Protestors rally at the headquarters of National Public Radio against proposed cuts to public media funding in March in Washington. (Joy Asico-Smith/AP Content Services for Our Revolution)

We went searching for why President Donald Trump is determined to end federal funding to NPR and PBS through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The White House website has arguments and bullet points.

“NPR refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story, calling it a waste of time and a distraction, despite that it was highly relevant to the presidential election…. An NPR editor found that registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans 87 to zero in the newsroom’s editorial positions….Over a six-month period, PBS News Hour used versions of the term ‘far-right’ 162 times, but ‘far-left’only 6 times.”

There are many more. The vigor is unimpaired and righteous. It’s a catalog of mistakes, errors in judgment, judgments and flaws.

Here’s the thing, though. We could also make a list of everything else NPR and PBS have done that do not deserve the sting of the lash. There is hour upon hour of coverage of “Morning Edition,” the “PBS NewsHour,” “All Things Considered” and more that are deserving of praise.

Listen to “Think Out Loud” and how hard it works to give a balanced voice to different political perspectives and nonpolitical perspectives. That program and Oregon Public Broadcasting’s news reporting are some of the best journalism in Oregon. Did you read OPB’s Oregon water series? You should. It was one excellent series of many excellent series. There is also the daily corralling of the peaks and valleys of lives – the sad, the jubilant, the heroic, the dastardly.

Partisanship and bias are not the chief distinguishing mark of what they do. It’s not as simple as a right way to do journalism versus the wrong way.

Another critique offered by the White House is that the media landscape has changed. “Unlike in 1967, when CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options, making government funding of news media outdated, unnecessary, and corrosive to journalistic independence,” the argument goes.

Yes, there are many more types of media. Of them, many are missing a fundamental ingredient: they do not, at least, seek objectivity. They aim for the loud and clicks.

Smaller and larger communities across the country are also losing news options or seeing options shrink. There are places where public broadcasting is the only news that people get. Oregon’s journalists have been diminishing in number.

Mistakes are made under deadline pressure and not under deadline pressure, only to be later recognized in the cool aftermath. Batting averages can always be better. Someone has to be there, though, to swing at the pitches.

A federal purge of NPR and PBS would compound the shadow of ignorance. Reach out to OPB, tinyurl.com/OPBfederal.