A herculean effort in Congress saved taxpayers 0.1% in spending rescissions, including cutting $1.1 billion in spending on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funnels taxpayer money to National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). CPB soon announced its pending closure after the funding cut, and affluent urban liberals bemoaned the fact that poorer, rural Americans might not have to scroll past NPR on their radio dial.
NPR CEO Katherine Maher lamented, “The ripple effects of this closure will be felt across every public media organization and, more importantly, in every community across the country that relies on public broadcasting.”
Advocates say as many as 115 local TV and radio stations could close without taxpayer funding. With the concern appropriate for a major city’s leading newspaper, The New York Times reports, “Many of those stations are in rural areas, like remote regions of Alaska and Kansas, where residents don’t have access to alternate sources of news and information.”
Well, America may have averted a major crisis.
Several foundations famous for funding left-wing causes are stepping in to raise money to keep NPR and PBS stations afloat, and they’ve been working out a plan for nearly a year. “The group is aiming to raise additional money for the fund and hopes to reach $50 million this year,” reports the Times. The Washington Post adds that $37 million has already been raised, and “the fund aims to raise $100 million over two years — roughly equivalent to what the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would have provided to the most vulnerable stations.”
Now, if you’re doing the math at home, that’s $100 million to fill a $1.1 billion hole. The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman marveled at that same math:
Even for those who believe in state-backed media, this does seem to raise questions about the overall amount as well as the allocation of the $1.1 billion in funding. After its rescission, CPB support for the most vulnerable stations can be replaced for just $100 million? Perhaps there are similar bargains to be found elsewhere across the federal landscape if taxpayer subsidies are permitted to recede. Washington budgeteers should seek to identify other recipients of federal largesse capable of surviving and even thriving as independent entities.
It certainly would seem like wealthy white liberals could put their wallets together for stuff like this and save the rest of us a lot of money.
The groups leading the fundraising are the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, Pivotal Ventures, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Just in case you’re wondering, these are a who’s who of rich left-wingers.
For example, the Knight Foundation is a major backer of the speech-suppression outfit we love most: NewsGuard, as well as donating $5 million to Howard University so that Nikole Hannah-Jones of “1619 Project” fame can have a cushy job. Each of the other foundations has likewise given to terrible causes, such as race-hustler Ibram X. Kendi.
The takeaway is twofold. NPR and PBS have long been biased — often grossly so — toward Democrats and the Left. They deny it, of course, stubbornly standing by their pretense of objective journalism. But who’s saving them? Wealthy white liberals. That will almost certainly reinforce the leftism in news coverage and lead many NPR and PBS personnel to abandon the pretense altogether.
