For decades, conservatives have argued to cut funding for “public broadcasting” in the US,but never got around to actually accomplishing much. At times, the effort to defund the Center for Public Broadcasting along with NPR and PBS reminded one of a wry observation often misattributed to Mark Twain about the weather: Everybody talks about it, but nobody seems to do anything about it.
However, the times, they are a-changing, as Bob Dylan (definitely) sang. The New York Times reports today that the FCC’s new chair is opening an investigation as to whether NPR and PBS corporate affiliations violate the non-profit status of public broadcasting, with an eye toward generating a legislative response in Congress.
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has waded into the politicized debate over NPR and PBS, ordering up an investigation that he said…
