I think the funding for NPR should be massively increased. The big cities are well served and there are enough people to donate money. It's the small towns and rural areas that need non-commercial radio the most. NPR offers educational progamming, whether it's classical and jazz music or arts and literature talk shows or unbiased and in-depth news programming. With HD radio they can offer all three at once. But that's too expensive for rural areas without help.

What happens without government support is that only the cheapest, mass market radio is available to most of the country. That's what advertisers will pay the most for. Pop, country music, and hate-talk radio completely dominate.

We need a BBC here in America. But NPR is the closest thing we have and we need to support it more.

I work for a news organization, I'm not a part of NPR or PBS. Defunding NPR would be a bad thing. While NPR has enough support to go on w/o funding, local, rural stations would not be able to purchase the programs from NPR and this would be a bad thing for those communities.

NPR is seen as one of the most credible, respected and fair sources of news by those of us in the industry. NPR works really hard to ask the hard questions and show both sides of a story.

I do not support defunding NPR, but I do believe that NPR executives should seek to end it themselves.

Much as I would love to see the government devote itself to supporting news sources that aren't beholden to corporate interests, it's not their place. The news is fundamentally political. Facts have political implications, and if a fact bolsters one side or the other, it remains a fact, and reporting it has a political effect.

If there is still a market for such objective reporting, it will fund itself. It largely does already.

If there is no market for it, then it hardly matters what the government does; the nation is already lost. Might as well save the money, and if the handbasket reaches Hades a few weeks earlier because of it, it's still ending up in the same place.

I oppose defunding because I don't think that it's based in the argument I just gave. Rather, I think it's politically biased. The right wing's news sources are deliberately, obviously, and demonstrably biased, and willing to admit to it in many forums while maintaining a false claim to neutrality in others. This is not an attempt to achieve neutrality or to save money; it's an attempt to silence facts that contradict them. Cutting off funding would doom it.

Rather, they should seek to separate themselves from it, in a controlled fashion which is more likely to allow survival.

Look, everybody can point to idiotic behavior. The reasons that we don't eliminate institutions when the people running them engage in idiotic behavior is that a lot of times the idiots get other jobs or retire and better people take their place.

It should be defunded. Its not the business of the federal government, despite its intentions, to be funding the news industry. If its as valuable as everyone thinks it is then it will be fine as a private industry. Defunding from congress won't stop people from donating to it. Besides, all the claims of political neutrality from NPR are a joke. It leans left.