As the broadcasters’ defenders say, the defunding of public media represents a “drop in the bucket” of what must be done to reach fiscal sanity. But it also needs to be noted that by cutting NPR and PBS off taxpayer funding, President Donald Trump accomplished a feat of historic proportions.

Every Republican president and Congress since LBJ signed the Public Broadcasting Act authorizing the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967 has tried to rein in, reform, or defund the CPB. They have all failed.

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This includes true conservative giants like Ronald Reagan, a president; Newt Gingrich, a Speaker of the House; and Antonin Scalia, who reached fame when he became a Supreme Court Justice, but who, as general counsel for the Office of Telecommunications Policy in the Nixon White House, warned about public broadcasting as early as 1971.

Of course, hubris comes before the fall, and NPR and PBS did their part. They could have heeded conservatives’ warning that their bias to the Left jeopardized taxpayer funding. Instead, they stubbornly refused to listen, prevaricated, and obfuscated. Then, time ran out.

The end came last week when both houses of Congress approved a “rescission package,” a clever maneuver that clawed back $1.1 billion that Congress had already appropriated for the CPB, which distributes that money to NPR, PBS, and local stations.

NPR and PBS will now try to do many things, including getting Congress to appropriate money for them once again. But everything they have said since then confirms why public funding had to be cut. The people who work for PBS (and especially NPR) are cultish followers of woke ideology who lack the frame of mind or the empathy to grasp what conservatives are saying.

Both Katherine Maher, CEO and President of NPR, and David Folkenflik, the media reporter in charge of chronicling NPR’s demise, have doubled down on blaming Trump for their vicissitudes.

As I have explained, that is true inasmuch as Trump is accomplishing many things at a very rapid pace. But that is not what they mean. In their telling, everyone in the land was happy with public media until Trump spoiled everything. The concerns of Reagan, Gingrich, et al. didn’t exist.

The headline on Folkenflik’s story on Friday said it all: “How bipartisan support for public media unraveled in the Trump era.”

As for Maher, when one of her reporters asked, “Why [do] you think that the argument in favor of public media didn’t prevail?” she responded, “I think this is an exceptional time in American politics. … There is a tremendous amount of political pressure right now to align with the administration’s political priorities.”

Maher appears to live in a Never-Never Land where criticism of bias is so gosh-darn puzzling, and the role that her own far-left views played in undoing support is something to be elided in interviews.

“When it comes to the accusations of bias, I would start as I always start, by saying, we, of course, are a nonpartisan organization and we want to serve, and are required to serve, the entirety of the American public,” Maher told CNN after the Senate voted to defund.

“Ever have a moment of thinking you were not the right messenger to defend public radio in this moment or public media in this moment?” her own reporters asked. Maher responded with a word salad worthy of Chef Kamala, but which appeared to say that, yes, people had broached the subject with her, but she still believes she’s NPR’s future.

“I — of course, I’ve thought about that,” she said. “And I’ve asked other members within the public media system whether it would be good for me to step aside. And I have to say that consistently, the answer was that really focuses on the moment that we’re in as opposed to the future that we need.”

But the crux of the problem for the people at NPR appears to be their utter inability to grasp that their recent embrace of outlandish woke claims about white supremacy and systemic racism finally pushed America over the edge.

Uri Berliner, an NPR veteran who became a whistleblower in 2024, last week called the defunding “a self-inflicted wound, a product of how NPR embraced a fringe progressivism that cost it any legitimate claim to stand as an impartial provider of news, much less one deserving of government support.”

But Folkenflik on Friday was still as clueless about what had happened as he had been before the vote. The fringe progressivism, to Folkenflik, was just a shift “to diversity in hiring and programming choices [as] both a moral imperative and a business strategy to broaden its reach. … Conservatives noted the shift and often criticized it.”

Maher herself — who heads an organization that fired Juan Williams, its longest-serving black voice, when he deviated from the party line — had the effrontery to say that “having non-white voices and perspectives on air does not make us woke.”

It doesn’t appear to enter the NPR mindset that perhaps promoting the ideology that racial and sexual groups are victims of systemic oppression is nothing but a bid for systemic change, one moreover that offends the members of such groups, who do not care to be cannon fodder in the Left’s attempt to revolutionize America.

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This blindness is reflected by Folkenflik’s doleful observation that after the shift, “staff came closer to reflecting America’s racial and ethnic complexity. Its audiences did not appreciably budge.”

This level of obtuseness helped Trump slay the Goliath of public funding. Folkenflik and the company can continue to blather on moral imperatives or business models. They just have to do so without our money now.

Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its board of trustees.