by WorldTribune Staff, July 18, 2025 Real World News
A few months of sucking up to Republicans couldn’t save NPR and PBS after decades of disseminating daily doses of leftist propaganda.
NPR and PBS were stripped of all federal funding in the $9 billion rescission bill that passed the House on Thursday.
“NPR and its allies went on a last-minute blitz to get Republican lawmakers to change their minds, which may be the first time in decades that NPR even bothered to engage them,” Ed Morrissey wrote for HotAir on Friday. “Local stations urged their urban-core progressive listeners of such fare as Microfeminism: The Next Big Thing in Fighting the Patriarchy and These Drag Artists Know How to Turn Climate Activism into a Joyful Blowout to contact their GOP representatives, when it seemed far more likely that their congresspeople were on the other side.”
President Donald Trump wrote in a post to Truth Social:
“HOUSE APPROVES NINE BILLION DOLLAR CUTS PACKAGE, INCLUDING ATROCIOUS NPR AND PUBLIC BROADCASTING, WHERE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR WERE WASTED. REPUBLICANS HAVE TRIED DOING THIS FOR 40 YEARS, AND FAILED….BUT NO MORE. THIS IS BIG!!!”
The New York Times editorial board, which Morrissey noted “has as much connection to rural Americans as NPR and PBS,” insisted in a Wednesday editorial that public broadcasting was a “lifeline” to such communities.
They later edited that out of their headline, but investigative journalist Matt Taibbi screen-capped it, writing:
“It should have run forever. National Public Radio ruined the enterprise, turning the country’s signature public news shows into an endless partisan therapy session, a Nine Perfect Strangers retreat for high-income audiences micro-dosing on Marx and Kendi. Forget conservatives, NPR’s trademark half-whispered stylings linking diets to rape culture or denouncing white teeth as a hangover of colonialism began in recent years to feel like physical punishment to the most apolitical listeners, like having a blind librarian hacksaw your forehead. Even today’s New York Times piece couldn’t argue the bias issue, instead offering a mathematical deflection.”
NPR and PBS argued that cutting off federal funds threatened their “independence.”
Uri Berliner, a longtime editor at NPR, offered them a sarcastic congratulations on their “Independence Day”:
“(NPR CEO Katherine) Maher’s most serious and dubious claim is the one that began her Congressional testimony, her core message about NPR and public media delivering ‘unbiased’ reporting. NPR’s progressivism is obvious to any fair-minded person who listens or reads long enough. If there’s one reason why the Senate just voted to defund NPR, it’s the failure of Maher, or anyone in NPR’s leadership, to acknowledge this basic fact.
“In the first week of November 2022, after a spate of particularly egregious coverage, including a piece entertaining the merits of dumping soup on masterworks in the name of fighting climate change and another suggesting that worries about crime were racist, I emailed a top NPR news executive and said we were headed for trouble.
” ‘The lack of viewpoint diversity and the unwillingness of top editors to push back against one-sided, opinionated journalism is causing great harm to NPR,’ I wrote.
“I predicted that if the GOP swept the upcoming 2022 midterms, NPR would be headed for defunding and ‘and unfortunately, we will have given them the ammunition that they need.’
“My timing was off by a few years.”
But this is just one budget cycle. In the next one, will NPR and PBS get a new lease on feeding at the federal trough?
“Democrats will demand it, and Republicans seem barely able to cut this even when everyone’s looking. Stay tuned,” Morrissey wrote.
Too late: NPR, PBS suddenly started paying attention to Republicans, average Americans added by Editor Two on
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