No, Public TV Isn’t a Constitutional Right

When Jonathan Capehart says “the government should not interfere with” reporting, he’s right — but he should have stopped there.

During a recent appearance on PBS, Washington Post editor Jonathan Capehart criticized the Trump administration’s recent directive instructing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to “cease federal funding for NPR and PBS.”

Capehart called the move “a fundamental attack on our Constitution” and claimed it threatened the very foundation of the United States.

“People need to understand and remember there is only one profession that is protected in the Constitution, and it is the free press,” he said. “The government should not interfere with that reporting.”

Capehart’s assertion went unchallenged, which is unfortunate, as it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment, individual rights, and the U.S. Constitution.

While the First Amendment guarantees a free press, stating, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” it says nothing about funding media operations.

In fact, federal funding for media didn’t even exist for nearly the first 200 years of the nation’s history. Not until the 1960s did such funding of public media begin, following passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, a law President Lyndon B. Johnson signed during the height of the Vietnam War, when his approval ratings had sunk to 38%.

There’s no evidence LBJ intended to use public media to save his floundering presidency, but it was already a well-established strategy for authoritarians. Indeed, one of the earliest adopters of public media was Benito Mussolini, who created the Italian Institute for Radio Broadcasting in the 1920s to spread fascism, promote nationalism, and glorify his leadership.

Il Duce was not alone in his affinity for public media. In Weimar Germany, the “Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft” was founded in 1925 as an “independent” public media entity, but in the 1930s it fell under the sway of Joseph Goebbels, who used it to spread Nazi propaganda. In Argentina during the 1950s, Juan Peron utilized state-controlled channels such as Radio Belgrano and Canal 7 (the country’s first state-run TV channel) to shape public opinion and consolidate his power.

There’s an obvious reason many dictators supported public media: It let them control the message and influence the masses. This brings me back to Capehart.

America’s Founding Fathers created a Constitution that enumerated the powers of the federal government. These powers included coining money, maintaining a military, conducting foreign affairs, making treaties, establishing post offices, and creating naturalization laws.

The framers of the Constitution created a government limited in scope. Anyone who’s read the Bill of Rights knows it lists things the federal government cannot do to you, not what the government must provide for you. The father of the Constitution made this clear.

“The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like state governments, whose powers are more general,” James Madison pointed out in a 1794 speech before the House of Representatives. “Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”

Madison said these things not because he frowned on charity but because he recognized that charity was not the province of the federal government. The same can be said of government funding media operations.

In their wisdom, the framers crafted a Constitution that limited federal power and built a complex system of checks and balances to restrain centralized authority. As historian Gordon S. Wood explains in The Creation of the American Republic: 1776–1787, the design was intentional, an explicit bulwark against the rise of autocratic rule.

The constitutional experiment worked. For nearly a quarter of a millennium, the United States has not fallen into the clutches of a Hitler, Peron, or Mussolini. The Constitution deserves a great deal of credit for this, and critics who claim the document is being undermined by cutting off funding for public media are turning the document on its head.

When Capehart says “the government should not interfere with” reporting, he’s right. But this means the government should allow the press to operate freely, not that the federal government has an obligation to subsidize the press. To confuse the two is a grave error in basic civics and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of negative and positive rights, something my 13-year-old daughter can grasp.

People can disagree in good faith on whether the government should be spending taxpayer dollars on media. But claims that defunding public media is an attack on the Constitution are false. To the contrary, defunding government media is one small step toward restoring the Constitution to its original purpose.

This article originally appeared on The Washington Examiner.