Picking up my review of Project 2025, we’ve reached Chapter 8: Media Agencies (pp 235-251, including endnotes).
The U.S. Agency for Global Media manages Voice of America and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, plus grant funding for a number of other organizations, including Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia. In the first DJT administration, his appointee for USAGM undertook some reforms which were then reversed by Biden. This chapter claims that a Firewall Regulation put in place right before DJT’s appointee was confirmed allows too much journalistic freedom (pp. 235-240) and basically considers the whole agency useless.
But, as with other chapters, what we get are proposed reforms (with a lot of hyperventilating about how the agency in its current form is a security threat) instead of the more honest position: zero it out.
After ranting, the discussion identifies the relevant government entities (pp 243-245) specifically the White House, State Department, and Congress, plus “key nongovernmental stakeholders,” who I guess they think should all work together to fix this?
Frankly, they should come right out and say: shut this one down. And I would not disagree. Various government messages are getting out to the world whether we want them to or not; we shouldn’t have to pay for them twice.
Next comes the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), and in this case they do come right out and say: shut this one down. The budget-balancing part of me wants to agree, except they also come right out and say “public broadcasting immediately became a liberal forum for public affairs and journalism. … government should not be compelling the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views (p. 246).”
Which annoys me. Airing cultural and educational programming free of cost doesn’t suppress anything.
But it does cost something. So what progressives need to ask ourselves is: are PBS and NPR essential services that only the federal government should provide which thus should be funded by tax dollars.
And the honest answer is: no.
It’s a trivial amount of money (in this trillion-dollar context), but we have to cut somewhere, and the fact is that diverse cultural and educational programming is everywhere now. Is this the hill we should die on? If we sacrifice this one to the efficiency czars, we pull the rug out from under the anti-diversity faction, and a chronic source of budgeting fights with it.
Defunding the CPB is discussed on p. 247, with some nastiness about how you can’t call yourself a noncommercial educational station if you push a specific agenda (i.e. the liberal one).
I would love to get into how you shouldn’t call yourself a nonprofit religious institution if your preacher is a multi-millionaire, or how government shouldn’t have compelled me to pay for a colossally stupid and ultimately pointless 20-year war in Afghanistan, but I’m trying to stay on track.
A short chapter. What a relief, eh?