As I've been told for the last decade, "everything is political" therefore NPR can't provide unbiased or neutral coverage of anything, therefore there should be no federal funding of NPR or PBS. Ideologues and corpirations donate more than enough money to sustain both without the pretense of impartiality provided by federal funding.
If "everything is political", then eliminating federal funding from NPR and PBS doesn’t solve the problem - it guarantees that only corporate and ideological interests shape the narrative. Public funding exists not to claim perfect neutrality, but to create a space where journalism isn’t entirely driven by profit motives or partisan agendas. Strip that away, and you’re not removing bias - you’re institutionalizing it.
Journalism, and specifically NPR, is already driven entirely by corporate and ideological interests. Your supposition that federal funding helps remove bias is trivially disproven by the last decade of coverage of NPR, where I literally (literally!) have not been able to turn it on without race, gender, or Trump being mentioned within a minute (it became a game).
To be fair, there was one exception. and that was a replay of a David Foster Wallace interview from 2003. Which was immediately followed by a current interview with two women talking about white men's obsession with Infinite Jest and how their podcast was helping deconstruct toxic masculinity or something like that. The comparison in quality was stark.
The time for caring about and preserving civic-level notions of neutrality and objectivity was a decade ago. I don't care anymore. If wingnuts want to unduly influence Americans through broadcasting, they can do it like everyone else--without taxpayer dollars.
If your position is "I don't care anymore", then you're not making a principled argument - you're venting. That's fine, just don't pretend it's a policy stance.
"When I am weaker than you, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles." likewise isn't a policy stance, it's naked hypocrisy.
It's a free country so people are afforded the right to be hypocrites, but nobody is entitled to receive public funding when doing so.
You're not actually critiquing hypocrisy - you're just deciding whose version of it gets a microphone. Pulling public funding doesn't eliminate bias, it just ensures the only voices left are the ones with capital to shout the loudest.
