Unbelievable. Kudos to Chuck Ross at the Washington Free Beacon for posting some pompous and ridiculous audio from a recent meeting of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting board after Congress rescinded CPB funding amounting to $1.1 billion. The CPB board members were crying and comparing themselves to military heroes in Shakespeare plays and the movies. 

The defunding may be temporary -- PBS and NPR folks are still lobbying Congress to put funds back in -- but the drama here is just too much. 

Before the eye-rolling movie and play metaphors, let’s start with Patricia Harrison, a former RNC co-chair in the 1990s who’s been a full-fledged CPB liberal for decades now.

She said “I wish I could get my head around this. It doesn’t make sense. I think things need to change, but you don’t end something that’s successful and that’s desired by the whole populace because you’re angry at one thing or another.” Who on Earth thinks PBS and NPR are “desired by the whole populace”? They’re mostly desired and backed by Democrats, because they know it exists to propagate messenging for Democrats.

“Is there bias?" asked Harrison. "Sure, we're not perfect, but we were working on that. It’s not a legitimate reason to shut down everything."

Ross pointed out this acknowledgment of bias differs from NPR’s CEO preposterously claiming to Congress she can’t find any. Anyone who's consumed PBS and NPR in 2025 knows they're not "working on" correcting their left-wing tilt. They've doubled down on bias in 2025. 

Ruby Calvert, the chair of the CPB board, first appointed to the board by Trump in 2017, began: "I want to say that Never in 58 years, actually, of operations has CPB and our public media system been so maligned and attacked." She talked up the PBS annual airing of A Capitol Fourth, a rare pro-America program on PBS – as if that represents the daily content. “And yet, a short 14 days later, Congress renewed the assault on public media and passed President Trump’s rescission package.”

Before that, we hear the dramatic readings. Tom Rothman, a Biden appointee to the CPB board, praised Harrison as like the Russell Crowe character in the naval drama Master and Commander: 

"The captain of the ship, they're under heavy fire. There's a little boy, a little midshipman, and he ducks down. And the captain, played by Russell Crowe, he reaches over to the little boy, and he says, 'Stand tall on the quarterdecks.'" There are gaps in the audio, probably for sobs. "All of us, that's what I think I'm gonna think about you, Pat," continued Rothman. "You've stood tall in the quarterdeck under heavy and unfair fire."

Harrison quoted from Shakespeare's play Henry V: 

"With apologies to Shakespeare and King Henry V, whose ragtag army was outnumbered by the French at the Battle of Agincourt, but won despite those odds," said Harrison. "King Henry said, sort of, after winning the battle, 'And those now against us shall think themselves accursed they were not here. And hold their honor cheap when any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin's Day.'"

"Aim for that win for public media," Harrison urged.

It's not "unfair fire" for conservatives to drive home the fact that so-called "public media" is relentless liberal media, involuntarily funded by conservative taxpayers. Liberals should pay for their own propaganda.