NPR hates Israel -- and has never met a progressive attitude it doesn't love -- but that's not the only reason why it should get $0 from the government

And the same argument holds for PBS. I love it -- but it shouldn't get one cent in tax dollars.

On a recent episode of the NPR show All Things Considered, reporter Aya Bertawy narrated a featured story about the battle between Hamas terrorists and Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) within the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. Hamas had set up a command center within the hospital, and almost a thousand Hamas terrorists were hiding out in the hospital. Israel killed hundreds and captured even more, in a highly successful military operation. On the All Things Considered web page, though, how was the 6-minute audio of the radio report summarized? The summary NPR posted is, in a word — dishonest. In a word — unapologetically biased. The exact words used to summarize the report of the battle are:

“Survivors recount horrors of Israeli siege on Gaza's Al-Shifa hospital

Isreali forces concluded a two-week siege of Gaza's largest hospital. Survivors say forces destroyed the complex beyond repair, killed medics, detained hundreds of innocent people and burnt homes.”

Note the total lack of any reference to the fact that a two-sided battle took place, and that the battle occurred because Hamas had set up a command center within the hospital and was using the civilians within the hospital (both staff and patients) as human shields. Admittedly, in the recording itself, an IDF spokesman IS referenced describing the purpose of the operation, but that brief segment of the report is immediately followed by claims that he was lying and by first person reports from Gazans – reports that in all cases are taken fully at face value without any checking. The reporter, for example, interviews a woman who says her brother was killed in the fighting. The implication is that her brother was an innocent bystander. Maybe he was — but NPR should have checked on the distinct possibility that he might have been a fighter himself.

This is just one example of the unrelenting and wildly unbalanced anti-Israel bias of NPR reports on the war. But that is just one of the many issues where NPR presents what is essentially the progressive viewpoint without any attempt to present information in anything approaching a balanced or objective manner. If you are a regular listener to NPR, for example, you would be hard-pressed to have ever heard anything other than full-throated support for so-called (and rather Orwellianly-named) “gender affirming care” (GAC) for children diagnosed with gender dysphoria. You certainly wouldn’t know that this form of care – which ultimately turns the individual into a life-long patient who has been subjected to treatments with powerful hormones (whose long-term effects are not fully known), and castration (for boys) or double mastectomies (for girls) – is no longer used to treat children except in particularly acute cases in most Western European and Scandinavian countries. The U.S. is an extreme outlier with respect to the treatment of gender dysphoria; whereas in the U.S., ideology has trumped science and GAC remains the recommended form of treatment, countries like England and Sweden are now basing their treatments on what is known scientifically about the benefits and harms of GAC and for the most part are no longer following the GAC protocol with children. But you would never know that from listening to reports during the past few years on NPR.

At one time, the progressive slant of NPR was almost wholly aligned with my own political views. But even then – I did not understand why NPR receives funding from the government. Basically, I have never been able to understand why people should be forced to pay taxes that go, in even some small part, toward supporting a radio station or system of radio stations. I may never have voted for a Republican in my life, but I can understand — and I have sympathy with — Republican supporters who don’t like what they hear on NPR and don’t want their tax dollars to be used to prop it up .

Make no mistake about it (and with NPR’s denials notwithstanding) NPR DOES receive a significant amount of its funding from the government – albeit much of it in indirect ways. I used to be a regular contributor, and now I’m not. But at no time should I have been FORCED to donate – and that’s what the use of tax dollars to support NPR really involves.

And the same thing holds true for PBS. Again, I’ve long been a fan of PBS programming (I can still remember watching the very first “Masterpiece Theatre” production, and my children watched LOTS of Sesame Street). PBS has some GREAT shows. Perhaps at one time, when there were only three major networks and almost no high quality children’s TV shows, it *might* have made some sense for the government to have created entities like PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. MAYBE. But today? What could possibly be the justification for tax dollars going towards one particular network and streaming service? If PBS can’t attract enough dollars to pay its own way – then it should change in whatever ways are necessary to make itself financially viable without having to receive government support.

And FWIW — I feel the same way about funding for opera and for football stadiums.