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After Congress defunded ‘public’ radio and television, liberal nonprofits are scrambling to fund them. But they’re not scrambling very hard. The Knight Foundation, with assets of $2.6 billion and which hands out over $100 million annually, is ponying up a mere $10 million.
Paula Kerger, the president of PBS, alone earns $1.1 million. 5 other PBS execs make over half a million dollars. The Senior Vice President of DEI earns nearly $400,000. That $10 million would hardly even begin to cover the insanely inflated salaries of ‘public’ media executives.
Knight, and the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (all names you’re likely to see in front and after PBS docs about how America was built on slavery) ponied up $37 million to compensate for what they estimate is $1.1 billion in funds.
During the BLM riots, the Ford Foundation underwrote BLM through the ‘Movement 4 Black Lives’, it sold $1 billion in bonds and announced it was pumping $180 million into racist organizations. Yet when it comes to the public media they claim to love so much, the Ford Foundation dug in its sofa cushions through its assets of $16.8 billion for loose change.
The Ford Foundation’s annual revenues are over half a billion dollars. If Ford wanted to, it could singlehandedly fund PBS and NPR into the next century. The MacArthur Foundation has total assets of $8.6 billion and doles out over a quarter billion a year and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has $13.7 billion in assets and annual revenues approaching $1 billion.
Together these liberal foundations have over $40 billion in assets and they put out a press release bragging about how they’re donating 0.0925% of their net worth to ‘public’ media.
I guess liberals don’t really want to save Big Bird after all.
All the whining about how PBS and NPR need money is a farce when Soros alone dropped around $300 million into the 2022 midterms. The Soros ‘Open Society Foundations’ spent $1.7 billion in 2023. If George and his spawn wanted to, they could fund NPR for the next decade and not even notice. Soros spent $400 million taking control of Audacy’s 200 radio stations.
Why won’t the old Hungarian war criminal save NPR and PBS? Because they’re worthless.
The people who listen to NPR and watch PBS are mostly the sort who already vote the Soros ticket. That’s also why Ford, Knight and MacArthur are offering a tepid response that is mostly focused on funding a few stations in ‘swing states’ where they can make a difference.
The huge foundations are putting most of their money into political organizing (often disguised as social justice) to radicalize and mobilize unaffiliated or unreliable voter groups. Wealthy old white liberals are not a priority which is why there’s no serious money going to ‘save’ PBS.
There’s nothing ‘public’ about public radio or television. It’s the entertainment of choice for 1% of the country that has a good deal of disposable income run by people with well-thumbed copies of Howard Zinn. It’s not representative of the public, it’s not run for the public or by the public, but it’s run by the sorts of people who romanticise everything from the Bolshevik takeover to Oct 7 for the benefit of an aging audience that knows more about the CCC than Stalin’s gulags.
The taxpayers should never have been on the hook for this perverse form of ‘public access’ that is about as democratic a medium as North Korea and the big foundations who sponsored the shows aren’t about to put serious money into subsidizing what amounts to a vanity project.
Local liberals have more than enough money to back their local PBS and NPR affiliates and huge operations like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are going to be just fine. And even if they’re not, the sorts of people who fund race riots across America have long term objectives that don’t involve Ken Burns documentaries or Rick Steve stumbling around Denmark.
Given a choice between subsidizing the destruction of America through documentaries aimed at retired liberal lawyers or race riots aimed at the sorts of people who will actually burn things down, the foundations showed they would donate mere millions to ‘public media’ and hundreds of millions to burning down the country. It’s simple radical revolutionary economic triage.
All the false appeals to empathy, the pretense that without billions in taxpayer subsidies, Sesame Street would go away, proved to be as hollow as progressive philanthropy.
It was never about Big Bird.
The yellow puppet is gonna be fine. Sesame Street has $559 million in assets and $187 million in revenues. Its CEO makes over $1 million a year, its president makes nearly as much and just in case you’re still worried, Sesame has a deal with Netflix to air episodes on the woke streaming platform that’s probably worth tens of millions like its previous deal with HBO.
Big Bird was just an avian shield for the real radical programming aimed at adults. Much like the teachers’ unions, PBS tried to take children hostage to steal a fortune from taxpayers. And when the scam was exposed, the big lefty money proved it didn’t care about Big Bird.
The farce now playing out in the media as foundations that could singlehandedly subsidize ‘public broadcasting’ scratch in their pockets for a few million and blame Trump because national taxpayers are no longer on the hook for their political propaganda shows their venal hypocrisy. Knight, Robert Wood Johnson, Ford and MacArthur are happy to donate just enough to have their names out front before programs, but they want to stick taxpayers with the bill. They won’t put serious money behind anything that’s not a paradigm changer like BLM.
Maybe they just don’t love Big Bird enough.