In his column today (Nov. 11), Washington Post columnist George Will says that “NPR’s self-immolation” in firing Juan Williams for his public comments on Muslims is “icing on conservatism’s 2010 cake.”
He goes on: “From its inception in 1967, as a filigree on Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which in 1970 begat NPR, has been a solution in search of a problem. Forty-three years later, in the context of today’s information cornucopia, ‘public’ broadcasting — its advocates flinch from candidly calling it government broadcasting — is even sillier than would be a Corporation for Public Newspapers.”
“But in 2010,” Will added, “NPR became useful. It became a conservative answer to the liberals’ challenge, ‘Where precisely would you begin cutting government?'”
And so, we will cut a fraction of a fraction of a percent from the public budget while at the same time amping up the budgets for our fiascoes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Now that’s what I call fiscal responsibility.
It’s not an either-or situation. You can cut funding to NPR while also looking at other funding cuts. No one said to stop there. But it’s a great place to start.