NPR & PBS Have Received Billions of Taxpayer Dollars: Bill to Defund Introduced in Senate by DeMint & Coburn
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on March 5, 2011
As Sen. Barbara Boxer hides behind her furry Elmo doll and public broadcasting executives receive outrageous salaries, Senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn submitted a bill in the Senate this week to defund NPR and PBS… reported by The Hill:
Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) introduced a bill Friday to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which doles out federal funds to radio and television stations.
DeMint said it “should be an easy decision” to halt taxpayer money for public broadcasting while the nation is “on the edge of bankruptcy.”
He pointed out that the bipartisan debt commission convened by President Obama suggested ending the subsidies.
The pair focused on NPR and PBS, two major recipients of public media dollars — particularly on the salaries of media execs at both outlets, including the nearly $1 million a “Sesame Street” president takes home each year.
“Americans struggling to make ends meet shouldn’t be forced to fund public broadcasting when there are already thousands of choices for educational and entertainment programming on the television, radio and Web,” DeMint said.
The federal government issued about $420 million last year for public media. Obama’s recent budget request included $451 million for this purpose. The total over the last decade is about $4 billion, according to Coburn and DeMint.
PBS and NPR both receive a mix of federal and corporate funds. NPR gets 2 percent of its funding from federal subsidies, while PBS gets about 15 percent, according to the senators.
The outlets “will do just fine without largess from Washington,” Coburn said.
The senators pointed to the popularity of the outlets to say they don’t need taxpayer money.
Proposals to defund public media, which are not unusual around budget time, have already provoked strong pushback from Democrats in both chambers.
PBS executives earn millions... on the taxpayer's dime
From P.J. Salvadore at Big Journalism, DeMint, Coburn Introduce Bill to Defund NPR and PBS:
Today, U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a member of the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), and U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-Oklahoma) introduced legislation to stop taxpayer subsidies to public radio and television. CPB-funded television and radio programs are distributed through National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Since 2001, CPB has received nearly $4 billion in taxpayer money.
“Our nation is on the edge of bankruptcy and Congress must make some tough choices to rein in spending, but ending taxpayer subsidies of public broadcasting should be an easy decision,” said Sen. DeMint. “Americans struggling to make ends meet shouldn’t be forced to fund public broadcasting when there are already thousands of choices for educational and entertainment programming on the television, radio and web. President Obama’s own bipartisan debt commission proposed ending these unnecessary subsidies to public broadcasting. NPR boasts that it only gets 2 percent of its funding from taxpayers and PBS gets about 15 percent, so these programs should be able to find a way to stand on their own.”
“Politicians in Washington should focus their attention on eliminating the more than $200 billion in duplicative spending GAO highlighted this week and stop defending indefensible subsidies for public broadcasting,” said Dr. Coburn. “The federal government has no business picking winners and losers in today’s highly competitive media environment. NPR and CPB will do just fine without largesse from Washington.”
CPB was incorporated as a private nonprofit corporation under the authority of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, and its first taxpayer subsidy in 1969 was $5 million. Today, CPB is slated to receive $430 million from taxpayers in the current fiscal year and President Obama recently asked for an increase to $451 million.
According to the 2009 tax forms all nonprofits are required to file (990), PBS President Paula Kerger received $632,233 in compensation that year while NPR President Emeritus, Kevin Klose, received more than $1.2 million in compensation. The PBS program Sesame Street’s Sesame Workshop President and CEO Gary Knell received $956,513 — nearly a million dollars — in compensation in 2008. And, from 2003 to 2006, “Sesame Street” made more than $211 million from toy and consumer product sales.
Sen. DeMint wrote this piece for the Wall Street Journal, Public Broadcasting Should Go Private:
When presidents of government-funded broadcasting are making more than the president of the United States, it’s time to get the government out of public broadcasting.
While executives at the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) are raking in massive salaries, the organizations are participating in an aggressive lobbying effort to prevent Congress from saving hundreds of millions of dollars each year by cutting their subsidies. The so-called commercial free public airwaves have been filled with pleas for taxpayer cash. The Association of Public Television Stations has hired lobbyists to fight the cuts. Hundreds of taxpayer-supported TV, radio and Web outlets have partnered with an advocacy campaign to facilitate emails and phone calls to Capitol Hill for the purpose of telling members of Congress, “Public broadcasting funding is too important to eliminate!”
PBS President Paula Kerger even recorded a personal television appeal that told viewers exactly how to contact members of Congress in order to “let your representative know how you feel about the elimination of funding for public broadcasting.” But if PBS can pay Ms. Kerger $632,233 in annual compensation—as reported on the 990 tax forms all nonprofits are required to file—surely it can operate without tax dollars.
The executives at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which distributes the taxpayer money allocated for public broadcasting to other stations, are also generously compensated. According to CPB’s 2009 tax forms, President and CEO Patricia de Stacy Harrison received $298,884 in reportable compensation and another $70,630 in other compensation from the organization and related organizations that year. That’s practically a pittance compared to Kevin Klose, president emeritus of NPR, who received more than $1.2 million in compensation, according to the tax forms the nonprofit filed in 2009.
Today’s media landscape is a thriving one with few barriers to entry and many competitors, unlike when CPB was created in 1967. In 2011, Americans have thousands of news, entertainment and educational programs to choose from that are available on countless television, radio and Web outlets.
[...]
Taxpayer-subsidized broadcasting doesn’t only make money from licensing and product sales. It also raises plenty of outside cash.
Last year, for example, the Open Society Foundation, backed by liberal financier George Soros, gave NPR $1.8 million to help support the latter’s plan to hire an additional 100 reporters. When NPR receives million-dollar gifts from Mr. Soros, it is an insult to taxpayers when other organizations, such as MoveOn.org demand that Congress “save NPR and PBS” by guaranteeing “permanent funding and independence from partisan meddling,” as the liberal interest group did last month. It was even more insulting when PBS posted a message on Twitter thanking MoveOn.org—the group that once labeled Gen. David Petraeus as “General Betray Us”—for the help.
The best way to stop the “partisan meddling” in public broadcasting that MoveOn.org complains about is by ending the taxpayers’ obligation to pay for it. The politics will be out of public broadcasting as soon as the government gets out of the business of paying for it.
Public broadcasting can pay its presidents half-million and million dollar salaries. Its children’s programs are making hundreds of millions in sales. Liberal financiers are willing to write million-dollar checks to help these organizations. There’s no reason taxpayers need to subsidize them anymore.
About the author
the bbc, who has a $5,000,000,000 (thats right 2.5billion pounds) prison-enforced licence fee, from ”every person in britain, who owns a tv set,” pays its own clowns and global-warming pro-anything ‘not english’, yes, we know more about africa,india,pakistan,and all the other 3rd world countries, than we do about america or scandanavia, or germany or france, and it , in fact this overbloated corporation is vehemently anti-english and anti-american.
they worshipped at the feet of your ethnic mesiah in the whitehouse, when he was elected, now there are no reports of the enormous mess that the socialists have and are making in america.
and it pays it chairman, 3 times more than the prime minister gets,
its ‘feather-bedding” employees have better wages and conditions than the ‘private-sector’ tv channels,
so!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i don’t think you americans are ‘hard done by’ in comparison.
the late great william buckley, summed it up, when he said, that 85% of ‘media-people’ in the western world are ‘left of center, liberal or socialist
does that sound right to you