Fifteen years ago, many Republican members of Congress, including Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Larry Pressler of South Dakota, were as rabid about defunding National Public Radio (and PBS) as Republicans are today. NPR had a liberal agenda, it was said. Government had no business funding broadcasting. Their constituents didn’t clamor for NPR.

Yet their constituents voted to oust Pressler and several colleagues, in part because, as polls revealed, voters liked public radio (and TV). Particularly in rural areas, NPR was a citizen’s vital link to the world, and a reliable source of international, national, and local news. Voters didn’t demonize NPR as “liberal.” In the end, Congressional Republicans joined Democrats in voting to fund NPR as a necessary organ of a democracy. (I wrote about that funding battle in a 2004 piece on Republicans’ changing attitudes toward PBS.)

Much has changed since the 1996 election. NPR bears a large measure of blame for its current predicament. They shovelled coal into the conservative furnace by treating a few honest but ill-chosen words by commentator Juan Williams as if he had committed a felony. By summarily firing a long-time contributor, NPR righteously proclaimed that it was fighting intolerance but came off as intolerant. After a public outcry, NPR shovelled more coal into the furnace by finding a scapegoat, its news director, and firing her. This week its chief fundraiser was caught on camera making sweepingly dumb comments about Tea Party members and Christian fundamentalists, solidifying an impression that NPR was engulfed by liberal elitists who hated anyone who voted for George W. Bush. The C.E.O. of NPR was fed to the furnace. The heat has intensified.

Something else has changed since 1996. The size of the federal-budget deficit, for one. The advent of Fox News has been more momentous. The Fox drumbeat that the press has a liberal bias and we’re “fair and balanced” and everyone else is not, has deputized citizens to be suspicious of all mainstream news. The polarization of politics, where incumbents who compromise are deemed impure and are thus vulnerable to a primary challenge, plays a role. So does the proliferation of cable and Web news sources, which increasingly bark louder to be heard and strive to stand out by embracing a right or a left I.D. If it weren’t for members of Congress, journalists might occupy America’s least popular occupation. We need the public’s trust for our reporting to be believed, yet often we’ve lost it.

But this much has not changed: NPR covers news better than any radio station, and remains a source of information that many citizens get nowhere else. In an America where local newspapers disappear and local TV and radio news flee from covering government because it is “boring,” NPR, with the federal government providing only two per cent of its budget, remains a bargain.

Photograph: Drew Saunders via Flickr.