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The Senate is debating whether to claw back more than a billion dollars in federal funds for public media. Republicans have accused NPR and PBS of liberal bias. For some member stations, especially in rural areas, the cuts could be devastating. But NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik spoke with someone who opposes government subsidies of public broadcasting altogether. His name is Jeffrey Miron, and he's vice president for research at the libertarian Cato Institute. Here's David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Thanks. And just a note, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this interview before it's broadcast. All right, so let's dive right in. In a nutshell, what's the case against taxpayers helping to subsidize public media?
JEFFREY MIRON: Economists start from a presumption that government doesn't intervene to subsidize or help any particular industry or firm unless there's an obvious market failure, some reason that something really valuable is not being provided. That case doesn't seem to apply for public media. It's been extremely successful, and the federal funding is a very small part of that.
Second issue is, if the government funds something - setting aside the first point - the government is going to think it has control, and that control is going to sometimes be used in ways that people will be very unhappy about, from one side or the other. And to me, that's a very undesirable consequence of having government funding for the media.
FOLKENFLIK: So let's break that down a little bit. We are right now seeing news deserts sprout up all over the nation, where news outlets are withering or shutting down. There's a study released this month from Muck Rack - found that the number of journalists nationally has dropped by 75% since 2002. Why isn't there a market failure in journalism, which, at least ostensibly, is a public good?
MIRON: Calling it a public good, it has a very specific meaning in economics lingo. It means that there's a failure to provide something for which there would be lots of demand, but nobody is willing to supply. Whereas what I think we're observing for public radio stations is the density population in some places is just too small, and that's a consequence of living in a place that has a very sparse population. There are positive things about living in those places and negative things. We don't worry that there are, say, McDonald (ph) deserts because some towns are too small to support a McDonald's. It is not an inefficiency overall in the way resources are being allocated.
FOLKENFLIK: Take it for what it's worth. I've been a journalist my entire life, but my sense is that news coverage is important to the functioning of democracy. What I'm hearing from you is it's better for democracy for public dollars not to be involved in journalism. And yet, that comes with the knowledge and cost of many parts of the country essentially not having local news coverage of events that matter to communities around the country.
MIRON: With cellphones and internet and all that, I think the ability of people almost any part of the country to access all kinds of information sources is, you know, greater than it's ever been. And if anything, there's just such an inundation of information, it's kind of hard to pay attention to it all.
FOLKENFLIK: So Jeff, let's turn to your other concern, the question of bias. Many congressional Republicans argue there's partisan bias favoring Democrats, though NPR and PBS executives reject that. They say their networks strive for fairness. Our team here unsuccessfully invited a dozen GOP lawmakers to join us to make that case in this conversation. To what degree do you share their concern of bias by these networks and by public broadcasting more broadly?
MIRON: Every company, every individual, every organization has some point of view. There isn't any obvious or easy, right or wrong, neutral position on all these sort of complicated and difficult issues. What bothers me and I think that the reason for concern is the perception that something like NPR has a particular perspective leads to frustration on the part of people who don't necessarily or don't always share that perspective and to backlash in polarization.
Do I think that NPR tends to lean left? I do. And lots of my friends and family who are not Republican or not conservative tend to agree with that. That in and of itself is not the issue. The issue is the taxpayer funding. We just want to let the marketplace for ideas determine what gets out there, what's produced and what people have access to listen to.
FOLKENFLIK: I've been speaking with Jeffrey Miron. He's vice president for research at the Cato Institute. Jeff, thanks.
MIRON: My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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