Suddenly, New York and Washington care about rural America. They're afraid people will die if NPR is defunded because they'll miss out on important warnings about hurricanes and earthquakes."It's a matter of life and death" for rural Americans, said Sen. Chuck Schumer. As someone said in an earlier post, "If that's true, why is all their programming targeted at upscale urban elites?" And Sen. John Kennedy did an excellent job roasting NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who replied to accusations of bias by asking what stories bothered people. Kennedy had a long list at hand.

New York Times Nicholas Kristof is right there with Schumer, saying that NPR is "an absolute lifeline" to rural America. 

What happened to President Joe Biden's $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program to expand high-speed internet access to rural areas? How many farmhouses were hooked up with high-speed internet under the program? Any?

The post continues:

… America already have no local newspaper, so a local NPR station may be the only source of news, of information about school snow days of emergency information. On the west side of my town of Yamhill, OR, for example, there are some areas where there is no easy Internet access, and radio is an absolute lifeline. Plus, pre-K is often not available in rural America, and that makes Sesame Street and similar shows particularly valuable. So I hope GOP members of Congress will understand what's at stake with the rescissions bill and will reject it.

But he says in his bio he's a farmer of cider apples and wine grapes. So he knows. I wonder if he has internet to send his columns to the New York Times.

Has NPR covered that story?

PBS and NPR always argue that taxpayer money is just a sliver of their operating budgets, but now people will die if they don't get federal funding. And Sesame Workshop hasn't been run by PBS since 2015, so spare us the drama about killing Big Bird.