…when I started working in America I switched from being awoken by the birdcalls of RNZ’s Morning Report to NPR’s Morning Edition theme song. At 6pm every evening I watched the superb MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, taping it if I was working late. The TV part of PBS was about the only American TV that seemed to have great documentaries, current affairs like Frontline and the science show, Nova, and which also pulled in British favourites..

September 13, 1993

It was delicious enough news that Late Night with Colbert is being taken off the air, but on its heels came the news that the so-called Rescission Bill had been passed by Congress and signed into law, stripping $1.1 billion from National Public Radio (NPR), the American equivalent of Radio New Zealand (RNZ)

This led to much screaming from all the usual Lefty suspects, starting with NPR CEO Katherine Maher who produced this argument for keeping the funding:

There’s a real understanding of the need there, as well as for emergency alerting, in which public media plays an extraordinarily important role…

Seriously? In the year 2025, between cellphones, wireless internet and Starlink, this woman thinks that a 19th century technology is essential to warning rural areas? It’s entirely typical of her Professional Management Class and an unaware confession that she, NPR as a whole, and its remaining listeners, do not have a fucking clue about American rural areas, or most Americans for that matter. They probably think rural Americans walk on dirt floors, get water from the well, fire up kerosene lamps every night and only go to town once a month, with a mule, to pick up supplies for the farm, including batteries for the radio. I can imagine the emergency scenario:

Pa: “Looks like them storm clouds are making little rat-tails towards the ground.“
Ma: “We better turn on NPR and find out what’s going on.“
NPR: “And now our story on how ‘These Drag Artists Know How to Turn Climate Activism into a Joyful Blowout‘”

Yes, that last was a real news item, along with these:

Rural folks know the scam:

  • I live rural. FYI if a weather emergency or natural disaster is headed our way the weather app on our phones tells us but NPR does not. Regional or local issues get out on Nextdoor but not NPR. The only time NPR will touch it is if they can blame it on climate change.
  • My family’s rural homestead is 1 hour from a grocery store – but we have 1 gig fiber.
  • I grew up on a farm in a rural area and we listened to the weather and commodities report ( aka “pig report”) on the radio every morning at breakfast. Public broadcasting didn’t exist yet and that station still does.

Aside from such facts on the ground nobody would believe her since this heartfelt appeal contrasted with all the shit she’s vomited up over the years:

She’s a vegetarian. She hates cars. And white men flying on planes. She supports race-based reparations, rioting, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She believes“America is addicted to white supremacy.” She doesn’t want to become a mother because “the planet is literally burning.” She uses phrases such as “CIS white mobility privilege” unironically. She admits to growing up “feeling superior … because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves.”

She was the perfect choice to be their leader, as was pointed out by a former NPR journalist and editor, Uri Berliner, who wrote a scathing article in The Free Press about NPR, which I covered here in early 2024 as part of a general piece on the Left ideological bias of the MSM (How climate change is hitting vulnerable Indonesian trans sex workers):

We were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.” …Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.
…
Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.

Berliner was fired from NPR as a result and they denied the bias – while doubling down on “diversity”, “inclusion” and all the rest. The examples of the bias are almost endless but here are seven of the worst, starting with Hunter Biden’s Laptop Is A “Pure Distraction”, COVID-19 Was Not Created In A Lab (of course) and Transgender Truckers.

The contrast between the internal mindset described by Berliner, with the stories it produced, and the CEO’s bullshit defence is astounding:

Public funding has enabled the flourishing of a uniquely American system of unparalleled cultural, informational, and educational programming, and ensured access to vital emergency alerting and reporting in times of crisis — all for about $1.60 per American, every year. Parents and children, senior citizens and students, tribal and rural communities — all will bear the harm of this vote.

Naturally her comrades the New York Times, got in on the action with the same clueless takes.

Journalist Matt Taibbi gleefully saw that they later edited out the “lifeline” bit and as a Lefty himself, listed their problems:

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,…

He gives them kudos for their past and that rang a bell with me because when I started working in America I switched from being awoken by the birdcalls of RNZ’s Morning Report to NPR’s Morning Edition theme song. At 6pm every evening I watched the superb MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, taping it if I was working late. The TV part of PBS was about the only American TV that seemed to have great documentaries, current affairs like Frontline and the science show, Nova, and which also pulled in British favourites, as Taibbi notes:

They produced pioneering programs ranging from NOVA to This Old House to Frontline, and introduced Americans to cool foreign programs like Doctor Who, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and I, Claudius. The quintessential PBS show was informative and quirky without pulling ideological threads, even if its Masterpiece roster sometimes over-scratched the upscale viewer’s costume-drama itch. From nature shows to comedy to documentaries, PBS was a sound counterweight to the boobs-and-car-chase lineups on commercial TV, providing the most remote communities with quality programming.

Commercial American TV in the 1990’s was largely dreck (with a few standout exceptions like “Frasier”) and is even worse now. PBS thus could be an alternative, just as NPR could be to commercial radio, but they killed themselves, as Taibbi showed when he asked his SubStack subscribers, “What’s everyone’s favorite ridiculous NPR story?”

Examples poured down. The COVID era was NPR’s definite nadir, with daily shrieking about the need for social distancing and the shunning of vaccine deniers. Tweeters pointed out stories like NPR’s advocating for a permanent ban on handshakes. “I remember a host shaming and ridiculing a guest for advocating for schools to re-open for in-person learning,” someone wrote. Several chimed in with the NPR tweet that “a new poll finds 40 percent of respondents believe in a baseless conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was created in a lab in China.” There were plenty of moments where NPR backed the Steele Dossier or said that the Hunter Biden laptop story was fiction.

Plus hundreds more…

But the funniest examples involved not important and highly-politicized news stories, but ridiculous cultural agenda reporting that mattered to almost no one. NPR has claimed, over the years, that country music has an implicit racial bias, that dieting is racist, and gave a lot of airtime to the woman who wrote the book “In Defense of Looting,” very relatable to the average listener.

The Spectator article brings up the same nostalgia that Taibbi and I have about PBS/NPR:

It’s sad because NPR did have a heyday, in the 80s and 90s, when it was the square but sensible voice of cultural liberalism, the light professorial soundtrack to millions of lives. But that era of Car Talk, whimsical Garrison Keillor songs about fake Midwestern products, Terry Gross interviews with David Byrne, mildly risqué David Sedaris essays, and Susan Stamberg reports from wherever is long in the past.

That NYT article struggles to defend NPR and actually gave the game away:

Republicans complain, not always wrongly, that public media reflects left-leaning assumptions and biases

Not always wrongly eh? So how much is that? The NYT does not say, and you can be sure its readers, unlike Taibbi’s, would not be able to supply even dozens of ridiculous NPR stories, let alone hundreds.

Yet the “national” part of NPR (or National Public Radio, as it used to call itself) that chafes conservatives may well be just fine without federal funds. Only about 2 percent of its budget comes directly from the federal government, and it may have an easier time raising money from its many dedicated listeners if Congress punishes it.

Why that’s exactly what Right-Wingers have been saying for the last twenty years. Well done NYT.

Of course the same NYT earlier did an investigation that showed that NPR’s weekly audience has dropped from an estimated 60 million in 2020 to about 42 million today, so raising funds may be more of a struggle than they think. And NPR derives a significant chunk of its revenue from member stations who use public funds to purchase its programs. That’s still a federal subsidy, only less direct, and not as easily made up by “dedicated listeners.”

Frankly I can’t wait until this asshole is out on the street begging for donations from George Soros.