Npr Girds To Fight For Funds Public Radio Official Seems Resigned To Budget Cuts

For the past 100 days or so, National Public Radio’s Bill Buzenberg has had a front-row seat to the most serious attack on publicly-funded broadcasting since it started in 1967.

It’s been a white-knuckled experience, but his voice still holds the calm tone of his awardwinning dispatches from Latin America and elsewhere.

Call it a tone of resignation.

“There seems to be a determination to end federal funding for public broadcasting, now or over a certain period of time, by the leadership of the House,” Buzenberg, NPR’s vice president for news, said Tuesday. “That’s pretty clear. We’ve got to deal with that reality.”

The question now, he said before delivering an address at Washington State University, is whether Congress will give public broadcasting enough time to become financially independent.

There’s the gentle “glide path” plan, which he said would take about seven years of continued federal funding. Then there’s the approach advocated by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has criticized NPR as a biased toy of rich elitists. Gingrich would have public broadcasting “zeroed out” in two years.

Buzenberg calls this “falling off a cliff.”

He also calls it wasteful government spending, given the operation’s current efficiency. For each $1 of federal money - and Americans actually pay an average of 29 cents a year for NPR public broadcasting brings in $5 of private money, he said.

It would also jeopardize a form of broadcast journalism based not on commerce but on public service, he told students and faculty in the Compton Union Building auditorium.

“The purpose will no longer be to educate,” he said, “but to sell products.”

For now, the House has voted to cut the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting 15 percent in 1996 and another 30 percent in 1997. The Senate proposes freezing the $285 million CPB budget at current levels, which would amount to a lesser, 9 percent cut each year from what had been budgeted earlier.

One-fourth of the CPB budget goes to public radio stations, which in turn pay for two-third’s of National Public Radio’s budget by buying its programming.

U.S. Rep. George Nethercutt and the rest of the House appropriations subcommittee has asked CPB to see that rural stations, who rely more on federal funding, be spared the deeper cuts.

“You’re at a time right now where we’ve got to take a look at everything and everything is going to have to take a cut here or there,” said Ken Lisaius, Nethercutt’s spokesman.

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat, last week called CPB “a true public service” used by almost every American and asked on the Senate floor that it not be cut at all.

The matter will be hashed out by a joint conference committee when Congress reconvenes next month.

Buzenberg and his wife, freelance editor Susan Brooks Buzenberg, were on campus as co-chairs of WSU’s Richard S. Salant Visiting Professorship.