Huckabee: Cut Funding for NPR
Politico reports:
NPR’s decision to fire Juan Williams over comments he made about Muslims on Fox News has prompted calls on the right for Congress to remove its funding, and concern on the left that NPR may have just handed its critics a powerful weapon for painting the broadcaster as liberal.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Fox News host, led the charge on the right this morning, urging Congress to cut NPR’s funding and announcing he would no longer accept interviews on NPR.
“NPR has discredited itself as a forum for free speech and a protection of the First Amendment rights of all and has solidified itself as a purveyor of politically correct pabulum and protector of views that lean left,” he said in a statement.
Brent Bozell, the president of the conservative media watchdog Media Research Center, blasted NPR’s decision and said his group is “preparing letters to the appropriate House and Senate oversight committees to request an investigation.”
“Juan Williams has done nothing wrong. What he said echoes what the vast majority of Americans believe. It’s their tax dollars that fund NPR. But NPR is ignoring them. Instead, they are kowtowing to the agenda of radical anti-American groups like CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relations], and doing the bidding of George Soros, who hates Fox News with a passion.”
But Anna Christopher, a spokeswoman for NPR, said these calls were “unfortunate” and reflect a fundamental misunderstanding about NPR’s funding structure.
“We don’t report to any congressional committee,” she said. “NPR is an independent news organization that receives no direct federal money, and less than 1 percent of our budget comes from grants that we competitively seek from government-funded organizations like the CPB [Corporation for Public Broadcasting] and the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts].”
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