BIASED MICROPHONE

Conservatives finance their own opposition.

Well, it happened. NPR and a bunch of their stations are suing the federal government over Donald Trump’s moves to cut off their public funding.

There’s not a chance in hell the suit would succeed if it were titled, say, Bob Heffelfinger v. Trump, with Bob demanding lifetime payments from the federal government. What the über-liberals are hoping for is getting a sympathetic judge and jury chock-full of liberals to ignore reality and the Constitution. Since they filed the suit in the District of Columbia, they’ll likely get both.

The suit claims NPR had its First Amendment rights violated, which shows a deliberate misunderstanding of what the Constitution says. All the rights noted in our Constitution are not granted us by the federal government. If that were true, then the government could un-grant them and do whatever it wanted. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution make it clear that these were granted by God (sorry, atheists) and they can’t be taken from us (that’s what “unalienable” means).

Since government didn’t grant us these rights, it must honor them by leaving them alone. We have the right ”to keep and bear arms” but that doesn’t mean the federal government has to buy everyone their own AR-15. Likewise we have the right to free speech, but the government doesn’t have to give each of us a soapbox, newspaper or radio station.

And that’s where PBS and NPR make their mistake. The people you hear on NPR have free speech rights, but they don’t have the right to speak over a radio station anytime they want. Going further, the radio and TV stations considered “public” operate under license from the government, and the Federal Communications Commission can pull their ticket at anytime.

There’s nothing special about “public” radio broadcasting or “educational” TV. They use the same spectrum as other broadcasting operations. All broadcast licenses mention the stations must operate in the public interest; the only difference for a PBS station is that its license states “noncommercial educational” in the box labeled “Facility Type.”

Companies that own radio stations don’t have a property right to them in the way you might own your house or a ranch. If the federal government decides they shouldn’t broadcast over their channel anymore, they’re out of luck. They can keep their offices and transmitters because they own them—they just can’t do anything with them.

The reality is, Donald Trump is being nice to these public stations. He has threatened to stop sending them huge gobs of government money and that might seem life-or-death to their management, but his appointees could simply vote them all out of business tomorrow for ignoring the “public interest” of anyone to the right of Lenin and Marx.

And don’t try to tell me how balanced NPR and PBS are. If they were truly balanced, the push to hold on to the federal money wouldn’t be nearly as intense. The uproar over the funding is because they are biased to the left; just another strongpoint to blather liberal talking points while claiming to be balanced. The New York Times article on the suit repeats the old canard “Only a fraction of NPR’s budget — about 2 percent — comes directly from federal grants.” Okay, but if that’s true, why are they fighting so hard to keep such a small amount of money?

In reality, we no longer need any of these stations. “Public” television and radio were born in the days of three-channels, three-networks, with a little left over for “education.” Cable channels and streaming services provide almost all of the content public TV gives us, while the Internet and podcasts now give us everything NPR has. Sesame Street, long considered PBS’s jewel in the crown, is now produced by Netflix. “Wait Wait—Don’t Tell Me” on NPR could easily be a podcast with plenty of listeners, In fact, it is.

Democrats have gotten fat and happy over recent decades, believing they would always have the Deep State loading the dice for them, getting a free TV and radio station in every city. They also expected to control our public schools and colleges forever—and have the colleges fattened by federal billions.

America was designed so that private citizens can pursue their dreams and the market decides whose idea wins, at no cost to the rest of us. It was never meant for billions in taxpayer money to support private universities or leftist propaganda. Our money shouldn't be used just to make college-educated liberals feel comfortable about their choice of liberal arts degrees.