Yesterday, VP Vance cast the tie-breaker that secured major cuts to PBS and NPR. As expected, the NY Times is telling us that all of those people who live in rural America will not get their dose of NPR’s sophisticated “Morning Edition” or the Sunday night British dramas. Yes, all of those “rural” folks will really be devastated because they can’t get their fix of British accents on TV or those “serious” segments for smart people on NPR. (Remember SNL and NPR).
Talk about a disconnect between public media, or the media in general, and the rest of the country. It reminds me of that story about Jeff Bezos telling the angry mob at The Washington Post to stop screaming because no one is reading them.
As Professor Turley wrote, NPR & PBS did it to themselves. They’ve been mocking half of the country for years. Here is Professor Turley:
Many of us have written for years about the biased reporting at NPR. Not all of this criticism was made out of hostility toward the outlet — many honestly wanted NPR to reverse course and adopt more balanced coverage. That is why, when NPR was searching for a new CEO, I encouraged the board to hire a moderate figure without a history of political advocacy or controversy.
Instead, the board selected Katherine Maher, a former Wikipedia CEO widely criticized for her highly partisan and controversial public statements. She was the personification of advocacy journalism, even declaring that the First Amendment is the ‘number one challenge’ that makes it ‘tricky’ to censor or ‘modify’ content as she would like.
Maher has supported ‘deplatforming’ anyone she deems to be ‘facsists’ and even suggested that she might support ‘punching Nazis.’ She also declared that ‘our reverence for the truth might be a distraction [in] getting things done.’
As expected, the bias at NPR only got worse. The leadership even changed a longstanding rule barring journalists from joining political protests.
Again, hire an uber liberal as your CEO, mock half of the country for its traditional values such as marriage, call us fascists because we want borders respected and homophobic because we don’t believe in sexualizing children, and this is how it ends.
Bye bye NPR, and take PBS with you.
So public media now enters reality. They need to sell advertising and sponsors and pay their way like the rest of us. No more free rent to call us racists and homophobic.
Rural America will survive without the subsidized versions of NPR and PBS. They will pay to watch Sunday night British drama if that’s what they want. In the meantime, the federal government is out of the news and opera business.
P.S. Check out my blog for posts, podcasts, and videos.
Image: YouTube video screen grab.