My more dedicated readers have probably noticed that I now host a link to the National Public Radio's website. "How," you may ask, "does someone who is so beholden to conservative principles support an organization that is (partially) government funded, with a liberal bend?"
To start off with, the quality and depth of the reporting trumps the bias, which they have made efforts to address. In an age of banal, celebrity driven "news," geared towards a public with an increasingly diminishing attention span, I welcome their dry and detail driven reporting. And even when I find their coverage biased, I am thankful that they bring economic, scientific and cultural developments to my attention, that other major media outlets do not. On my own time I try to research them in depth, so I can form a more independent, informed outlook.
Regarding questions of government funding, in the context of the billions and billions of dollars in subsidies doled out to special interests, the limited funds provided to improve the level of education, culture and public discourse are hardly disconcerting. And until we address the entitlement programs and military spending that drive the growth of the national debt, public support of NPR and PBS, which constitutes less than 1% of the federal budget would not be justified, as least from a fiscal perspective. And the fact that voluntary individual and corporate contributions constitute the majority of their funding may be the main reason why this is one of the few contemporary examples of a successful public-private partnership.
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