Food for Thought: The US Has Three Government Broadcasters

-By Frank Hyland

In the midst of the uproar over National Public Radio (NPR), one factor either has been ignored or simply not even realized: The United States already has an official US Government “voice.” It is The Voice of America (VOA), a longtime broadcaster offering listeners around the world the official views of the US Government in an unabashed fashion.

Straight from the VOA website (http://www.voanews.com) in their own words, with no spin by those pro or con, the agency itself says: “The Voice of America, which first went on the air in 1942, is an international multimedia broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors. The VOA broadcasts approximately 1,500 hours of news, information, educational, and cultural programming every week to an estimated worldwide audience of 123 million people.” Why, then, you are asking yourself, do we need to give The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and National Public Radio (NPR) taxpayer money approaching half a billion dollars this year? All of those organizations, I hasten to add, have every right to continue to exist. They have every right to compete for our eyes and ears, for our money spent on advertised products. The line should be drawn, however, at the receipt of your tax dollars.

As a side note, it may be time also to rename the CPB, PBS, and NPR, to remove the words “Public” and “National” that presently grace their titles, adding further to the illusion that they deserve tax dollars. On a lighter note, freeing the CPB broadcasting duo of PBS and NPR to obtain their revenue solely from advertising rather than their agonizing, interminable pledge breaks will elicit a long, loud sigh of relief from listeners across the nation.

Finally, you need not take my word for it that it is time to end the funneling of tax dollars to Public Broadcasting while we also fund the VOA. I offer instead the words of the now-former high-ranking NPR executive and chief NPR fundraiser, Ron Schiller, who is overheard on videotape saying that NPR would be “better off in the long run without federal funding.” That pretty well cinches it in my book and should result in our debt of gratitude to the CPB as opposed to our debt of tax dollars.
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Frank Hyland is a long-time Writer/Editor who has written for The New Media Alliance, and also for The Reality Check and has appeared weekly on Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Conservatism on Sunday evenings on Blog Talk Radio, along with Babe Huggett and Warner Todd Huston.


Copyright Publius Forum 2001