Ken Burns makes some good movies. I don’t call them documentaries anymore because they’re riddled with errors and he doesn’t seem to have any interest in correcting the record, just hammering the checks. “Ty Cobb was a racist everyone in baseball hated,” is the gist of what was said in “Baseball,” but it wasn’t true, as Charles Leerhsen showed in his brilliant, “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty.” Burns didn’t answer Leerhsen about where he got his false information from, or whether or not he’d tried to actually verify any of the claims he’d made in his film – being Ken Burns means never having to say you’re sorry.
This indifference toward truth, not to mention reality, is just one reason the entire PBS/NPR infrastructure is not just unnecessary, but needs to be destroyed.
My closets are free from clutter from PBS tote bags and Rick Steves DVD box set from donating to fund my local station, or any station associated with the Public Broadcasting System. Most relics of the past I can justify at least the existence of in the context of the time in which they were created – unions, for example, were useful in improving workplace safety in a time when if you were killed on the job thanks to employer negligence or indifference, your family was pretty well screwed before them – but most have outlived their usefulness or failed to adapt with the times (like unions).
But it’s not just that these publicly funded outlets are biased, it’s that they are rotten to their core.
They are the playthings for billionaires. For all the whining about Elon Musk leftists do, they embrace the hell out of billionaires when no one is looking.
Laurene Powell Jobs, who “made” her fortune by marrying Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and outliving him, bought The Atlantic a few years ago to be her progressive plaything (it’s amazing how leftists who inherit or fall into wealth have a compulsion to “do something” in politics, I suspect, in an attempt to fool the world into thinking they’ve actually done something with their lives too).
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Jobs recently bought the PBS show “Washington Week,” now called “Washington Week with The Atlantic,” turning what was already leftist propaganda into branded leftist propaganda. If this accidental billionaire can afford to buy a show on the “public” channel, she can afford to pay to put it on a privately owned channel. Taxpayers don’t need to be involved in the operation at all.
Newsbusters reports, “Laurene, one of Kamala Harris’s biggest bankrollers and confidantes, isn’t alone. David Rubenstein has bought himself several chat shows on PBS. As long as you’re a progressive billionaire, no one in ‘public’ broadcasting objects – and nobody inside their bubble cares about conservative taxpayers if and when they object to funding this ideological boondoggle.”
I don’t have a problem with rich liberals buying themselves shows, I have a problem with even one penny of anyone’s tax dollars being used to support that proposition.
Washington Week is Pravda for the progressive state on steroids, with its host, Atlantic chief tool Jeffrey Goldberg, living so far up the backside of the Democratic Party he can see what they ate before it gets digested. But the checks clear, so there’s that.
DOGE needs to not only cut off taxpayer funding for NPR and PBS, the Trump administration needs to reclaim as much of the money they’ve already blown as possible.
In 2013, NPR built itself a $201 million headquarters on some of the most expensive real estate in DC. If they have that kind of money, they don’t need ours. Given the product they put out, they don’t deserve ours either.
If these “public broadcasters” are going to be dominated by one side, the unpopular side, of the political spectrum, let those people pay for it or let them sell ads. Or let it die, I don’t really care. I just don’t want another penny for tax money to go to it.
The CEO of PBS made more than $1 million in 2020. According to their filings, “Total expenses were $495 million. However, $178 million were donated broadcast rights and $136 million was depreciation, meaning cash expenses were $181 million (50% of cash revenue), with the largest expense ($76 million or 21% of cash revenue) being compensation for the 591 employees, who received an average compensation of $129,000.”
To hell with them, cut them off. If they have to take a pay cut, good. If they go out of business, I don’t care. They need to be made to sink or swim on their own.
When you mention defunding these propagandists to a leftist drone you inevitably get the standard, “It’s really just pennies that they get from your taxes, an insignificant amount.” Good, since it’s so insignificant they can do without it.
The Trump administration needs to cut off taxpayer funds to every institution that is part of the left-wing industrial complex, which includes every sociology research grant and pretty much every non-medical penny sent to universities and NGOs around the world and in the US.
Make the left-wing donor class pick up the tab or lose the propaganda benefits they rely on from the garbage these dollars belch up. Make them put their money where their mouths are by diverting funds to these endeavors or killing them altogether. Either way, the American people win.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.
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