Although the federal government should be cutting costs wherever possible and eliminating any unnecessary spending, the reality is that federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and NPR isn’t key to the nation’s fiscal problems. The CPB received about $450 million from the federal government last time around, a small amount of which went to NPR. Now, $450 million matters a lot for an individual media company, but it is insignificant for the federal government. 

The problem with NPR isn’t that it’s a bad use of public funding. It’s that getting involved in broadcasting is not a legitimate government function. As is often the case, the underlying disagreements concern the proper role of government. 

The CPB website, as it turns out, provides a helpful visual aid for understanding its own view of the government’s role in the media: 

Yes, the plant is growing from money instead of soil.