This morning, the U.S. Congress passed a $9 billion “recission” package of bills which will, among other things, cut $1 billion from the funding for PBS and NPR. The Editorial Board of the New York Times expressed dismay:

When the private sector doesn’t provide an important service, the government often steps in. That is why the framers established the U.S. Postal Service; they believed no one else would deliver the mail to the entire country. Many places in America, especially in rural communities, would not have a library without public funding. Police departments, the military, Medicare, Social Security and public education offer other examples.

“This Is Why America Needs Public Media,” June 16, 2025

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As a news writer in Canada, where most media are, unfortunately, government-funded, I found the New York Times‘s viewpoint profoundly misguided. Government-funded media are civil servants and, over time, it will show. For one thing, they can’t be honest critics of government.

Government is a huge part of civic life nowadays. To be proper critics, media must be financially independent. Otherwise, they have no place to stand that gives them a clear view.

For that clear view, they must depend on readers, viewers, and listeners, and the advertisers who want to reach the medium’s audience. They must need to inform that audience, mediating between their perspective and the perspective the medium’s journalists develop from surveying the events of the day.

When media are dependent on government, not audience, for survival, two things happen

First, they gradually become more and more out of touch — and public interest and public trust declines. Last year, Uri Berliner, a 25-year veteran of NPR (National Public Radio), talked about the decline at NPR in The Free Press:

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

“I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” April 9, 2024

Indeed. So politicians knew that defunding little-heeded NPR would not bring them much grief at election time. They can even credit themselves with a rare instance of keeping a promise to cut spending. That’s the risk any medium runs when public funding allows it to just be out of touch.

Second, they display much less interest in opposing censorship of various sorts. Thus journalist Barbara Kay, a veteran of the free speech wars in Canada, responded to the imminent cuts by wishing NPR a Happy Independence Day.

Kay isn’t being cruel. She is hinting at a fact: Government-funded media do not have a vested interest in opposing government censorship. They get their grants, whether or not they tell the public things that the government would rather they didn’t. And indies who do tell the public such things don’t seem like part of the Club.

I’ll have more to say about the rise in new censorship laws in Canada in a later post. For now, let me quote another media veteran, Peter Menzies. Menzies, past publisher of the Calgary Herald, was interviewed recently by Kris Sims on the Candace Malcolm Show:,

Here’s part of what he had to say about publicly funded media and Cancel Culture:

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Peter Menzies I think that the real issue has been this sort of [9:02] decline in the willingness to stand up for freedom of speech at all costs.

I mean, we’re just emerging right now from a Cancel Culture era. And what shocked me about it was that, instead of media standing up for people’s right to speak and that sort of stuff … they went along with it. And that really, I thought, set a bad sort of example for where we might be going [9:55] when you see the media — being the ones who depend the most upon freedom of speech — were willing to get pretty mushy about it. …

Peter Menzies: There was a time, not that long ago … when no publisher [18:58] — out of their own sense of self-respect — would ever link themselves to government with money, right? I mean, after the Kent Commission in the 1980s, the government proposed a whole bunch of things. The industry stood up on its hind legs, snarled, and said, “Get thee away, Satan.” Right? Stay away! We would never compromise our independence like that!

But along came the internet and, as Elon Musk would put it, tens of thousands of people online became the media.

Peter Menzies: I’m not going to accuse them [the Canadian media] of pay for play because there’s plenty of [19:35] evidence of some journalists still doing some good work. The fact of the matter is though, you’re going to have a tough time convincing the public of that. And that’s that’s the core reason for it. Once you build an association or a codependence like that, you’re going to lose public trust. Of course, they’re just not going to believe you.

Indeed, Canadians display little trust in media today.

Some will respond by pointing to American media, the playthings of billionaires, that behave similarly in enabling Cancel Culture. Very well. But no taxpayer is compelled by law to subsidize them, which is the injustice many now face in Canada.

Next: The government of Canada is determined to control the internet