Former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller told MSNBC yesterday that “I have long believed that mixing journalism and federal funding is just a recipe for disaster.”
As The Daily Wire notes, “This comes as the Senate passed Trump’s $9 billion rescissions package on Sunday, which is awaiting the President’s signature to become law. The bill repeals over $1 billion in federal funding allocated to public media, including broadcast corporations like PBS and NPR.”
“In many ways, I think this is an opportunity for a reset,” Schiller observed. “I think the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was a very bureaucratic organization that was, still is today, doling out that money, will go away. Let’s reset. Let’s come up with a new governance structure.”
Congressional Democrats claimed cutting off federal funding to NPR and PBS would leave rural communities without access to news, even though only a tiny percentage of people in rural areas listen to PBS and even fewer listen to NPR. Very few people in the countryside read NPR or PBS articles on the web, according to media traffic websites such as Similarweb and Google Analytics.
Absurdly, the purple-haired Congresswoman Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, claims that rural communities are “frightened to death” that “they’re not going to have access to important information or alerts about weather situations, information that they need to know, education for their kids, because they’re not in communities where there are multiple sources of information.”
But former NPR CEO Schiller cast doubt on such claims: “Those of us that care about local journalism are going to help them,” she said. “I tend to look at the bright side of life and say let’s just find a better way forward, because there were problems with the former system,” she added.
As The Daily Wire notes, “The rescissions bill passed the House 51-48, largely along party lines. Republicans have long accused NPR and PBS of having a liberal bias.”
“NPR reported that country music and birds are racist, told American people to stop eating beef, and promoted the Russia-gate conspiracy. No person with a brain above a single-celled organism would call these articles fair and balanced,” Senator John Kennedy said in a series of replies to current NPR CEO Katherine Maher’s challenge to critics to list any example of bias.
“NPR reported that there is no evidence that biological men have an unfair advantage over biological women in sports. NPR also called America’s interstate highways racist. I did not know our highways were racist. I thought they were concrete, but not according to NPR.”
