Jake Tapper, Cokie Roberts and George Will get together on ABC’s This Week to discuss last week’s revelations about NPR’s leftwing bias. Needless to say, Roberts and Will didn’t see eye to eye.
Tapper: Cokie, you’ve been at NPR for almost 40 years. Obviously this institution means a lot to you, but why should we care?
Roberts: Look, I should just say that they did then reject that money, and sent internal e-mails basically saying this is totally unacceptable. We have to have tax forms, all of that. So, that should be stated. But, look, we should care because 34 million people listen every week and want to get the news that you get there, that you can’t get any place else. NPR’s got seventeen foreign bureaus. That’s something you can’t say for any other broadcast organization these days. And brings you terrific information, day in and day out, week in and week out. And the reporters who are there on the line, being shot at in North Africa at the moment are being very badly served by the management that’s now gone.
Cokie, honey, the reason they have more foreign bureaus than any other network is because the American taxpayers give them $450,000,000 per year.
Tapper: George, very quickly.
Will: We learned this week redundantly that NPR is run by people who don’t like people like me. Which is fine. The problem is there are 14,000 radio stations in this country. The government shouldn’t be subsidizing neither entertainment, certainly not journalism. In fact, this is a solution in search of a problem.
Roberts: Well, there are not 14,000 radio stations in rural areas, which is where most of the federal funding goes. Most of those stations are the ones that, NPR gets hardly any money from the federal government, and the big stations get hardly any money. But the little, tiny, rural stations that, where there’s nothing else on the air, get a lot of money and they would go dark.
So we’re spending $450 million per year to subsidize NPR so that “little, tiny, rural stations” can broadcast to areas where virtually no one lives?
Take a few minutes, Cokie. We’re pretty sure you can come up with a better argument than that.
H/T: NewsBusters.org
