MRC President David Bozell joined WMAL’s "O'Connor & Co." show on Wednesday morning to break down the latest developments in the push to stop the misuse of taxpayer dollars by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Bozell expressed optimism that defunding will happen.
In the first wave of a sweeping rescissions package from the Trump administration, the House GOP has included a $1.1 billion cut to CPB. It’s the clearest sign yet that conservatives are serious about ending taxpayer-funded propaganda.
“This is something that I think 90 percent of Republicans would have voted on years ago. Another nine percent probably are a little bit squishy on it, but they would get there,” Bozell said.
“And there are probably one percent of Republicans that are holdouts. We’ve got to work on those guys. But I think we'll get there. This is something that the president has been championing during Trump 1.0 and now currently during Trump 2.0, and we're super excited about the advancement.”
As O’Connor noted, “It is illegal for [PBS and NPR] to show a political bias in their productions.” Yet they continue to do exactly that.
A recent MRC study supports that claim, that on the PBS News Hour, liberal or Democratic leaning guests outnumbered conservative or Republican leaning guests 173 to 41, a ratio of 4.2 to 1.
Bozell said the Republican holdouts are misguided in defending PBS and NPR. “If they want to die on that hill and tell their constituents, ‘I preserved an entity that declared Joe Biden to be mentally acute and just fine,’ that’s on them.”
Bozell went on to give examples of some of NPR’s most outrageous content. “Three years ago, they aired an abortion on the air. That’s what your taxpayer dollars are going towards?” He also questioned PBS pundit David Brooks comparing Elon Musk to mass murderers: "You’re going to go on the air and describe one of the brilliant minds of our time, Elon Musk, who has rescued astronauts as Pol Pot for wanting to deliver some fiscal responsibility to the country? Silly.”
Among the "silly arguments" Bozell disparged was the one that “farmers will not get a tornado warning unless they have NPR.… It's a lie.” The idea that eliminating federal subsidies for NPR would leave rural America in the dark is simply false, Bozell explained. He continued, “not even the Farm Bureau lobby is making noise about that.”
Bozell is hopeful for the rescission package to continue advancing. Bozell stated, “I’m a glass-half-full guy, and I think this is going to happen.”