Dump NPR!

DUMP NPR (National Propaganda Radio)

Recently we, along with many other Americans, were subjected to another fund raising fiasco hosted by Americas great experiment in publicly funded propaganda, a.k.a. National Public Radio. We confess that, yet again, we did not call in and pay our fair share, as one announcer put it.

We dont know about you, but were pretty tired of being told by a liberal D.J. that his job depends on our contributionas if NPR was a charity of sorts. We are told repeatedly that our local NPR stations exists on public contributions. This statement is, of course, correct. NPR does exist on public contributionsmuch like the government exists on public contributions. We call them taxes, and if we choose not to contribute, or if the government believes our donation is a little lean, we could have all our assets frozen and spend some time in jail with other volunteers.

We are supposed to feel good about our giving, we are told, because public radio offers programs that no private radio station would air. Well, yes, precisely! No businessman in his right mind would waste expensive airtime letting some know-nothing writer living on a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts expound for half an hour on the effects of growing up gay in a Catholic neighborhood in New York; or listen to some obscure garage band mix Bluegrass music with Gregorian chants.

There are a lot of people like us, who really dont care about the plight of women artists in Muslim countries; or a student-led gun buy-back program in Los Angeles; or the latest babbling coming from the tree-hugger lobby; or the incessantly boring political commentaries from liberal beltway elitists with big mouths and even bigger egos.

Public radio is a public nuisance. It essentially allows every reject of the free market to have his or her own soapbox at the competitors expense through taxation. Sure, there are the occasional nuggets of truth and beauty, but our ears must endure hours of cruel and unusual punishment for the momentary respite. The dizziest spin doctors, the most obscure experts, and the lunatic fringe of the Marxist Left all have their pulpit on NPR.

We, the undersigned, desire to make Public Radio just that 100 percent publicly supported without compulsion. Please support the current effort in Congress to phase out funding for National Public (sic) Radio.