Not Another Dime For Public Broadcasting
Defund it already.
I’m talking about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. After yesterday’s clown show on Capitol Hill we should take away every last dime they get from unwitting taxpayers.
Do it today, Congress.
Spare us the agony of watching a couple of woke lefties with apparent amnesia twisting themselves into knots as they try to disavow their past Marxist statements on Capitol Hill.
I’m talking, of course, about the far left girl bosses that run National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service.
They were in Washington yesterday trying to defend the leftist propaganda machines they run but all they managed was to look moronic.
For instance, the chair of PBS indignantly denied using a drag queen on a kids’ TV show, only to backpedal and say that while the pervert didn’t actually appear on the show, he was “mistakenly” featured on the website of a New York City PBS website and later removed.
Oh please.
America’s had enough with the cross-dressers. Keep them FAR away from kids.
And get a load of Katherine Maher, NPR’s CEO. She was eaten alive yesterday by Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas at a hearing dubbed “Anti-American Airwaves : Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.”
In his Washington Post column of March 14, George Will made a compelling case to defund public broadcasting, arguing that it has outlived its dubious purpose decades ago.
If there are any actual, as distinct from merely rhetorical, fiscal hawks in Washington, they should be calling attention to the dismal fact that the government added $838 billion to the national debt in just the first four months of fiscal 2025 (October through January). The lowest of the low-hanging fruit for budget-cutters is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an ornamental entity, decorative but inessential.
Last year’s appropriation of $535 million brought spending on the CPB to over $15 billion since its 1967 founding. It was then a late piece in Lyndon B. Johnson’s mosaic of national perfection called the Great Society.
The CPB’s Public Broadcasting Service, launched 55 years ago, at least increased many Americans’ network television choices from three (CBS, NBC, ABC) to four. Thirty years ago, however, PBS improvidently adopted the slogan “If PBS doesn’t do it, who will?” Today, the antecedent of “it” can be almost anything, and the “who” will be many of the hundreds of channels available even on smartphones in scores of millions of Americans’ pockets.
In addition to today’s approximately 15,000 commercial AM and FM radio stations and more than 425 satellite radio channels in the United States, there are over 4 million registered podcasts worldwide, with more than 500 million listeners, an increase of 40 million in the past year. With this mind-boggling menu of choices, should we really spend more than half a billion dollars a year for a few more options, many of them duplicative?
Taxpayers supply about 10% of the funding for NPR and about 16% of PBS’s budget. Most of the rest comes from donations.
Surely the handful of devotees of public broadcasting can reach into their own wallets and make up the difference once the public spigot is cut off.
To support this argument, Will points out the public broadcasting only appeals to the well-heeled upper crust of American society.
According to Market Enginuity, an advertising firm, “If one were to combine the average statistics for PBS viewers on a national level, they would likely find a married homeowning woman who is in her 30s or 40s,” who “takes at least 3 vacations each year” and “holds a post-graduate degree.”
THREE vacations a year? How about cutting back to just two trips and coughing up a little more dough for your leftie programming, ladies?
Oh, and here’s Will’s money shot:
CPB is like the human appendix: vestigial, purposeless and susceptible to unhealthy episodes. In 2025, it is a cultural redundancy whose remaining rationale is, amusingly, that government should subsidize its programing because so few want it.
The country is more than $30 trillion in debt. Cuts must be made. Let’s defund something that only a few woke elitists will miss.
Slashing $535 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will be easy.
Get out the scalpels, Congress. This cut won’t hurt a bit!
