According to a nytimes.com story, Republicans in the House tried to advance the defunding measure as part of their “YouCut” initiative, which allows the public to vote on which spending cuts the G.O.P. should pursue. But their push was blocked, 239 to 171, with only three Democrats voting with a united bloc of Republicans.
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EARLIER STORY...
Proposal to Defund NPR Wins GOP Anti-Government Spending Contest
A story at Foxnews.com reports, the winning proposal in this week's online contest, in which Americans vote for the items they want slashed from the federal budget, was to terminate federal funding to NPR. That proposal received 63 percent of the vote, the highest percentage for a proposal since the program began in May.
House Republicans will bring that proposal to the floor Thursday for an up-or-down vote.
"When NPR executives made the decision to unfairly terminate Juan Williams and to then disparage him afterwards, the bias of their organization was exposed," House Minority Whip Eric Cantor and Doug Lamborn, who authored a bill this year to defund NPR's parent company, said in a joint statement.
"Make no mistake, it is not the role of government to tell news organizations how to operate. What is avoidable, however, is providing taxpayer funds to news organizations that promote a partisan point of view," they said.
"Eliminating taxpayer funding for NPR is precisely the kind of commonsense cut that we have to begin making it we want to fundamentally alter the way business is conducted in Washington," they said.With Democrats still in charge of the House until the end of the year, the proposal is certain to fail. Lamborn's legislation to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) , introduced in June, hasn't made it out of committee.
But when Republicans assume power in January, they are expected to go after NPR's federal funding with a vengeance.
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My opinion is that NPR and BBC are the only news services that deliver news in an intelligent and thoughtful manner. Other networks are slanted towards a political agenda, either on the left or right (e.j. MSNBC and Fox News). NPR really is "fair and balanced", because they have to be, or else face criticism by the right (of course that doesn't stop them anyway). Firing Williams was a dumb move, but that doesn't take away from the quality of the service, because they aren't beholden to special corporate interests, via advertising. That's probably why some politicians don't like it. They prefer the populace avoid critically thinking at all costs and just be good, docile "sheeple". How about we instead cut our humongous defense budget instead of picking on NPR?
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