Congress’s vote to eliminate funding for public television and radio reminded me of when I wrote about the issue in September 2004. It was for a New York Sun editorial, “A Subsidy to Celebrate,” about the news that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would pay $4.48 million dollars to fund 26 episodes of a Wall Street Journal editorial page program on New York’s Channel 13/WNET. 

The Sun editorial asked why tax dollars should be taken from Rupert Murdoch, who owned the profit-making Fox News channel and who had not yet bought the Journal, and used “to subsidize a government handout to a competing conservative news and opinion program?” It quoted a Journal editorial of February 8, 1995, contending that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “was probably a misguided idea from the start” and noting, “six other broadcast networks and dozens of cable outfits thrive without a penny of taxpayers’ money.”

When I asked the Journal’s editor back in 2004 about the apparent inconsistency between denouncing the public television subsidy and accepting it, he said that the battle over ending the subsidy to public television had been fought and lost back in the 1990s. He also said that as long as public television is going to exist, it might as well have a diversity of opinions. 

Twenty years on, the observation about the need for diversity of opinions certainly holds up well. If public television and radio had done better at maintaining diversity, they might not have lost the taxpayer subsidy. As for the fought-and-lost point, the recent vote by Congress is a reminder that sometimes what looks like a lost battle on policy is only a temporary setback along the way to an eventual triumph. 

What changed? It’s not only that Republican politicians in Congress got more relentless. Media technology has transformed so that it’s possible to launch a video or audio program with little more than a smartphone and, for ambitious anchors, an accessory or two. Beyond satellite radio and cable television there is YouTube and the rest of the Internet and “wherever you get your podcasts.”

Even Sesame Street cut deals with Netflix and HBO Max. The same day that the Senate voted to defund about $1.1 billion from National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, the Substack tech platform, which hosts video and audio along with text, announced it had raised $100 million, reportedly at a $1.1 billion valuation. The symmetry in the sums has a certain symbolism.

As the media landscape changed, public television and public radio shifted, too, becoming more shrill, partisan, and left-wing. I still tune to public radio sometimes while cooking dinner. Since October 7, 2023, it’s become basically unlistenable and is nicknamed “National Palestinian Radio.” Coverage got worse since President Trump returned for a second term.

Why do I still turn it on? Habits are hard to break, and I’m picky about alternatives. Rush Limbaugh’s voice has been absent since he died in 2021. Red Sox games air only during baseball season. The public radio stations sometimes have jazz music worth listening to or even some economics reporting from the “Marketplace” team. So what if from now on they’ll have to compete in the free market without subsidies other than the tax deductions for their donors or “sponsors,” which are also under pressure.

When any news organization or cultural institution suddenly loses funding it’s a sad thing for the people who work there and for those who consume the content. Yet it’s not only media moguls taxed unjustly to subsidize competitors such as PBS and NPR. It’s all the competing Substackers and freelance journalists and people at small-town weeklies and internet startups.

Also paying taxes are non-media-business people who may prefer to listen to country music or sports talk shows rather than to news programs that originate from coastal cities or college towns. Plus everyone’s children who will eventually be stuck paying off the federal borrowing that finances the deficit spending.

The 2004 Sun editorial concluded with the hope that if enough Democrats watched the Journal show on PBS, eventually the politicians would adopt the Journal’s principled free-market position that the government doesn’t belong in the television business. The Democrats haven’t yet come around, but they can still watch. The Journal Editorial Report eventually found a home on Fox News, where no taxpayer subsidy is required.