Tuesday’s CBS Mornings Plus gave a spotlight to last week’s passage of a rescission package to take back $1 billion in taxpayer funding for far-left propaganda outlets NPR and PBS by commiserating with the interim news director for KZYX, the NPR affiliate in Mendocino County, California, a coastal and wooded area north of the Bay Area. Unsurprisingly, the arrogance was on display with the director saying they “don’t have time” for any accusations of bias.
A quick peek of their schedule revealed all the NPR national staples like Morning Edition, Fresh Air, and All Things Considered as well as insanely far-left pundits like Thom Hartmann and Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!. Among the local shows include humdingers such as a twice-monthly show called Pride Radio Mendocino. None of those facts made the interview.
Co-host Adriana Diaz provided the lead-in, filled with all the standard talking points from her fellow liberal journalists:
Public media stations are bracing for the impact of Congress’s decision to slash more than $1 billion in federal funding. Last week, the Republican-led House approved the cuts for the corporation for public broadcasting, ending all federal support for NPR, PBS, and local member stations. By the way, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been around since 1967. Yep, that’s when television stations still broadcast in black and white. It’s helped fund more than 1500 local public radio and TV outlets across the country. President Trump said a key reason for the — for the — for the budget cut was because he — he says PBS and NPR are politically biased, but public media executives say some of the hardest hit stations will be radio outlets that provide critical news and information to rural communities.
She predictably led off with a softball to said interim general manager, Dina Polkinghorne: “So, walk us through how this budget cut affects your station. In particular, how much will you lose in terms of dollars and what will be the impact?”
Polkinghorne said government funding covers “about 25 percent of our annual operating revenue” and thus devastating to “a staff of five — about five people” that in turn “don’t have, like, a news team.”
Co-host Tony Dokoupil tried to have her say more, asking “what kind of services does your station provide to listeners.”
Incredibly, Polkinghorne could only name one show and predictably picked the most innocuous sounding one before insisting they’re there and rolling whenever bad weather strikes:
You know, a whole — a whole variety of things. You know, on — in — in good times, we have a show called Trading Time where people can call in and say, I’ve got some extra wood from my deck project. I’d like to trade with somebody for, you know, a new nail gun, but in bad times, and, you know, this is an area prone to natural disasters. We provide a lot of emergency information, breaking news. We, you know, we — we’re a small community. We don’t have a lot of big donors on speed dial, but we have the sheriff on speed dial, and we have the, you know, the local office of emergency services personnel on speed dial. It’s a large county divided north to south with a mountain range on one side. It’s very dry and prone to wildfires. And on the other side, we just some pretty, pretty violent winter storms, sometimes with lots of redwoods in between that fall across the road, so our listeners need to know what roads are open, you know what — what areas are flooded, things like that.
Diaz offered the token question about bias: “And what do you say to President Trump’s view that public broadcasting stations are politically biased?”
Polkinghorne showed the utter pomposity of the government-funded media crowd: “Oh, goodness. We are so far removed from the hyper political things happening in D.C...[W]e don’t ask people what party they belong to when we’re interviewing them...[T]he boots on the ground folks just do not care. They’re not interested.”
Based on the programming lineup and the additional reality that the county went 61 percent for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election (and is in a D+24 House seat), it’s a one-party show and thus it’s easy for her to say everyone agrees.
As he usually does, Dokoupil took a hot second to admirably and genuinely present the opposing view.
He first wondered whom is the source of Polkinghorne’s frustrations with the funding fight, but then added the possibility it might be “the NPRs of the world which, you know, the President’s point, there’s some data supporting the idea that they’re mostly Democrats working there, and the coverage hasn’t been down the middle.”
See, liberal journalists, it’s not that hard.
By offering the opposing view (albeit in a compacted fashion), it triggered a telling response illustrating more arrogance from the public media crowd and thus why their fear-mongering didn’t work.
“You know, I honestly don’t have time. I don’t have time to think about that. I mean, we — we our fiscal year started July 1. We had to prepare for these cuts. We passed a break even budget and the only way we get there is by, like I said, laying off the staff person, some other cuts and some really ambitious fundraising goals,” she huffed.
“[I]f we don’t want to burden the taxpayers with paying for NPR, that’s one thing. But a — a provision in this rescission effort included something called the community services grant, which many of these small rural stations receive...[W]e all have emergencies in rural areas. We all have to provide this. You know, critical information to people..[W]e’ve got work to do here on the ground to keep our listeners safe and informed,” she concluded.
Our Tim Graham has repeatedly torn this “community services grant” talking point to shreds. For example, he explained in February what it actually means: “The vast majority of NPR stations receive ‘community service grants’ from CPB, and then turn around and send money back to D.C. for ‘programming costs’ for the nationally distributed shows.”
To see the relevant CBS transcript from July 22, click here.