State-funded media and the nature of ‘truth’

President Trump has repeated his call to defund PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) and NPR (National Public Radio).

Under the First Amendment, PBS and NPR certainly have the right to free expression, but must the American taxpayers be forced to fund them? From a Christian and conservative perspective, they are heavily biased broadcasters.

When the issue came up two months ago, Congress held a hearing with Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR. Ohio Republican Rep. James Jordan asked if NPR was biased, and she responded: “I have never seen any political bias.”

But Jordan countered: “In the D.C. area, editorial positions at NPR have 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans.” He gave an example where one of those 87 Democrat editors said of the Hunter Biden laptop story: “We don’t want to waste our readers and listeners’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

Defenders of PBS and NPR, such as MSNBC, claim that “Trump’s attempt to defund NPR and PBS is straight out of the authoritarian playbook.”

In an op-ed for The Hill, Jonathan Turley writes of “The Cost of Arrogance: NPR’s undoing is a cautionary tale for the media.”

The Media Research Center (MRC) – no fan of NPR and PBS – reports, “This media dinosaur [NPR] has recently hired a horde of new lobbyists who are now scurrying across Capitol Hill to justify its hold on $1.1 billion in taxpayer subsidies.”

Must we the taxpayers be forced to pay for speech with which we disagree? During the classic debate over federal funding of the arts around 35 years ago, I interviewed the late North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C. He told me, it’s one thing to scribble naughty words on the public bathroom wall – but don’t make me have to provide you with the crayon to do it.

What’s fascinating about NPR’s Katherine Maher is that she has a decidedly squishy view of truth.

In a 2022 TED talk, she observed: “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done. … That is not to say that the truth doesn’t exist or to say that the truth isn’t important. Clearly the search for the truth has led us to do great things … [but] one reason we have such glorious chronicles to the human experience and all forms of culture is because we acknowledge there are many different truths.”

She added what’s true for you might not be what’s true for the person sitting next to you.

This reminds me of what many of us heard last month in the Good Friday account in the Gospel of John, when Jesus was standing before Pontius Pilate, and the Defendant referenced “the truth.” And the Roman procurator asked a famous question to Christ – not realizing he was speaking to Truth Incarnate. “What is truth?” sneered Pilate.

Does truth exist? Yes, said the founders of America in our Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” If there is no truth, we have no rights.

In the book, “Lord of All,” which I co-wrote with the late D. James Kennedy, we included an interaction he had with the late ABC anchor Peter Jennings – who was promoting a 2004 documentary he hosted on Jesus and Paul. Dr. Kennedy had been quite critical of Jennings for his 2000 special on Jesus that relied almost entirely on radically liberal Jesus scholars.

Peter Jennings said, “I’m looking for as many opinions and ideas and reference in all this regard as I can. Your truth I fully wholeheartedly accept. But it’s not everybody’s truth and you know that.”

D. James Kennedy: “Well, of course I believe that there are such things as absolutes and that there is an absolute truth, and the fact that it was true before I ever believed it – and I was almost 25 years old before I ever believed. But when I was 22, it was still true and I didn’t believe it. … I did not believe Christ rose from the dead … and [now]I do believe that Christ rose from the dead, and nothing changed except me.”

The Founding Fathers believed in truth, in free speech and in robust debate. Freedom of speech and of the press are enshrined in our First Amendment. In his famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech, founder Patrick Henry spoke of the importance of “the freedom of the debate,” noting, “It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country.”

But that didn’t mean the government had to pay for that debate – on either side.