Juan Williams

In case  you were wondering, the taxpayer subsidy for public broadcasting such as PBS and National Public Radio this year: $420 million.

I want my money back.

I never could understand why we subsidized left-wing radio and the likes of TV hack Bill Moyers, who never passed up an opportunity to exploit his subsidy for personal gain and launch uninformed political attacks on Republicans.

And now we have something new brought to you by NPR:  Censorship.

NPR has fired Juan Williams for saying the simple truth that nearly everyone recognizes.

According to NPR, he was fired for saying on the Bill O’Reilly Show:

“Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

What NPR did not report was that Williams also warned that political correctness causes paralysis. He should have added that it also it causes stupidity — such as the kind shown by NPR in firing him.

Even with tax subsidies, NPR cannot allow certain non-liberal viewpoints to be spoken. And there’s little doubt they got their wiring in a tangle because Williams said it on Fox News Network.

An interesting item from Powerline blog says that another NPR personality was similarly bullied by NPR.

Mara Liasson is National Public Radio’s top political correspondent. She also helps hold down the left flank on panels where she appears as a FOX News contributor such as Special Report with Bret Baier. Last year Josh Gerstein reported that NPR management has asked Liasson to reconsider her appearances on Fox News because of what they perceive — in accord with the teaching of the Obama administration — as the network’s political bias. NPR executives said they had concerns that Fox’s programming had grown more partisan, and they asked Liasson to spend 30 days watching the network.

At the end of the 30 days, Liasson was undoubtedly expected to engage in rigorous self-criticism, but it didn’t work out that way: “At a follow-up meeting last month, Liasson reported that she’d seen no significant change in Fox’s programming and planned to continue appearing on the network, the source said.” Now NPR has gone a step beyond the summoning of Mara Liasson.

I almost never agree with her, but I have new respect for Liasson.

But no respect for NPR. There is just no reason we should be paying even a dime for PBS and NPR subsidies. Once upon a time, when there were only three networks, PBS made sense as an educational network. They were nonpolitical.

But now they are the unofficial network of the Democratic Party — blatantly, egregiously biased, unprofessionally partisan. They are the plummy, condescending voice of the liberal faculty at any state university.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy NPR sometimes. They have talented people who do interesting and thorough stories, when they stay away from politicas. But those people and that kind of reporting can succeed in the free market, without a subsidy. And it is beyond insulting that conservative taxpayers are forced to fund PBS bias and propaganda, as we listen to Democrats whine and carp about the conservative slant of talk radio.

Last time I checked, the only talk radio that required a taxpayer subsidy was NPR.  And that’s because their brand of politically correct lectures cannot  succeed in the market.

It’s past time to pull the plug. I hope this ridiculous censorship of Juan Williams winds up turning off the taxpayer juice to NPR and PBS.

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