Rep. Jim Banks (R–Ind.) announced yesterday that he will introduce a bill to defund National Public Radio (NPR). Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.) has said she hopes to do the same in the Senate. We live in strange times, anything can happen in politics, and there may be no faster route to looking like a fool than to issue a prediction. With that throat-clearing out of the way: No, of course Congress isn't about to defund NPR.

This latest wave of Defund NPR! sentiment follows an article by Uri Berliner in The Free Press, in which the NPR editor and reporter—make that former NPR editor and reporter, since he has since resigned—argues that the network "lost America's trust" by shutting out opinions disfavored by the center-left hivemind. I think Berliner's piece wavers between claiming too much (it would have been more accurate, though probably less SEO-friendly, to replace "lost America's trust" with "saw its niche grow somewhat smaller") and claiming too little (it ends with a plea not to defund public radio, since Berliner believes there's "a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith"). But at this point the specifics of his essay are almost beside the point, since the debate it has unleashed goes far beyond what the article says. The proof is that people have been using it as a springboard to call for cutting off NPR's federal dollars even though Berliner goes out of his way to stress that that's not the result he wants.

And now the anger has spread, with NPR CEO Katherine Maher under fire for her history of left-wing tweeting. The troops are ready for battle. So why don't I expect Congress to stop the funds?

For three reasons. The first is the obvious one: The Democrats control the White House, and there aren't enough Republicans in Congress to override a veto, so at the very least this is unlikely to become law before 2025. A second reason is that it's difficult to devise a bill that cuts off NPR while leaving the rest of the public-broadcasting ecosystem alone. As the network's defenders never tire of pointing out, NPR doesn't get much direct support from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). It gets far more money from its member stations, which NPR does not own, and which receive their own cash from the CPB (and, frequently, from other government sources, since many of them are run by state universities).

This shell game isn't an insurmountable problem, but it's the sort of thing that has tripped up legislators before. Last year, for example, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R–Texas) introduced a bill to prevent federal funds from flowing "directly or indirectly" to NPR, its TV cousin PBS, or "any successor organization." Well, how do you define "successor organization"? There are already several public radio networks out there, some of them pretty old. If the Morning Edition team drops its NPR affiliation and starts distributing the show through Public Radio Exchange, are they in the clear?

The easiest way around such tangles, of course, would be to write legislation that doesn't try to single out NPR and instead just cuts off the Corporation for Public Broadcasting entirely. That would keep the money from moving. But it also leads us to the third and biggest reason I don't think a defunding bill will get anywhere anytime soon: No matter how much it huffs and puffs, most of the GOP has no serious interest in defunding public broadcasting.

Yes, there are a few Republican officeholders who would rather see an openly liberal NPR that supports itself than a "balanced" system that relies on tax dollars. I'd bet a libertarian-leaning legislator like Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) would vote for that. But Massie is an outlier. If history has taught us nothing else, it's that the most powerful Republican officials aren't usually bothered by the idea that Americans are being forced to subsidize views they dislike. They just want the subsidies to go in a different direction.

Why do I say that? Because we've seen this process play out again and again, and it always ends pretty much the same way. In 1971, President Richard Nixon proposed a "return to localism" that would have effectively overthrown the crew running PBS, and a year later he vetoed a CPB appropriations bill; then PBS canned most of the programs that the president didn't like, the CPB brought a bunch of White House–friendly figures onto its board, and the president signed a budget increase. In 1994, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R–Ga.) suggested that he might "zero out" the CPB's money; the chief long-term result was that several conservatives got public TV gigs. In 2005, a House subcommittee actually voted to cut the CPB budget by 25 percent and wipe out the rest over the following few years; that time things ended with a former chair of the Republican National Committee becoming chair of the CPB—which landed a higher appropriation, not a lower one. I could list more examples, but I've already written that article more than once and I don't want to write it again. Suffice to say that the CPB invariably survives these battles, that its federal support almost always increases, and that its rare budget cuts don't last long.

And—here's where we come back to Uri Berliner's article—one reason this keeps happening is because the attack so often comes down to the idea that NPR and PBS are unbalanced. That's true, of course: The big public-broadcasting operations have always tilted toward the dominant views of the social milieu that produces them, and Berliner is surely correct that this has intensified at NPR in the years since Donald Trump was elected president. But when bias is your chief complaint, you give the folks who run the networks an easy out. They would almost always prefer to gesture toward balance with some hires or fires than to see their money axed.

Is there a way around that? I think there is, but it would take a different approach to the fight. Instead of a narrowly partisan battle, bring together an alliance of people (mostly on the right) who are sick of subsidizing opinions they dislike and people (mostly on the left) who are sick of seeing those subsidies used as an excuse to insert the government into broadcasters' editorial choices. Adopt a plan to transform the CPB from a semi-governmental body into a fully independent nonprofit, bringing the federal role in noncommercial broadcasting to an end.

There was serious talk of doing this right after the Gingrich attacks shook up the broadcasters. In 1995, the New York Daily News even reported that a CPB spokesman had "confirmed that all the groups agreed on the need to establish an independent trust fund that eventually could replace federal funding." Then the CPB's subsidies started creeping upwards again and the idea moved back to the edges of the political spectrum. So a push like this has failed once before. But the partisan approach has failed to detach these operations from the government far more times than that. It can be hard to assemble a transpartisan alliance, but sometimes it's the only thing that can get the job done.

And yes, it's possible to bring people around on these issues. Back when I spent a lot of time covering the radical Pacifica radio network, I often encountered leftists who saw the CPB as a back door for government influence and felt they'd be better off without it. On the other side of the spectrum, after I wrote a blog post on this subject in 2011 I got a couple of emails from Ken Tomlinson, who had chaired the CPB for two years under President George W. Bush. Tomlinson had gone after public broadcasting for being unbalanced, a crusade that led to a lot of reshuffling of the system but no reduction in its federal support. He didn't care for how I had characterized his efforts, but he was friendly, and he seemed to have come around to the idea that the underlying problem was the purse strings, not the bias. "Bottom line, get tax money out of CPB," he told me. "Not just NPR. CPB."

Maybe someday we'll get there. But if Banks and Blackburn manage to pull it off this year, I'll eat an NPR tote bag.

The post Another Day, Another Doomed Plan To Defund NPR appeared first on Reason.com.

Who is Katherine Maher, and what does she really believe? The embattled NPR CEO had the opportunity on Wednesday to set the record straight regarding her views on intellectual diversity, "white silence," and whether Hillary Clinton (of all people) committed nonbinary erasure when she used the phrase boys and girls.

Unfortunately, during a recent appearance at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to discuss the journalism industry's war on disinformation, she repeatedly declined to give straight answers—instead offering up little more than platitudes about workplace best practices. I attended the event and submitted questions that the organizers effectively ignored.

That's a shame, because Maher's views certainly require clarity—especially now that longtime editor Uri Berliner has resigned from NPR and called out the publicly funded radio channel's CEO. In his parting statement, Berliner slammed Maher, saying that her "divisive views confirm the very problems" that he wrote about in his much-discussed article for Bari Weiss' Free Press.

Berliner's tell-all mostly took aim at specific examples of NPR being led astray by its deference to progressive shibboleths: the Hunter Biden laptop, COVID-19, etc. He implored his new boss—Maher's tenure as CEO had only begun about four weeks ago—to correct NPR's lack of viewpoint diversity. That's probably a tall order, since Maher had once tweeted that ideological diversity is "often a dog whistle for anti-feminist, anti-POC stories."

That Silicon Valley v Russia thread was pretty funny — until it got onto ideological diversity. In case it's not evident, in these parts that's often a dog whistle for anti-feminist, anti-POC stories about meritocracy. Maybe's not what the author meant. But idk, maybe it is?

— Katherine Maher (@krmaher) July 6, 2018

Indeed, Maher's past tweets would be hard to distinguish from satire if one randomly stumbled across them. Her earnest, uncompromising wokeness—land acknowledgments, condemnations of Western holidays, and so on—sounds like they were written by parody accounts such as The Babylon Bee or Titania McGrath. In her 2022 TED Talk, she faulted Wikipedia, where she worked at the time, for being a Eurocentric written reference that fails to take into account the oral histories of other peoples. More seriously, she seems to view the First Amendment as an inconvenient barrier for tackling "bad information" and "influence peddlers" online.

But interestingly, she did not reiterate any of these views during her appearance at the Carnegie Endowment on Wednesday. On the contrary, she gave entirely nonspecific answers about diversity in the newsroom. In fact, she barely said anything concrete about the subject of the discussion: disinformation.

When asked by event organizer Jon Bateman, a Carnegie senior fellow, to address the Berliner controversy, she said that she had never met him and was not responsible for the editorial policies of the newsroom.

"The newsroom is entirely independent," she said. "My responsibility is to ensure that we have the resources to do this work. We have a mandate to serve all Americans."

She repeated these lines over and over again. When asked more specifically about whether she thinks NPR is succeeding or failing at making different viewpoints welcome, she pointed to the audience and said that her mission was to expand the outlet's reach.

"Are we growing our audiences?" she asked. "That is so much more representative of how we are doing our job, because I am not in the newsroom."

Many of the people who are in the newsroom clearly had it out for Berliner. In a letter to Maher, signed by 50 NPR staffers, they called on her to make use of NPR's "DEI accountability committee" to silence internal criticism. Does Maher believe that a diversity, equity, and inclusion task force should vigorously root out heresy?

At the event, Maher did not directly take audience questions. Instead, audience members were asked to write out their questions and submit them via QR code. I asked her whether she stood by her previous tweet that maligned the concept of ideological diversity, as well as the other tweets that had recently made the news. Frustratingly, she offered no further clarity on these subjects.

This Week on Free Media

In the latest episode of our new media criticism show for Reason, Amber Duke and I discussed the Berliner situation in detail. We also reacted to a Bill Maher monologue on problems with liberal governance, tackled MSNBC's contempt for laundry-related liberty, and chided Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) for encouraging drivers to throw in-the-way protesters off bridges.

This Week on Rising

Briahna Joy Gray and I argued about the Berliner situation—and much else—on Rising this week. Watch below.

Worth Watching (Follow-Up)

I have finally finished Netflix's 3 Body Problem, which went off the rails a bit in its last few episodes. I still highly recommend the fifth episode, "Judgment Day," for including one of the most haunting television sequences of the year thus far.

But I have questions about the aliens. (Spoilers to follow.)

In 3 Body Problem, a group of scientists must prepare Earth for war against the San Ti, an advanced alien race that will arrive in 400 years. The San Ti have sent advanced technology to Earth that allows them to closely monitor humans and co-opt technology—screens, phones, presumably weapons systems—for their own use. We are led to believe that the San Ti want to kill humans because unlike them, we are liars. Eccentric oil CEO Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce), a human fifth columnist who communicates with the San Ti, appears to doom our species when he tells the aliens the story of Little Red Riding Hood. The San Ti are so offended by the Big Bad Wolf's deceptions that they decide earthlings can't ever be trusted, and should instead be destroyed. "We cannot coexist with liars," says the San Ti's emissary. "We are afraid of you."

The scene in which Evans realizes what he has done makes for gripping television but… I'm sorry, it's nonsensical. Clearly the San Ti already understand deception, misdirection, and the difference between a made-up story and what's really happening. After all, they were the ones who equipped Evans and his collaborators with the virtual reality video game technology they use to recruit more members. The game does not literally depict the fate of the San Ti's home world; it uses metaphor, exaggeration, and human imagery to convey San Ti history. It doesn't make any sense that they would be utterly flummoxed by the Big Bad Wolf.

Then, in the season finale, the San Ti use trickery to taunt the human leader of the resistance. They are the liars, but no one ever calls them out on this.

The post NPR's Katherine Maher Is Not Taking Questions About Her Tweets appeared first on Reason.com.