There seems to be some conflation of terms in this thread. I'm not sure how much of it is unintentional, or how often, but it leaves me with the sense that some people are unclear just what or who they are complaining about.
The DeMint quote in the OP is a good starting example.
"Since 2001, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds programming for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, has received nearly $4 billion in taxpayer money," said DeMint. "The country is over $13 trillion in debt and Congress must find ways to start trimming the federal budget to cut spending. NPR and PBS get about 15 percent of their total budget through federal funding,
This may or may not be true in a very technical and pedantic sense, but since the OP sparked a tirade of knee-jerk neo-con outrage against NPR, with a truly awesome and profoundly misleading overuse of the term "NPR station", it might deserve some review.
CPB
PBS
NPR
APM
PRI
public radio stations
These terms are not synonymous.
DeMint was mixing and matching quite a bit himself. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting receives about 15% or 20% of its budget from various Federal sources. This is true. Not all, or even most of
that money goes to entities such as NPR.
National Public Radio receives about 1.5% of its ~$164 million/year budget from competitive grants from the CPB. Roughly $2.5 million. It gets no money directly from the Fed.
It could be argued that his statement was semantically defensible, but there is no question its intent was to distort and mislead. It seems to have worked, at least for the faithful.
NPR has no stations. It provides a distribution service for the affiliate member stations to select programing from. It produces only about 61 hrs. a week of in-house programming. All the rest, around 95% of the total they distribute, is produced by various other sources, generally the various affiliate stations themselves. (
Link)
Morning Edition, The State of Things, and All Things Considered comprise the vast majority of that fraction of in-house programming.
So Brainster's observation ...
1. The Lewinsky affair was recognized as serious very quickly.
<snip>
2. NPR covered the story initially, so you've mistaken my point. It's not that they were covering up anything. Indeed, they could not have covered it up because by that time reporters were all over the story. It's that NPR decided, after sufficient flack from their listeners, not to talk about it on their gabfests, like the Diane Rehm show and ToTN.
... exemplifies this confusion. The
Diane Rehm Show is produced by WAMU, the American University public radio station in Washington, DC. NPR doesn't decide what their content is going to be. NPR merely distributes it. Local affiliates choose separately whether or not to air it. Not all of them do.
There's an awful lot of public radio stations that carry mostly local broadcasting and only a mere few hours of actual NPR generated programing, or even NPR distributed programming. Recent trips from here through neighboring states made that very evident to me. Not all of the content that was political in nature was liberal. This was apparent in some of the less traveled parts of West Virginia, for example.
A tolerance for classical music was very helpful.
It's interesting to note that the most meaningful debacle concerning the CPB in recent years was a result of senior management making blatant efforts to skew the staff selection toward conservative sensibilities. CPB Chairman Ken Thomlinson had to resign in the face of evidence that he was means-testing on the basis of conservative credentials for such positions as President/CEO, as well as for the content of some programs, a violation of Federal statutory mandates for the CPB charter.
I wonder how outraged DeMint got about that particular failure of professional ethics?
