One thing vetoed

Gov. Bob McDonnell got the last word in his quest to reduce funding for public radio and television, vetoing just one item in the voluminous state budget and signing everything else.

McDonnell's veto eliminates a $424,000 funding increase in the 2012 budget for the government-subsidized radio and television stations that present artistic, cultural and public affairs and news programs. The offerings of public radio and television range from Ken Burns' acclaimed "Civil War" series on PBS to National Public Radio's afternoon news program, "All Things Considered," which conservative critics say leans heavily to the political left.

Former NPR correspondent Juan Williams recently described the organization as "radio by and for liberal Democrats." He was endorsing Congressional GOP efforts to end government funding of the public broadcaster after a fundraising letter derided conservative talk show hosts. With it and other attacks on conservatives, Williams said, "NPR's troubled management team has turned its fundraising efforts into a weapon to be used against its essential product-top quality, balanced reporting."

PBS, also under fire from Republicans in Congress as a tax-supported frill that a debt-ridden nation can no longer afford, is not a core government service, McDonnell said Tuesday in a release explaining his veto.

"In today's free market, with hundreds of radio and television programs, government should not be subsidizing one particular group of stations," McDonnell said. "We must get serious about government spending."

Curtis Monk, president and CEO of the Community Idea Stations, which provide public broadcasting in Virginia, said the cuts were most likely to affect classroom uses for public broadcasting such as delivery of online content, teacher training and technical service and support.

McDonnell's veto pares state support for the stations from the $2.6 million the General Assembly approved this year to slightly more than $2.2 million in the original, two-year state budget adopted last year.

But that's still more than twice as much as the Republican governor wanted as part of his proposed phase-out of state funding for PBS stations in Virginia.

In mid-term adaptations to the biennial budget that McDonnell submitted to lawmakers in December, he proposed cuts totaling $957,871, nearly half of what public broadcasting was to receive for the fiscal year.

The General Assembly balked. Budget revisions the GOP-controlled House and the Democratic-ruled Senate passed in this year's regular session and sent to McDonnell in February boosted PBS funding to about $2.6 million.

McDonnell amended the line item, reducing the total by more than $1.6 million and leaving total state appropriations to public broadcasting at slightly less than $1 million. It was one of 86 amendments McDonnell proposed to the budget, and legislators rejected about one-fourth of them when they returned for a one-day reconvened session on April 6.

The House accepted the governor's amendment, but the Senate refused. Without a two-thirds vote in both chambers to reject the governor's line-item amendment, the state Constitution allows McDonnell to veto it after-the-fact, leaving the appropriation as it was passed in 2010, but wiping out this year's proposed funding increase.

The rest of the $80 billion budget will go into effect unchanged.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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