations at Fox News. There, execs demand straight news reporters to spin stories on climate change and the health care bill to skew opinion against them. Fox producers doctored coverage of Tea Party rallies to make them seem much larger than they actually were. Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, told Judith Regan to lie when she was interviewed by federal investigators when Bernard Kerik was being vetted for Homeland Security secretary. Mr. Kerik was later sent to prison.

As for political bias, NPR executives are scrupulous about avoiding the barest appearance of bias, going so far as to forbid employees not covering from attending Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity. Even MSNBC sanctioned Keith Olbermann for donating to a Democratic political campaign. Meanwhile, Fox News runs non-stop rants on air against the president and Democrats, while contributing millions of dollars to Republican candidates and action committees. So much for "fair and balanced."

There are only two arguments left for eliminating federal funding for NPR, PBS and CPB: the federal government shouldn't spend money on things that duplicate the private sector, and I shouldn't be forced to pay for stuff I don't believe in or want.

PBS and NPR are the only outfits that make decent educational programming, especially for children. The History Channel and Discovery Channel pretend to do programming like PBS, but their stuff is, to be brutally honest, complete junk. It has to be written for people with a five-minute attention span because of commercials every eight to ten minutes. Every time these shows break for commercial, they spend the first five minutes when they return recapping what they told you in the previous ten-minute segment, five minutes of which was a recap from the segment before that. PBS programming does not have these interruptions and they do not spend half the program repeating themselves endlessly. Anyone who watches shows like Mythbusters (which I love and hate at the same time) knows exactly what I'm talking about. One hour of "educational" programming on commercial stations is really only 20 minutes of information, while one hour of educational programming on PBS is really one hour.

All but one basic cable channel on our system is riddled with commercial interruptions, even though I am already paying them to get this programming! That one exception is TCM, which is an absolutely fabulous channel that shows old movies in their entirety without any idiotic chopping for commercials.

Commercial interruptions are the worst thing about commercial TV. They prevent logical chains of thought in educational programming and constantly interfere with story development with fictional programming. This is why so many people use DVRs to skip commercials; DVRs may ultimately doom the entire commercial model of television.

No private broadcaster puts together news programming like PBS and NPR. All the commercial networks and newspapers are cutting back on international reporting. NPR is not. Commercial broadcasters fill their shows with fluff, or anxiety-inducing scare stories that emphasize the latest bizarre murder, or celebrity gossip (who gives a damn about Charlie Sheen?). The "news" channels like Fox, MSNBC and CNN are spectacularly barren of news. Fox has endless hours of right-wing tirades. MSNBC has endless hours of ranting from all sides. CNN has endless hours of mindless blather.

When covering major news events all three cable network news channels stand around saying nothing for hours on end, repeating themselves, reporting rumors, and soliciting speculation from "experts." They have five minutes of blather, then five minutes of ads, then five minutes of blather, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. On NPR stations they give you the news, talk with someone on the scene for a few minutes, then when they've run out of things to say, they give you actual historical background. And when that runs dry, they go on to another story about something else. Just because there's a revolt in Egypt or a tsunami in Japan doesn't mean the rest of the world has stopped.

NPR runs news stories that vary in length, from a minute, to five, to ten, to 20 minutes long. They take the time necessary to fully explain the situation. They don't break for commercial every five minutes. On NPR call-in shows they weed out the ranting nut jobs, and when loudmouths do get through the hosts try to calm them down and then shuffle them quickly off if all they can do is vent angrily.

The closest thing commercial television has to NPR programming is 60 Minutes, which is a shadow of its former self, and it's just 40 minutes a week. Other than that, no private American broadcasting company does programming remotely like what NPR and PBS do. CPB and NPR are not stepping on any private toes. They are providing a unique source of programming in the US (only the BBC is comparable, and it's not American).

Public radio stations are also the only source of classical music programming in this country. Classical music is one of the great treasures of Western Civilization, and it's wrong to let one of the great traditions of our forefathers die out in this country.

Federal funding for CPB is essential for stations that can't possibly support themselves with local contributions alone, mostly in rural and small markets that aren't served by cable or local news radio. These stations are run by local people, often at universities, and reflect local sensibilities, not the dictates of head honchos at NPR headquarters. Cutting federal funding for NPR will close down community radio stations across rural and small-town America, but leave the stations in big cities unscathed.

Many conservatives complain that they shouldn't have to pay for PBS and NPR because they're politically biased and they don't want to pay for something they don't like.

The only bias NPR has is to tell the truth. They bend over backwards to avoid bias. They don't broadcast long rants in which the host claims the president is a racist, anti-colonial communist socialist fascist. They don't even raise their voices on-air. I do my own ranting, I don't need to watch someone else do it, thank you very much.

There are things government does that all of us don't want to pay for. I didn't want to pay a trillion dollars for George Bush's invasion of Iraq. I knew that it was bogus, that there were no WMDs, that Saddam had no connection to 9/11, that it wouldn't be a cakewalk, that we would be stuck there for many years -- if not decades. Now we all know it.

I don't want to pay millions upon millions of dollars for abstinence-based sex education. How can you possibly spend millions on that? How long does it take to say, "Don't have sex. You can get pregnant and get a disease." That's the entire curriculum. What more need be said?

I don't want to pay for "faith-based initiatives." It's a scam to give government money to politicians' religious cronies.

I don't want to give oil and gas companies tax breaks for oil exploration. Selling gasoline is extremely profitable. Why do they need special treatment to do it? They use our ports and roads to deliver their oil, and our Coast Guard to drag their employees out of the drink when their oil rigs explode. Why can't they pay their fair share of taxes?

I can see giving them tax breaks for basic research into something new, but there's nothing new about searching for oil in different places. This country's having serious financial problems, and we're still handing out special breaks for companies that are charging us $3.50 a gallon for gas? Soon to be $4 if things in the Middle East continue to be hosed up?

But even though I don't like all those things, I accept the necessity that I must pay for some of them, because this is a democracy and democracies are based on compromise: everyone gives a little and everyone gets a little.

And, yeah, I know times are tough and everyone has to pitch in. I have no problem with CPB and NPR taking a funding cut. But if you cut them off completely a lot of local stations are just going to shut down and years of investment will be lost, never to be regained.

But if you want to go with the "it's wrong for me to be forced to pay for something I don't want" argument for a moment, I can do that. Because I can fully appreciate that sentiment. And it happens not only with my taxes, but in other parts of my life.

My wife and I pay about $75 a month for cable TV. That includes all the local channels, basic cable stuff like Disney, Discovery, Comedy Central, Univision, and news channels like CSPAN, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. Now, I will never watch Fox News or MSNBC or Univision or QVC, but if I want to get Comedy Central or TCM I am forced to get those channels as well. That means I am paying money to Rupert Murdoch against my will and being forced to support the right-wing propaganda machine.

And I can't escape this by using a satellite TV provider. If I want Comedy Central or TCM I am also forced to get Fox News on Dish Network and DirecTV. My only option is to not get cable or satellite TV at all, which is problematic because the on-air signal is extremely poor where we live, in a hollow 20 miles from the TV antennas in our area. That means my only "freedom" is no freedom at all. It's like me telling you to move to Mexico if you don't want to pay taxes that will be spent on the CPB.

Then there's the special treatment cable companies get. These days they're basically phone companies. They provide cable TV, Internet access, and quite frequently phone service. But they aren't bound by the same regulations phone companies are, even though they provide phone service. I never thought I'd see the day, but there are companies that I now like less than the phone company: my local Comcast provider.

Then there's the extortionist behavior of certain broadcasters, Fox in particular. At least twice in the last couple of years Fox has blackmailed cable providers by threatening to cut off local channel access to cable subscribers during football season. They charge cable companies a boatload of money to retransmit a signal the local Fox affiliates beam into the ether, free for anyone to receive. If they're giving it away, why are they charging some people so much money for it?

So, to everyone who's insisting that they shouldn't be paying for CPB, NPR and PBS: I'll agree to cutting federal funding for those organizations when the following conditions are met:

• A private broadcaster has programming of equal breadth and quality, written without the endless interruptions that destroy the pedagogic and entertainment value of the program.
• Congress stops cable companies from forcing me to buy expensive bundles of 20 or 30 channels that I'll never watch just to get the six or seven that I do (a mandatory a la carte option).
• Congress imposes the same regulations on cable companies that provide telephone and Internet service that telephone companies are subject to. Now that they're firmly established (some have been around 30-40 years) cable companies no longer need special treatment reserved for startups.
• Congress stops Fox's blackmailing of cable companies by allowing free retransmission of signals broadcast over the public airwaves, as long as the signal is unmodified and retains all advertising as is.
• Cable channels that I pay extra for should have no commercials. If I'm paying for a channel, why should I have to watch commercials?

There's no real broad-based conservative demand to end public funding for CPB, NPR and PBS and the local stations. There's a relatively small group of conservatives who want to stamp out anything that might disagree with them.

We are in a media age, and media companies are getting bigger and bigger. Comcast just bought out NBC/Universal to form a vertically integrated production/distribution monolith, intent on wiping out competitors like Netflix. Fox has always been pushing to change federal laws so they can buy more and more TV and radio stations, newspapers, movie studios, and so on. Fox is now also trying to extend its sphere of influence over the financial markets with its purchase of the Wall Street Journal.

And now, as a paean to Fox News, our moment of xenophobia:

Is it wise to allow Rupert Murdoch to have so much control over what Americans see and hear? He is, after all, really a foreigner. He only acquired American citizenship in 1985 so that he could own American TV stations. How can we trust a man who betrayed his own country out of financial convenience? How can we be sure he won't sell out out to the British or the Australians or the Chinese when it's convenient? Murdoch's papers in England have been caught hacking people's cell phones. How can we be sure he isn't doing it here?

Do I believe that crap? No. But that's the quality of the reportage at Fox News.

I trust the news I get from NPR, which in the grand scheme of things has no almost no money and never will, and has no axe to grind. How can I possibly trust the the pronouncements of reporters hamstrung by the dictates of huge, multinational corporations like News Corp and Comcast/NBC/Universal who stand to make hundreds of billions of dollars by monopolizing US media? Corporations that have no real allegiance to this country, except what can be denominated by the almighty dollar.