Redbrickbear said:
[Trump Defunds Public Broadcasting
Well, nobody can be much surprised by this. From NPR:This won't be a big deal for NPR, but PBS is going to take a significant hit:Quote:
President Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's board of directors to "cease federal funding for NPR and PBS," the nation's primary public broadcasters. Trump contends that news coverage by NPR and PBS contains a left-wing bias. The federal funding for NPR and PBS is appropriated by Congress.Quote:
NPR receives about 1% of its funding directly from the federal government, and a slightly greater amount indirectly; its 246 member institutions, operating more than 1,300 stations, receive on average 8% to 10% of their funds from CPB.
By contrast, PBS and its stations receive about 15% of their revenues from CPB's federal funds.
Most of the funds for public media go to local stations; and most to subsidize television, which is more expensive than radio.
I have no real idea about bias on PBS, which I only ever watch for its historical documentaries (and haven't done that for some time). But NPR absolutely deserves it. One year ago, longtime NPR journalist Uri Berliner wrote a piece for The Free Press explaining "how NPR lost the public's trust." Berliner, a liberal, wrote:Quote:
It's true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.
In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.
If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it's always been this way.
But it hasn't.
That's true. I started listening to NPR in the 1980s, when I was a high school liberal. I stuck with it and even gave money to it after I became a conservative. Yeah, it was liberal, but it was pretty good, and I learned a lot from NPR programming. I always listened to it on my car radio.
Until I didn't. I don't remember when the change happened, but I think it was after 2012, when the programming went ultra-woke. I would listen until a host or reporter would insert racism or LGBT into stories that had nothing really to do with racism or LGBT. Or they would focus excessively on race, sex, gender, and so forth all the woke favorites while utterly ignoring the great number of people in the broad and diverse United States whose lives do not center around wokeness.
And then there was this:Quote:
In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here's how NPR's managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: "We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions."
But it wasn't a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.
The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR's best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren't following the laptop story because it could help Trump.
The Summer of Floyd further radicalized the NPR workplace. Berliner:One more:Quote:
Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to "start talking about race." Monthly dialogues were offered for "women of color" and "men of color." Nonbinary people of color were included, too.NPR's leadership had every reason, for years, to change. Nobody wanted it to become conservative. We just wanted it to be fair, and diverse in its programming in terms of viewpoints. NPR, though, is the epitome of the problem within elite journalism: they only want to talk to themselves, about their own interests. Consequently, they don't see the world beyond their heads.Quote:
There's an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It's frictionless-one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It's almost like an assembly line.
Fine. No media outlet has to cover the world in any way other than it wants to. But American taxpayers don't have to contribute to the salaries of people who hate them.]
That's a good post, and mirrors my thoughts. I have also given money to NPR in the past, and stopped because I couldn't give to such biased reporting. I wrote a letter to them, not that they cared.
