The New York Times leadership actually attempted to sell readers on the dimwitted notion that stripping tax dollars from leftist public media is just as nutty as defunding police departments. This is the same newspaper that largely rationalized nixing police funding across a number of stories over the past few years.

The Times editorial board went to bat for lefty outlets NPR and PBS, which are on the verge of possibly getting $1.1 billion cut from their mothership Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The newspaper had the utter audacity to argue in a June 16 editorial that continuing literal government-funded propaganda is a founding ideal:

“When the private sector doesn’t provide an important service, the government often steps in. That is why the framers established the U.S. Postal Service; they believed no one else would deliver the mail to the entire country.” 

Yes, according to The Times’s logic, getting a tax-funded “service” of crackpot left-wing codswallop from NPR about people hijacking the dinosaur emoji from transgenders and how The Communist Manifesto supposedly offers “refuge, inspiration, and argument” is just as important as getting your mail.

The newspaper even admitted that “Republicans complain, not always wrongly, that public media reflects left-leaning assumptions and biases.” “Not always wrongly?” What does that even mean in this context? Like this is rare? Instead of hourly? 

Then the editorial board took a detour onto Cuckoo Avenue to describe current legislative efforts to strip NPR and PBS (finally) of their taxpayer-subsidized license to continue belching up left-wing propaganda with impunity:

 We are reminded of the excesses of the ‘defund the police’ and ‘abolish ICE’ movements on the other side of the ideological spectrum. They adopted a fatalistic view of vital government services, suggesting that their imperfections justified their elimination. They were wrong, and so are the conservatives who want to defund public media.

And now an ironic message from PBS’s Sesame Street brought to you by the number “5” and the letter “O."

The insanity speaks for itself.

What The Times didn’t tell readers is that its own lefty podcast The Daily, is widely distributed by American Public Media (APM), which receives funding from — *checks notes* — the CPB! Conflict of interest much? 

In 2018, The New York Times Company published a press release celebrating how its The Daily podcast was being aired in partnership with American Public Media “on 25 stations across the country, including five of the top 10 public radio stations nationwide.” According to the release, “the collaboration between The New York Times and American Public Media extends the audio news report’s five million monthly unique listeners to the national radio audience.” Go figure!

The newspaper has a clear financial incentive for keeping the public media gravy train rolling, which makes its latest editorial failing to disclose this factoid look even worse in retrospect. Also missing from the editorial was any disclosure that one of the newspaper's top columnists, the insufferable anti-Trump fanatic David Brooks, co-contributes to one of  PBS News Hour's signature segments, Brooks & Capehart.

Public media, like every other major institution, is imperfect. But it improves the lives of millions of Americans, and it strengthens American interests. It should not become yet another victim of our polarized political culture.”

“Polarized political culture?” That’s rich coming from the Kamala Harris-endorsing “newspaper of record” that has devolved into one of the most polarizing publications in American media. It’s also reasonable to suggest that the only “lives” The Times cares about as it pertains to public-funded media are those of its own “five million monthly unique listeners.”