[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 3]
[House]
[Page 3947]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          PUBLIC BROADCASTING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, this morning thousands of people on 
Capitol Hill turned to NPR radio or the NPR Web site to find out the 
latest developments on the horrific situation in Japan, the potential 
nuclear meltdown, and with the fast-moving events in the Middle East. 
This is why the Pew survey revealed yesterday that, while media across 
the board is declining--broadcast television news, newspapers, radio--
that we are watching a renaissance as far as public broadcasting, in 
particular NPR, which is increasing its audience, its revenues, and its 
reporting staff.
  But the health and vitality of NPR is not a reason to slash the 
financial support for public broadcasting. First and foremost, it is a 
miniscule part of the budget, less than one half a cent per day for 
each American. But more important, this is the type of infrastructure 
America needs right now.
  The public broadcasting support provides a unique service that is not 
available on commercial television. The education, culture, news, even 
the boring news, is an area where there is no commercial market. That 
is why you will search 500 stations in vain on cable and satellite to 
find that type of programming that is available for news and for 
educating our children, not selling them something.

                              {time}  1020

  More significant, the amount of money that comes from Public 
Broadcasting to NPR is a tiny fraction of its budget. Most of the 
Public Broadcasting support that is provided by Congress goes to local 
stations, with particular emphasis on rural and small-town America.
  Taking as an example my home State of Oregon with its awarding-
winning Oregon Public Broadcasting, it costs 11 times more to broadcast 
to the far eastern reaches in Burns, Oregon, than it does in 
metropolitan Portland. That is a pattern that is repeated coast to 
coast. Rural and small-town America relies more heavily on Public 
Broadcasting. It doesn't have the population base to ever provide for 
itself.
  Slashing Public Broadcasting funding is not going to stop Public 
Broadcasting in New York or Washington, DC., in Seattle or Los Angeles, 
or even Portland, Oregon. What it will do is make the programming less 
rich, and it will reduce the ability to provide those services in the 
outlying areas.
  Even the most recent flap about the media ambush of a former NPR 
fundraiser, which produced an 11-minute video that appeared to be very 
damning as far as Public Broadcasting is concerned, well, it took NPR 
to do an in-depth study. It reviewed the entire 2-hour conversation 
captured on tape to find out that the edited 11-minute version was 
misleading, trying to portray the point of view of the ambush 
journalist. This is the same guy who was caught by law enforcement 
officials trying to illegally ``bug'' the office of Senator Mary 
Landrieu in Louisiana.
  In the course of 2 hours, it was very clear, reviewing the entire 
record, that it had been inappropriately edited to suggest that there 
was an acceptance or that it was amusing that there was somehow an 
attempt to impose sharia law across the country. It ignored the fact 
that the NPR employee made it clear that there was a firewall between 
any contributions and influencing the editorial content.
  That is why NPR and PBS are the most trusted names in broadcasting, 
and why 78 percent of Americans in a recent poll said they wanted 
Public Broadcasting support maintained or even increased. And, indeed, 
two-thirds of the Republicans wanted support maintained and increased. 
I hope my Republican colleagues will listen to the public and support 
this vital resource.

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