White House Falsely Calls NPR, PBS A “Grift,” Moves To Cut Already Modest Funding In Latest Attack On Journalism And Informed Consensus
from the terrified-of-the-truth dept
Authoritarians don’t much like journalism, education, or informed consensus for what should be obvious reasons. But the far right has long had a particular animosity for publicly-funded broadcasting. In part, because when done right, public broadcasting is free of the kind of perverse financial incentives that results in the kind of feckless, truth-averse, “both sides” journalism we all saw last election season.
Of course in the U.S. we don’t really do public broadcasting particularly well. In a good piece over at The Nation, University of Pennsylvania professor Victor Pickard notes how the generational demonization of public media by the right routinely starves it of funding. That forces it to lean more heavily on commercial funding, which then results in journalism that looks a lot like the rest of our feckless, corporatized mush:
“By any measure, US government support for public media is paltry. The $535 million that Congress currently allocates to the CPB covers roughly 1 percent of NPR’s and 15 percent of PBS’s budget. To even call this a public system is a misnomer; most funding for public media comes from private sources in the form of individual donations, philanthropic grants, and corporate sponsorships.”
So the U.S. version of “public broadcasting” is decidedly half assed. Yet it still gets endlessly demonized by the right wing as some sort of extremist concept. That happened again this week when the White House issued a statement full of lies about public broadcasting, calling NPR and PBS a “grift”:
“For years, American taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidizing National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as “news.” As President Trump has stated, taxpayer funding of NPR’s and PBS’s biased content is a waste.”
White House budget director Russ Vought has drafted a so-far-unpublished memo for a rescission plan that will eliminate funding already approved by Congress, including $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
The far right doesn’t want reformers untethering journalism and media from commercial interests because they know that model is eminently exploitable, something that hasn’t been subtle the last few years. Looking for major merger approvals, tax cuts, and mindless deregulation, consolidated U.S. media companies have demonstrated they’re more than willing to throw the truth under the bus for financial gain. You see it absolutely everywhere you look. Again: not remotely subtle.
Running journalism as a traditional business has been positively fatal for informed consensus in the U.S. The country is awash with news deserts where the only news people get are either AM radio (dominated by right wing propaganda), broadcast news (dominated by right wing propagandists at Sinclair and Fox), or national cable news (dominated by right wing propagandists at Fox News).
When election season comes, and huge swaths of the electorate vote in favor of their own fucking immolation, political and polling experts then stand around with a stupid look on their face wondering why the public appears to have heads full of peddles and pudding. Democrats who could be pushing for media reforms or consolidation limits have instead often chosen to ignore the problem, and here we are.
Pickard’s research at UPenn has shown that publicly-funded journalism can result in healthier democracies overall for this very reason. If you strip away the problems caused by chasing ad engagement or coddling power for quarterly financial gain, journalism is more incentivized to tell people the actual truth and less incentivized to pull punches.
Not only has the right wing constantly starved public broadcasting of funding forcing them to embrace more traditional commercialization, Trump’s earlobe nibbler over at the FCC, Brendan Carr, is now launching sham investigations into public broadcasting’s reliance on commercials. Carr claims, without evidence, PBS and NPR are violating on-air sponsorship or “underwriting” rules.
Again, this has nothing to do with government efficiency or saving taxpayers money. It has everything to do with authoritarians controlling the flow of information and the shape of modern media, which they prefer to be a combination of right wing propaganda and feckless, obedient, oligarch controlled consolidated media giants too afraid to do their fucking jobs.
Filed Under: authoritarian, disinformation, journalism, media, propaganda, public broadcasting, russell vought, trump
Companies: npr, pbs
Comments on “White House Falsely Calls NPR, PBS A “Grift,” Moves To Cut Already Modest Funding In Latest Attack On Journalism And Informed Consensus”
By “democracy”, you mean the Democrats thing, aka the “Deep-Woke-State”. No wonder Reps don’t want it.
Authoritarians don’t want you to hear the objective truth, they want you to believe a “reality” of alternate facts created purely for their prosperity and power, and never for your own.
On an unrelated note, how’s the price of eggs these days?
Man I fucking hate mealy-mouthed both-sides regulatory captured NPR but these fucking guys are going to make me support it again aren’t they?
Every accusation, a confession.
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Equal Footing
I’m sure that if the government was paying money to One America News Network then there would have been an immediate demand ton pull funding.
But it’s true that Republicans do want liberal news media to pay for itself the same way conservative news can pay for itself. Taxpayers ought not do it. If news organizations lose credibility, then they risk going out of business.
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With boldfaced lies, scapegoating, and angertainment that’s explicitly not news?
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You’re again mistaking “honest” for “liberal.”
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You say that like conservative news outlets aren’t funded by rich-ass Republicans who buy off journalists to spin the news in ways that favor those rich-ass Republicans. Do you think Fox News is funded by Viewers Like You?
Taxpayers are funding NPR and PBS—by giving them money out of their own pockets. Like the article notes, federal funding isn’t even a majority of the funding for those two outlets (and in NPR’s case, it’s only 1%). Instead of blindly repeating Trump propaganda because you want to “own the libs”, maybe look into what he’s complaining about and see if his complaints have any merit.
Seriously: Do you think NPR and PBS are “woke” because they’re legitimately bashing Republicans 24/7, or do you think they’re “woke” because Trump and the GOP media apparatus cucked your brain into thinking things like “empathy is a weakness”, “diversity is bad”, and “Big Bird is a communist”? (Side note: When your “side” is attacking Sesame Street, you might want to reëxamine whether you want to be on that side. It’s no better than, say, attacking Mr. Rogers.)
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The simple fact that you equate a right-wing shitrag with NPR means you have nothing of value to add here.
Sit down, clown.
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Fuck off and die. You are such a cult idiot that you want to censor facts for not matching your evil wishes.
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Journalism and lies are not and should never be on equal footing. Hey, while you’re here, how about you tell us all about how kidnapping and deporting people for expressing their freedom of speech in a way the government doesn’t like is good for free speech, actually, given how you actively seem to be avoiding the articles related to that?
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Conservative TV news doesn’t pay for itself, it is paid for by all cable subscribers who have no choice but to take it as part of their subscriptions, with cable compamies unable to drop that content or make it entirely optional without the fear of an angry mob of rd tate reps turning up at their doors.
There is a reason they are trying to force streaming services to host more bihot content, because given a choice people won’t pay for it. See also the push to force AM radios on carmakers to keep conservative talk radio alive at other people’s expense.
Convenience Sampling
If you [the reader] take a poll [of all BestNetTech readers] you can just summarize any article as:
REPUBLICANS ENCOURAGE ENSHITIFICATION, DESTRUCTION OF BOOKS, COLLECTED HEALTH DATA, KNOWLEDGE, AND OTHER EVIL THINGS.
If you have been paying attention for a while just add:
REPUBLICAN VALUE LIFE SO SO SO VERY VERY MUCH UNTIL THE BABY IS BORN, AT WHICH POINT IT’S OK TO REMOVE ITS RIGHTS, DEPORT IT, OR KILL IT. BECAUSE MURDER IS WRONG, UNTIL A BROWN PERSON SHOPLIFTS.
But hey, lies, damn lies, and statistics. Convenience Sampling.
Now go repeat that same survey on OAN or FAUX NEWS.
Just wait till Project 2025 launches their OWN [no pun intended] network to ensure EVERYONE gets THE SAME talking points every morning. That would beat their current “fax” network.
I went to finishing school so instead of saying “F*** those ***ces of **it” I’ll just say:
Hope you all have a great weekend. Happy easter, end of passover, or whatever you celebrate. Raise a toast up to democracy, because may it RIP.
Truth is only a threat to a liar
It makes perfect sense that a political cult that’s all about ‘alternative facts’ and that only considers facts and evidence real and valid if they confirm their already pre-existing biases and beliefs would see public broadcasting that isn’t required to cater to corporate interest as a threat and call it a ‘scam’ or ‘grift’.
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And this is why this will end with bullets, instead of ballots.
The Trump Bottoms don’t want to hear how they were entirely too stupid to not vote for Mango. They only want to hear about brown people suffering and somehow, they’re excited about losing their Social Security and Medicare.
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I don’t think that’s true. Trump’s propensity for bullying—and the implicit approval for his followers to do that same bullying—will only go so far when the people on Social Security and Medicare who voted for him start losing their money. Educating people wakes them up slowly; taking their money wakes them up far faster.
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How many people killed and died for the Confederacy, so a handful of rich folks they never met would be able to continue owning black people?
American conservatives have shown for America’s entire existence that they will literally die to subjugate minorities. It’s not a coincidence that the Nazi playbook is a big hit in the Confederate states.
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I sincerely hope you’re right and would prefer this type of outcome, but we’re talking about monumental levels of stupid and assholery, so I’ll keep stocking bullets.
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Oh, if it gets bad enough, bullets will be what it comes to. I’m not going to deny that. But I think even a fascism-loving GOP would boot Trump out of the White House if doing so meant they would save their own asses from angry citizens who want Trump’s head. And there’s no way to get them angrier any faster than fucking with their entitlements—especially for older people who are living off said entitlements.
Blood won’t have to be spilled if the GOP does the right thing if and when the time ultimately comes. But if they don’t…well, no one will be able to say “they weren’t given a chance”.
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Some of them, anyway. Nixon and Bush bottomed out around 25-30% approval; that’s the GOP base that will never turn against a Republican president no matter who he is or what he does.
I suspect Trump’s floor is higher than that, because he’s got a cult of personality those other two guys didn’t.
But I agree with you that a lot of his supporters will turn against him once it starts to affect their pocketbooks. Certainly not all of them, and I don’t think most of them, but a pretty good number — 20-40%, I’d ballpark — and that kind of backlash is enough that at least some Republicans in Congress will start being more afraid of their constituents than they are of Trump.
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I cannot wait until they realize it’s entirely too fucking late for that horseshit.
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They’ll just blame the wokes/DEIs (by which they mean minorities) and their voters will be like “Yeah! That’s right! Them darn ni- I mean DEIs did this! I need to vote Nazi even harder!”
Re: Re: Re: 'My social security and medicare are gone? Must be those demonic democrats!'
As much as I’d like to believe that convicted felon Trump screwing over his own voters will be enough to turn them against him that hasn’t seemed to have worked too well in the past, and that’s not even getting into the cult factor, how the voting base has already been primed to always blame the Other for anything bad that happens to them, and how any republican politician that ‘turns’ on the Dear Leader is likely to face rabid mobs both at the polls and in person comprised of said cult.
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They may change their opinion when they find themselves picking lettuce. SOMEONE is going to have to…
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They’ll pick lettuce, then go home and listen to Faux News tell them how it’s all someone else’s fault. The Dems who wanted equality, the immigrants that did those jobs and commited no crimes, brown people in another country.
These “people” have breathtaking levels of denial and that will not change.
The consequences will befall them, but they will continue to blame everyone but their own bigoted, idiotic asses.
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And “home” will be a dormitory on the corporate-owned factory megafarm that used to be a dozen or so different family farms. I can at least take a little comfort in the fact that rural America will be getting what it voted for, good and hard.
Would be nice if NPR’s CEO could give a fullthroated defense of it (and herself), instead of going for appeasement and apologizing for calling Trump a fascist, and not covering Hunter’s laptop more.
Re: 'It's just a teeny-tiny bit of dane-geld and they'll go away, they promised!'
Some people either haven’t studied history as it applies to appeasing dictators, or are so stupid and/or arrogant as to think that just because it’s failed every time before for everyone else that doesn’t mean that this time it won’t work for them.
Trump Media Group announces Trump Multiplex opening soon!
NPR is a grift… what does that make Trump Media (DJT)? Or any of the other right wing media platforms like Infowars, Parler, Frank Speer and especially Truth Social?
If Trump was projecting any more he’d be opening multiplexes.
What pushes this into dark comedy is the fact that NPR is one of the leading sources of glossing over how completely malicious and stupid Trump and his cronies are since they started their bid for the oval office.
Their appeasement strategy has failed miserably.
Re: NPR: 'Who could have seen that coming?' Anyone familiar with history: 'EVERYONE!'
If only there had been some historical precedent they could have looked back upon to know why try to appease a fascistic dictator is a terrible idea doomed to failure…
White House
“There’s no art in this White House. There’s no literature, no poetry, no music. There are no pets in this White House. No loyal man’s best friend, no Socks the family cat, no kids’ science fairs. No time when the president takes off his blue suit, red tie uniform and becomes human. Except when he puts on his white shirt and khaki pants uniform, and hides from the American people to play golf. There are no images of the first family enjoying themselves together in a moment of relaxation. No Obamas on the beach in Hawaii moments or Bushes fishing in Kennebunkport. No Reagans on horseback. No Kennedys playing touch football on the Cape. Where’d that country go? Where did all the fun, the joy, and the expression of love and happiness go? We used to be the country that did the ice bucket challenge and raised millions for charity. We used to have a president who calmed and soothed the nation instead of dividing it. And a first lady who planted a garden instead of ripping one out. We are rudderless and joyless. We have lost the cultural aspects of society that make America great. We have lost our mojo, our fun, our happiness, our cheering on of others, the shared experience of humanity that makes it all worth it. The challenges and the triumphs that we shared and celebrated, the unique can-do spirit that America has always been known for. We are lost. We’ve lost so much in so short a time…”
Bruce Springsteen