Every morning from 6 to 9 on 850 WTAR Mike Imprevento and I host The Kerry and Mike talk radio show. Across the hall from our studio are the busy offices of the Sinclair Communications sales staff.

These tireless men and women hustle to sell ads on our stations. They solicit local companies and national corporations and political campaigns, trying to convince these enterprises that our good ratings and goodwill in the community will sell their products or candidates.

Radio advertising pays. It really does.

Meanwhile, across town, is the soporific local National Public Radio affiliate broadcasts. They don’t need an aggressive sales staff because they don’t need advertisers. Instead, they rake in tax dollars year after year regardless of how poor their ratings are or how unpopular their product. They do this through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which gets more than $500 million a year to distribute to about 1,500 radio and TV stations.

The balance of their funds for come through their semi-annual begathons.

NPR and PBS like to claim that direct federal funding totals a tiny portion of their budgets. That’s lame. Our tax dollars make up an estimated 17% or more of the network’s budget. 

Public broadcasting may not be government controlled, but it’s definitely government funded.

And that’s the problem.

The fact that NPR doesn’t simply lean left, it’s hard left, only serves as salt in the wound.

Naturally, newspaper editorial boards almost universally support public broadcasting. I suspect their attitude would change if there was a National Public Newspaper using tax dollars to compete with their private sector jobs.

Why should the tax dollars I pay from my radio job go to support a competitor? Anyone?

For that matter, why should anyone have our tax dollars confiscated and turned over to a television or radio broadcasting company?

In March of last year Uri Berliner, an NPR business editor for 25 years, created a media earthquake when he wrote an expose on the NPR propaganda machine masquerading as an impartial news organization.

Read it, please. Berliner is shocking in his honesty about what passes as objectivity in government-sponsored media.

Berliner documented that there were no conservatives working in public radio. None. Worse, there was an active attempt to suppress news - like the Hunter Biden laptop - that hurt Democrats and helped Republicans.

There is a bill in Congress now to cut off all public funds to the Corporation For Public Broadcasting. Supporters of PBS and NPR wax poetic about “Sesame Street” and a handful of other popular programs.

Their argument is weak.

If “Sesame Street” went off the public airways, it would be picked up immediately by commercial television. Disney, for instance.

Not true for most of the other eat-your-peas public programming.

Berliner left NPR shortly after his blistering piece was published at The Free Press. He claimed that defunding NPR was not the answer.

The hell it isn’t.