Its being Monday morning, I couldn’t quite manage the double entendre with the title to this post, but Ian Donnis’s weekly TGIF column for Rhode Island Public Radio had another point worth highlighting:

Rhode Island Public Radio gets 93 percent of its funding from people and organizations in Rhode Island. So you don’t need to worry about us going anywhere if President Trump is successful in eliminating funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Here’s part of a comment on the subject by our esteemed general manager, Torey Malatia: “Were it to suddenly disappear, the $200,000 CPB grant to RIPR would need to be replaced.  We would do this by encouraging our community to help support us. We would hope that more listeners would become donors and sustainers, or would increase their gifts. We have a broad base of community support, and if every listener helped a little more, we could offset the grant. It will be work, but it can be done. In our view, though, the loss of CPB funding hurts our culture overall. Many local radio stations in very small markets rely of the annual CPB grant heavily, representing in some cases 25%-35% of their annual budgets. Losing this funding may severely damage these smaller stations. And since local public television stations receive three-quarters of the targeted congressional funds, small public television stations may become insolvent.”

So, to emphasize, RIPR doesn’t need the government money, and Rhode Island can afford to let the left-wing radio audience pay for left-wing radio.  There’s no reason whatsoever that all Rhode Islanders should be forced to contribute, and certainly no reason a more-conservative-than-Rhode-Island country ought to pay for it.

That reasoning applies, as well, to the smaller stations that Malatia cites as justification for keeping the grant alive.*  If there’s no market for left-wing radio in a particular area, the federal government shouldn’t be the mechanism for ensuring that it gets its space on the dial nonetheless, anymore than the federal government should ensure that there’s a right-wing station in markets where there’s no audience for conservatives.

* The initial version of this post erroneously attributed the citation to Donnis rather than Malatia.