Why Fox News should help fund NPR

By Steve Coll
WashPost
Friday, October 29, 2010

National Public Radio's decision to fire news analyst Juan Williams after he made controversial comments on Fox News about Muslims has become - for some Republican lawmakers, at least - a teachable moment. NPR, House speaker-in-waiting John Boehner (R-Ohio) said recently, is a "left-wing radio network" and should be stripped of federal funding. Eric Cantor, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly and other conservative voices have issued similar calls.

The Williams imbroglio is teachable, but its lessons actually point in the opposite direction: America's public media system, including NPR, requires more funding, not less. In particular, the funding should come from commercial broadcasters that profit from their licensed use of scarce public airwaves - and that would include News Corp., the parent of Fox News.

In this time of niche publications and cable networks that thrive on ideological anger, we should be seeking to strengthen NPR's role as a convener of the public square, a demagogue-free zone where all political and social groups - including conservatives and others opposed to federal funding of public media - should be welcome on equal terms.

During my six-year stint as managing editor of this newspaper, I made plenty of bad, time-pressured judgment calls. The Williams firing looks like a classic of the genre because it was carried out in a way guaranteed to obscure whatever merit the decision had. The precipitous speed with which NPR dispatched its most visible right-leaning voice and the defensive tone the network's leaders used to explain themselves made it entirely fair to question whether the network acted from ideological bias. Of course, Fox News displayed its own familiar, unabashed opportunism by quickly offering Williams a $2 million contract and pledging to protect his freedom of speech "on a daily basis."

(More here.)

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