Senators Coburn, DeMint Introduce Legislation To Defund NPR
The nation is broke. In the private sector, Americans have more sources of information available to them than ever before. The time to cut funding for public broadcasting is now.
(CNSNews.com) – Two Republican senators on Friday introduced a bill to stop taxpayer subsidies to public radio and television.
Since 2001, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has received nearly $4 billion in taxpayer money for National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said with the nation on the brink of bankruptcy, some decisions to cut spending are difficult — but not this one:
“Americans struggling to make ends meet shouldn’t be forced to fund public broadcasting when there are already thousands of choices for educational and entertainment programming on the television, radio and Web,” DeMint said. “President Obama’s own bipartisan debt commission proposed ending these unnecessary subsidies to public broadcasting. NPR boasts that it only gets 2 percent of its funding from taxpayers and PBS gets about 15 percent, so these programs should be able to find a way to stand on their own.”
Coburn called subsidies for public broadcasting “indefensible.” “The federal government has no business picking winners and losers in today’s highly competitive media environment. NPR and CPB will do just fine without largesse from Washington,” Coburn added.
Outside of the fact that the nation is broke and doesn’t really need public broadcasting anyway, there’s also the fact (as pointed out by the Senators) that NPR has aligned itself with a far-left organization:
DeMint and Coburn also noted that in 2010, NPR accepted a $1.8 million grant from the Open Society Foundation, backed by liberal financier George Soros, to hire 100 reporters. Additionally, NPR has an endowment of over $200 million, they said in a news release.
If NPR wants to be a liberal broadcasting network let them do it without the taxpayer’s money.
Tags: jim demint, npr, tom coburn
