Taxpayer-Funded Broadcasting, Ten Questions and the Honest Answers

Few things in Washington can start a fight as reliably as a puppet. Mention public broadcasting at a conservative gathering and within thirty seconds somebody will say "defund it," somebody else will say "not the kids' shows," and a third person will remind everyone that the town's only radio station reads the weather during a tornado warning. Everyone is partly right, which is what makes it a fight worth having properly.

Most of the arguments I hear are really about two other things. One is what the federal government should pay for. The other is who benefits when it does. Both sides have a real case, and the debate goes better when each side can state the other's. So here are ten questions, in the order they tend to come up, with answers that stick to what I am certain of. Where a number would normally go, I point you to the place to check, because funding decisions change from year to year, and a blog post is a poor place to keep a budget.

How it started

1. What did the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 do?

It created the framework for federal support of noncommercial television and radio. The groundwork was a 1967 report from the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, which argued that educational broadcasting needed a stable source of support and recommended a new corporation to provide it. Congress took up the idea, and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act on November 7, 1967.

The Act did several things. It created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a body meant to distribute federal money to stations and programs. It set up a structure intended to keep the money one step removed from direct political control, on the theory that Congress and the White House should not be the editors of the news. And it wrote into the statute a standard that conservatives often forget: the law calls for "strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature." That clause is in the U.S. Code, in title 47, section 396. Hold on to it. We will need it in question nine.

2. What is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and is it the government?

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB, was set up as a private nonprofit corporation and not as a federal agency. Its board has nine members, appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Congress appropriates money for it, and by long practice the money has been appropriated two years in advance, so that it does not become a lever in the year's political fights. That advance funding is by design. Supporters call it insulation. Critics call it a way to hide the spending from the voters who pay for it, and I think that second criticism is fair: money that is appropriated years ahead is harder for the public to notice.

CPB does not produce programs for the most part. It passes money out. That brings us to the programs you actually know.

3. When did PBS and NPR start, and are they federal agencies?

The Public Broadcasting Service, PBS, was incorporated in 1969, and National Public Radio, NPR, was incorporated in 1970. Neither is a federal agency. PBS is a nonprofit organization owned and run by its member stations, and it distributes programming to them. NPR is a nonprofit membership organization too, with member stations as its core. NPR's best-known program, All Things Considered, first aired in 1971.

That detail matters because people argue past each other here. Critics say "NPR and PBS are taxpayer-funded." Supporters say "they're nonprofits, not government." Both are describing something true. The networks are private organizations, and federal appropriations have flowed to the system through CPB. The honest description is that they are private nonprofits that have received public money.

How the money works

4. How does station funding work?

This is the part most people have wrong, in both directions. Most of CPB's funding is passed through to local stations as grants, not spent on the national networks. A local public station is typically a separate nonprofit, or is licensed to a university, a state authority or a local community group. It raises money from several sources: donations from listeners and viewers (the pledge drives you know), underwriting from businesses and foundations (the short sponsor announcements, since noncommercial stations cannot run ordinary commercials), grants from universities and state governments, and federal money passed down through CPB.

The proportion varies widely from station to station, and I will not give you a figure, because any single national number hides that spread. CPB publishes financial reports and each station files public documents, so you can look up your own local station. Do it. You will learn more in ten minutes than from a year of cable segments.

5. What about rural stations?

This is the strongest card the defenders hold, so I'll state it fairly. A station in a big city can raise a great deal of money from thousands of donors and dozens of local businesses. A station in a sparsely populated area may have a small donor pool, few businesses to underwrite its shows and a large territory to cover with transmitters. For that station, a federal grant can be a larger share of its operating budget, and by many accounts it is the difference between staying on the air and going dark. In some rural places, the public station is the only local broadcaster that carries local weather, farm reports and emergency information.

Nobody should wave that away. If you propose to end federal funding, you owe those communities an answer, and "let the market sort it out" is not one a farmer in a county with one stoplight will find comforting. We will come back to what a conservative should say.

The case against

6. What is the market argument for ending federal funding?

It runs in four steps.

1. When the system began, there were few choices. In 1967, a household had three commercial television networks, a handful of local stations and the radio dial. The Carnegie Commission was worried about a gap in educational and cultural programming.
2. That gap has been filled. Cable, satellite, streaming and podcasts offer more educational, documentary and children's programming than anyone can watch. If a program has an audience, someone will pay for it.
3. Government should not pick winners. Federal money flows to some outlets and not their competitors, such as commercial local radio stations that compete for the same listeners. A taxpayer-supported competitor is not a level field.
4. If it is valuable, it can be funded voluntarily. Public broadcasters already raise much of their money from listeners and sponsors. Those who love the programming can give more.

There is a fifth point that conservatives often make, and it is about principle and not about dollars. The appropriation is small next to the whole federal budget, and nobody serious claims that ending it would balance the books. The argument is that Congress should justify every item by what it is for, and that "we have always done it" is not a justification. I make that case more broadly in Why Spending Restraint Keeps Losing in Washington, Whoever Is in Charge, and you can check the actual amounts for any year on Congress.gov or in the appropriations bills themselves. For how the process works in general, see How a budget becomes law, from the President's request to the checks.

7. What is the First Amendment argument?

This is the most interesting question on the list, because it points in two directions at once.

The argument against funding goes like this. Thomas Jefferson, in the Virginia statute for religious freedom, wrote that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves "is sinful and tyrannical." Jefferson was writing about religion, but the principle is wider: forcing people to subsidize speech they reject is an injury to conscience. The Supreme Court applied a similar logic in Janus v. AFSCME (2018), when it held that public-sector workers could not be compelled to pay fees to a union whose positions on public matters they might oppose. If it is wrong to compel a state employee to subsidize a union's political speech, the argument runs, why is it fine to compel a taxpayer to subsidize a broadcaster's editorial choices?

Now the answer the defenders give, and I'll state it fairly. Government has always spent money on speech, from the Library of Congress to the Smithsonian to the military's recruiting ads, and no one has a constitutional right not to have his taxes spent on things he dislikes. The Court has held that when the government itself is the speaker, the compelled-subsidy objection does not apply; see Johanns v. Livestock Marketing Association (2005). And the rules cut in the other direction too. In FCC v. League of Women Voters of California (1984), the Court struck down a federal ban on editorializing by stations that received CPB money, holding that the government could not condition funding in a way that gagged them. So a conservative who wants to use the First Amendment as a tool to cut funding runs into a body of law that is mostly protective of how money is spent, and a conservative who wants to use funding to control what stations say runs into League of Women Voters head-on.

My read: the constitutional argument against public broadcasting funding is a moral argument more than a legal one. It is a good moral argument. It is not a good lawsuit.

The case for, and the bias question

8. What is the best case for keeping it?

Three points, stated as its defenders would state them.

1. Local service the market under-supplies. Small markets cannot always support a commercial station that covers local government, agriculture or emergency information. The grant is what keeps the lights on.
2. A different kind of programming. Children's educational shows, documentaries and long-form coverage that no advertiser is eager to sponsor.
3. A modest price for a shared resource. Supporters say the cost per person is small and that the public gets something in return that commercial media does not offer.

On the first point, the evidence is the station-by-station financial reports I mentioned. On the second and third, they are matters of judgment and I will not pretend a spreadsheet resolves them. A conservative who has the facts straight can argue that the benefits are real and still conclude they do not justify compelled funding, and a defender can argue the opposite. This is a disagreement over values.

9. Is there a bias problem, and does the law address it?

Many conservatives believe the national programs lean left. I think you are entitled to hold that view, and I'd suggest you test it the same way you would test any outlet: look at specific stories, compare them with other sources, and use the checklist in How to Evaluate Any News Source With a Twelve-Point Checklist. Impressions and anecdotes are not evidence, and I am not going to quote a survey I cannot verify.

What I can say is this. The statute itself requires "objectivity and balance" in controversial programming, That is a lever. If you believe a program violates the statutory standard, you can write to the station, to CPB and to your member of Congress, and you can ask the House and Senate committees that oversee the funding to hold hearings. A standard that is written into law is a better thing to argue from than a feeling.

I'd add a note of caution that cuts against both camps. Public radio and television are not one thing. They are hundreds of local stations with different managers and different audiences, and generalizing from a national show to a station in a county you have never visited is how bad arguments start. For the larger history of how conservative voices found their audience outside the legacy networks, see How a Dying AM Dial Turned Into the Biggest Platform for Conservative Ideas, and for the story of the old rule that tried to force balance on broadcasters, The Fairness Doctrine From 1949 to 1987 and Why Its Repeal Still Matters.

What a fair-minded conservative should concede

10. What should a fair-minded conservative concede?

Here is my list. You may disagree with some of it, and you should say so if you do.

1. The money is small and the principle is the point. Do not claim that ending it fixes the deficit. It does not. Argue the principle, which is that every dollar Congress spends should have a reason, and be honest about the scale.
2. Rural stations are a real concern. If your plan leaves a small-town station without a way to survive, say how the community will cope: a longer phase-out, a shift to state or local support, or a different mechanism. A plan that ignores them will not carry a rural district, and it shouldn't.
3. The programs are not all one thing. There is a difference between a national show you dislike and a local station that reads the grain prices. Argue about each on its merits.
4. Past efforts to end it have not worked. Republican Congresses have tried more than once to cut or end the funding, most notably in the mid-1990s, and the funding survived each time, trimmed but alive. That tells you something about how many listeners and viewers, including conservatives, are attached to their local station. Strategy follows from that fact.
5. The status changes, so check it. What Congress has appropriated, cut or rescinded in a given year is a matter of public record. Look it up on Congress.gov rather than relying on a headline.

And here is what I'd hold on to: conservatives are right that government should have to justify what it spends, and right that compelled support for speech deserves suspicion. But we do our best work when we make that case with the details in hand, including the rural station, the statutory balance requirement and the history. If you want the budget process mapped, see how a minority party fights a spending bill when it does not have the votes.

The bottom line

• It is private nonprofits with public money. CPB, PBS and NPR are not federal agencies, but Congress has appropriated money to the system since the 1967 Act.
• Look up your own station. Its financial reports show how much of its budget comes from donors, sponsors and the federal grant.
• The case against is about principle. Markets now offer abundant choices, and compelling taxpayers to support speech they reject is a moral objection worth making.
• The case for rests on rural and local service. If you want to end the funding, have an answer for the small-town station that carries the weather.
• Use the law's own words. The statute demands objectivity and balance. Hold the system to that standard, and keep every claim you make about its funding tied to a source you can cite.