Secular Right

To anyone who relishes empirical verification, the belated Wisconsin union votes are particularly satisfying–not so much on their substance, however welcome that is, but because they create a very clean test: What really does the public think about government unions?  The MSM has been furiously cranking out polls over the last three weeks claiming that the public opposes efforts to cut back on collective bargaining rights and benefits for public employee unions.  If that is in fact the public’s view, it is deeply misinformed about the risk of government employer abuse against government workers in this age of lawsuit frenzy and a victim-hungry press.  But it would be good to find out the degree of the public’s cluelessness, if it exists.

 Fortunately, Walker’s bill was watered down hardly at all.  So let the recall battles begin.  Yes, Wisconsin has a strong left-wing union tradition, which may not make it completely representative of the country, but it also has a strong conservative streak as well—a bit like California’s schizophrenia.  If Wisconsin’s Republicans, including Walker, are swept out of power because of this vote, they will have gone down for a superb cause.  And they will have illustrated how much of a bubble conservatives are in, for whom the grotesque inequities between public and private sector pensions and benefits are patent.  They will also have shown how effective liberal propaganda on behalf of unions has been.  (See, for example, the New York Times’s hilarious pretend effort to determine whether public sector workers are overpaid that neglected to include pensions and benefits in the calculation.) 

This coming empirical test may be a harbinger of the likelihood of significant cuts to entitlements.  I would have thought that it would have been much easier to cut public employee benefits, since they are a finite special interest group, however powerful, than it would be to cut population-wide entitlements.  If it proves impossible even to cut back on government workers’ fat benefits packages, things don’t look good for broader entitlement cuts.

I take it as a given that NPR’s feature reporting and programs like On the Media are pervaded with liberal bias.  NPR will cover every cop shooting if any fringe element in a community claims racial bias by the cops, however preposterously.  It will never cover the racial reality of crime on the streets and the positive effect of proactive policing on law-abiding, inner-city residents.  It will cover claims of government heartlessness towards the “homeless,” and never cover the costs of government programs for the homeless that the homeless refuse to use or the effect of uncontrolled vagrancy on neighborhood vitality.  Rising child poverty?  Love the story.  All-important role of single-parenthood in child poverty?  Sorry, not interested.  Alleged gender pay gap, civil rights urgency and benefits of gay marriage, need for more self-esteem programs for girls? Frequent NPR topics.  Society-wide discrimination in favor of women and girls, the role of marriage in affirming the obligations of biological parents to their children?  Non-existent topics. 

I also am indifferent to the possible loss of federal funding for NPR, now that NPR has decimated its classical music programming starting well over a decade ago.  And I am happy to see NPR CEO Vivian Schiller go after watching her haughty, entitled refusal to speak about the Juan Williams firing at the National Press Club on Monday (not that the sycophantish National Press Club host pressed her to address the topic after her initial condescending refusal to go into it). 

But I fail to see the relevance of an NPR employee’s off-air criticism of the Tea Party to the question of NPR’s federal funding or its liberal bias.  Conservatives can easily prove liberal bias by analyzing the content of the programming.  And it is in that arena alone that liberal bias matters.  Does anyone really think that no NPR employee finds the Tea Party racist, or, equally importantly, that no NPR employee should find the Tea Party racist?  The public is not entitled to a particular political belief system among the recipients of tax payer dollars, just to the scrupulously fair airing of all views.  CSPAN’s hosts for Washington Journal are impeccably even-handed in their questioning of liberal and conservative guests.  Despite the regular, predictable, and paranoid ranting of conservative callers accusing CSPAN of stiffing conservative entities and individuals, CSPAN is absolutely balanced in its coverage of political viewpoints.  But it could well be that some of its hosts believe that the Tea Party is racist, or that Obama is a socialist.  Who cares?  In believing so, they would merely reflect positions that are present in the public. 

Conservatives should make their case against NPR based on objective evidence of programming decisions.  If they can’t do so, what one employee says in a semi-private conversation is of no import.    The only question relevant to public support of a media or any other institution is what the recipients of those funds do in performing their public duties.  What they believe is irrelevant.  It should be possible to act objectively and fairly regardless of one’s political position—at least we should act as if that were possible.  But to exploit this recent ambush suggests otherwise.