A POLITE AND CULTURED FAN OF NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO WRITES:

Don’t be a dope. NPR is public radio because it’s supported by its LISTENERS, who presumably value Diane Rehm over Rush Limbaugh. The taxpayer-dollar support of public radio (CPR) is down to pennies, as we’re reminded constantly during pledge week.

I’m sure, in our lifetimes, we’ll see those pennies reduced to nothing, and will you be happy then? After all, I patronize lots of businesses that advertise on our loathsome talk-radio station, so I guess part of my money goes to subsidize the morning-drive guy who thinks it’s hilarious to make jokes calling a Hispanic and a Jew “a taco and a bagel.” My feeling is, it’s not worth getting upset about; it all comes out in the wash.

So what if Diane Rehm supports gun control? She had you on her show, and I’ll bet she was a damn sight more polite to you than Bill O’Reilly is to the guests he disagrees with.

Hmm. Where to start? NPR was called “public radio” long before its listeners started shelling out. It’s now listener-financed to a large degree because it’s sufficiently unpopular with taxpayers that it has to turn for support to the niche market that it actually appeals to. Nothing wrong with that, but nothing “public” about it either.

As for Rehm and O’Reilly: It’s OK for Rehm to support gun control — it’s just dishonest for her to deny that she’s a liberal. That’s like Rush Limbaugh saying he’s not a conservative. And on the politeness front, Rehm was more polite than O’Reilly is to people he disagrees with — heck she was more polite than he was with me when I was on his show and I think he agreed with what I was saying, though it’s hard to be sure because I could barely get a word in edgewise.

In truth, though, I’ve seen O’Reilly be awfully polite to people he disagrees with, so that’s probably a cheap shot. He’s not rude — he just can’t keep quiet. It’s also a bit lame to conflate tax money — which is money you’re forced to pay — with money that you spend at businesses that advertise on a particular station. Don’t want to patronize Taco Bell? Nobody will show up at your house with guns. Don’t want to pay your taxes? Expect a different response.

UPDATE: Reader George Moore writes:

A couple of points regarding your post about radio talk show hosts. Limbaugh rarely has guests on his show. There are times when a political figure will phone (I recall one show when Bill Bennett seemed to be calling from a pay phone someplace in the Carolinas), but they are few and far between.

On Bill O’Reilly’s TV show, or one of them, anyway, they do have guests, and they are frequently of leftist tilt. Unfortunately, this frequently degenerates into O’Reilly and his guest attempting to talk over each other for five minutes, but the guests are on the show. Your point about public radio is well-taken. However, it should be pointed out that hosts like Limbaugh and O’Reilly are frankly opining from a political position. They make no secret of it. The main objection to the so-called main-stream media is that they firmly maintain a political position, middle to hard left depending on the show or story, but refuses to acknowledge it.

Case in point: I was listening to Bloomberg radio in New York this morning. They delivered a news item stating that the Justice Department had broken with its past position on the meaning of the Second Amendment. Fair enough. It has. They then went on to an ad-hom attack on John Ashcroft, stating that the new take on the Second Amendment merely reflected his personal view.

I was hoping to hear how Mr. Ashcroft got Mr. Tribe (D. Harvard), to endorse this bizarre new view of the Second Amendment, but they dropped it after a swipe at Bush.

Yes, it’s the unacknowledged but obvious bias of NPR that sticks in most people’s throats.