For the first time, after decades of trying, Republicans appear on the verge of defunding PBS and NPR over the wild left-wing bias of their news reporting, and remarkably, rather than promising changes, the progressive elites in charge are doubling down on Trump derangement.

It's all happening even as Congress considers a rescission bill from President Donald Trump to slash their lefty slush fund.

WHITE HOUSE URGES CONGRESS TO CUT FEDERAL FUNDING FOR NPR, PBS

On Wednesday, the PBS NewsHour aired a segment on Trump’s victory in a lawsuit against CBS News, which settled for $16 million over deceptive editing by "60 Minutes" of a Kamala Harris interview during the 2024 campaign.

To address the issue, they brought on CNN’s Brian Stelter, yes the same Brian Stelter who, with a straight face, parroted the ludicrous White House line that President Biden was fine and just a victim of right-wing video "cheap fakes," last year.

You remember, about eight minutes before Grandpa Joe imploded on a debate stage.

You will not be surprised to learn that the left-wing, water-carrying Stelter told the left-wing water-carrying NewsHour that the left-wing water-carrying "CBS did not actually do anything wrong here. CBS engaged in standard television news editing practices." 

At this point, in a failure of journalistic ethics that would make Pravda blush, supposedly straight news anchor Amna Nawaz gave Stelter’s astounding lie no pushback. In fact, the abjectly subjective and obviously biased opinion of Stelter was simply treated as fact.

So what really happened? We all saw it. One morning during the election campaign, "60 Minutes" put out a clip of its Harris interview in which she answered a question about Israel with a run-on nonsense sentence that made Joe Biden look eloquent.

But, lo and behold, when the episode aired, the answer that we had already seen was no more, replaced by a highly edited version that made Harris almost seem cogent.

In the original clip, when host Bill Whittaker asks why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not listening to Biden, Harris said the following: 

"Well, Bill ... the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region."

And here is the answer that eventually aired on the program: 

"We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end."

In no universe of fair and honest journalism can this blatant clean-up on aisle Harris be viewed as anything other than CBS News trying to make the Democrat candidate look better. It's not a standard practice, it's a lie.

PBS NewsHour and Stelter didn’t dare roll the actual tapes, or their feeble claim that CBS News parent company Paramount is bribing Trump to get approval for a merger would have collapsed faster than CNN’s ratings.

And this is not a new issue for public broadcasting. It was April of last year when longtime NPR editor Uri Berliner penned a scathing column about the outrageous, if soft-spoken, bias at the outlet.

But have we seen any changes? Have we seen the executives who run PBS and NPR take any action to present a fair news product? Obviously not. As the Stelter interview shows, these outlets are still as bad as ever.

It very much seems that, having resigned themselves to the fact that Republicans are going to cut their direct federal funding, PBS and NPR have decided to go all in on the anti-Trump sentiment their base craves. Maybe they can move a few extra tote bags and umbrellas.

Given the utter lack of remorse shown by PBS and NPR, even when evidence of their rank bias piles up like garbage during a trash strike, no self-respecting Republican should vote to give them a dime.

PBS and NPR have been given years, even decades, to clean up their act and live up to their responsibility to provide unbiased news in the service of the public, not in the service of the Democrat Party.

Time is up. Public broadcasting can be a propaganda arm of the Left or it can be funded by taxpayers; It can no longer be both. 

And after all, with the passage of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, millions of people who love public broadcasting will be free to donate their significant tax savings to PBS and NPR, while the rest of us can opt out of funding fake news.

I call that a win-win.