Liberation Day 2.0: Trump Terminates national backing For NPR And PBS

Authored by Robert Spencer via PJMedia.com,

On Thursday, President Trump gave Americans another Liberation Day: He signed an executive order ending federal funding for two of the left’s principal propaganda organs, National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that these two vicious taxpayer leeches and leftist disinformation entities will disappear, but at least patriots won’t be forced to shell out for programming that is designed to destroy everything they hold dear.

The left, predictably enough, is howling, led by NPR and PBS themselves. NPR issued a statement warning of imminent apocalypse:

“Eliminating funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting [CPB] would have a devastating impact on American communities across the nation that rely on public radio for trusted local and national news, culture, lifesaving emergency alerts and public safety information.”

The statement was yet another example of what a cruel joke NPR and PBS are on the American people. No one actually trusts NPR and PBS except the indoctrinated cadres of the left and those who are uninformed enough to continue to believe in these propaganda organs’ claims to be free from bias. The grim reality is that NPR and PBS are the left at its most cynical, opportunistic, and parasitical. American taxpayers, including those who are patriots, are forced to subsidize two of the left’s shrillest and most nakedly biased mouthpieces, all the while being gaslit about how it’s their patriotic duty to support a free press.

And so Trump wrote in his executive order that the joke was over:

“Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence. The CPB Board shall cease direct funding to NPR and PBS, consistent with my Administration’s policy to ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage. The CPB Board shall cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding.”

That bit about “biased and partisan news coverage,” which is putting the reality of NPR and PBS extremely mildly, is eliciting reactions from the left on the order of the kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar insisting that he doesn’t even like cookies.

CNN laments that “America’s two biggest public broadcasters” have “faced a series of attacks from the White House and Republican lawmakers accusing them of biased reporting.”

The New York Times also pretended that Orange Man Bad and his henchmen were making up this whole bias thing, saying that they were “accusing the outlets of producing biased coverage and ‘left-wing propaganda.’” Note the scare quotes around “left-wing propaganda,” as if no reasonable person could believe that such a thing even exists, much less that NPR and PBS ladle it out to patriots as if they were cigarette-puffing meatballs doling out lunchtime glop to a sweaty chain gang.

Unfortunately, even if leftist judges don’t manage once again to arrogate to themselves the power of the executive branch and overrule Trump’s order, NPR and PBS will survive. The New York Post reports that “both have diverse revenue streams, including major foundation grants, advertising and voluntary viewer and listener donations, meaning that neither is likely to cease operations if they lose federal support.”

Still, if Trump succeeds, taxpayers will save a bit of money: “the CPB is set to receive $535 million in congressionally appropriated funds annually to distribute to public broadcasters in 2025 and 2026.”

Trump summed up what’s at stake in his executive order:

“At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage. No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the Government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize. The CPB’s governing statute reflects principles of impartiality: the CPB may not ‘contribute to or otherwise support any political party.’”

This is simple common sense, and so Trump’s executive order is long overdue. Both NPR and PBS should have been cut off from federal funding the moment that their news coverage became 100% leftist propaganda, but too many leftist presidents benefited from that coverage to take a step of this kind until now. You can bet that if NPR and PBS reflected 100% patriotic perspectives, Barack Obama or Old Joe Biden or maybe even Bill Clinton would have cut them off long ago.

Better late than never.