Why NPR Won't be Defunded
Politico reports:
The conservatives' new rallying cry — Defund NPR — is actually an old rallying cry, given new life by National Public Radio's firing of political commentator Juan Williams.
But if history is any guide, the calls to strip NPR's federal funding that have emerged from the offices of Republican lawmakers and leaders face an uphill battle. They've tried this before, several times, and it's never worked.
Republicans have been trying to strip government subsidies from public broadcasting almost since the inception of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967.
Then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich's efforts in the mid-1990s to "zero out" funds for public broadcasting may have been the most memorable battle, but Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon went after the subsidies during their administrations too. President George W. Bush tried to cut funds to public broadcasting every year he was in office.
In 1997, when anti-CPB fervor was near its height, a measure to eliminate the CPB from the federal budget by the year 2000 was voted down in the Republican-controlled House 345-78. And in 2005, when Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House, a move to defund the CPB was rolled back after a coalition of House Republicans voted to reinstate the money that had been removed in committee.
The latest calls to cut NPR's federal dollars came as conservatives rallied around Williams, who was fired by NPR for saying he felt "nervous" around people wearing "Muslim garb" on airplanes.
One thing that makes it tougher for Republicans to succeed: Congress doesn't directly fund NPR, but rather funds the CPB — which distributes money through a variety of channels, some of which lead to NPR. But NPR only gets about 2 percent of its funding from the CPB.
