In the wake of James O’Keefe’s devastating NPR sting, the mainstream media has apparently reached the “throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks” point. Its arguments in favor of continued funding are getting more desperate and less rational.
Cokie Roberts tried a novel approach on This Week last week:
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.
MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell took that line of reasoning a step or two further when she interviewed Majority Leader Eric Cantor last Wednesday:
Mitchell: I just want to point out that NPR and the radio stations are saying that the elimination of federal funding for public broadcasting would be extraordinarily damaging to the services that they provide in rural America, on Indian reservations. Not in the big cities, perhaps, as much where other kinds of fundraising is possible, private fundraising, but in a lot of poor communities, it’s their only news service.
Based on this argument, one can only assume that rednecks listen to “All Things Considered” as they drive their pickups around looking for black and gay men to lynch. And Native Americans listen to “Car Talk” while hand-grinding what we call corn, but they call maize.
In other words, NPR doesn’t appeal merely to liberal, big city elites. Heaven forbid. No, according to this line of reasoning, the very people liberal elites disdain the most are NPR’s most ardent fans.
Unfortunately, the network’s own website offers audience stats that put the lie to this inane argument.
So NPR’s audience is older, far richer and far more educated than the average American. Yet Roberts and Mitchell would have you believe that it’s poor, uneducated rural Americans who value NPR the most.
As NPR’s supposed redneck audience would say, “Bullshit.” As it’s supposed Native American audience would say, “Heap big bullshit.” And as it’s actual audience would say, “Please pass the Grey Poupon, Th0urston.”
Source: NPR, LexisNexis
