This is a giant thread full of people lamenting the demise of public broadcasting so it seems like someone should write the comment that points out that CPB doesn't do PBS programming. They don't develop content. They're a grantmaking organization that manages the distribution of the congressional PBS appropriation.
The actual PBS and NPR shows you're familiar with are generally developed and produced privately, and then purchased by local PBS stations (streaming access to PBS content runs through "Passport", which is a mechanism for getting people to donate to their local PBS station even while consuming that content on the Internet). This (and other streaming things like it) is how most people actually consume this content in 2025. If your local PBS affiliate vanishes, you as a viewer are not going to lose Masterpiece Theater or Nova, because you almost certainly weren't watching those shows on linear television anyways.
The cuts are bad, I just want to make sure people understand what CPB ceasing operations actually means.
This is one place some sorta "trickle down" economics worked. CPB contributed to developing the content on PBS. Now PBS either has to cut costs by either canceling programs or ordering cheaper content that corporate sponsors like, run more pledge drives, or seek more corporate sponsors. None of those are appealing to me.
Also CPB helps keep rural stations open means all the niche local productions about state history or geology or whatever can happen.
It's a cut to the already strained budget of a wonderful resource. I'd be surprised if there weren't lost jobs and less quality as a result.
Edit to add: Just sentimental but I'll miss hearing "this program was made possible by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions from viewers like you!"
I think the cuts are bad and certainly there will be programming losses. It's just not an existential threat to public media in America, which has over the last 20 years become far less dependent on local stations. GBH, which produces Frontline, gets $177MM in revenue from major donors and viewer subscriptions.
I don't know if I'm the only one that finds fault with:
> GBH, which produces Frontline, gets $177MM in revenue from major donors and viewer subscriptions.
Given Frontline is a production for public consumption, for public good, it shouldn't have to be financed by donations, it absolutely should be financed by the federal government.
I find your tone (sorry) offensive, in the sense that you DON'T find it dramatic and just plain terrible that CPB had to cease operations, just because billionaires feel it's a waste of "money that could be in their pocket" and obviously they prefer the greater population to be clueless and ignorant.
Me? I am furious. But what can I do besides the usual? Write my congresscritters, call them, write angry posts on Hackernews, donate?
I guess you could blame Craigslist for commoditizing their competitor’s complement, which mattered because newspapers found their lunch being eaten from both ends: first by Craigslist with classified ads (which CL capitalized on with low-ish transparent flat fees for job, rental, real estate, and commercial posts), then by Facebook, which first became a direct source of truth for citizens to find local and regional newsworthy information, and then again when Facebook Marketplace became a competitor with classified ads in newspapers and on Craigslist.
Elon Musk talks about wanting X to be a super app, and I think he’s jealous of Zuck and Meta. Meta is a super app without having to be one, but since the failure of Libra Meta has been trying to get another bite at a similarly large apple, and general purpose AI isn’t a bad one to bob for, and X is trying to swim in those same waters.
It's unfortunate, but as someone who's been on HN since probably 2010, I remember the ethos of this site to news like this used to be a lot more "let's find an opportunity" – maybe I'm looking with rose colored glasses.
People would say "should we setup a donation site" or "how can we build a product that saves local affiliate stations money" etc etc etc. Maybe that's still happening quietly. But I just see a lot more doom nowadays in HN comments. (Just a feeling, obviously no data whatsoever to back it up)
> how can we build a product that saves local affiliate stations money
Let's bring back those supposed good 'ol days!
What are some valid business models that could successfully fund local affiliates? Knowing nothing of the industry, some initial questions come to mind:
- Is there value in cross-affiliate connections and referrals where a broadcasting association could work?
- Direct donations seems like a filled market, but what about donation pooling?
- Does private equity have an interest in these affiliates and why or why not?
- Is there a product in marketing and branding local stations that appeases YouTube and related algorithms? Would this fundamentally work against the mission?
- Are there potential alternatives for some of the alerting products provided by the rural areas, that is lost in this process?
- Can we also use some of the same tech that's used by influencers, etc to reduce the costs for local affiliates? Like could the shows be produced at home, with cheaper gear, reducing their in-studio costs?
- Program scheduling can be done in the cloud, and maybe the content can be posted on YouTube for more monetization options, however small?
- It could overall lower the costs involved in running a station.
It doesn’t help that many of even those rose-colored startups created 15 years ago have since crossed the rubicon.
It’s solid PR to mumble something about effective altruism being the justification for predatory capitalist behavior.
It just becomes hard to believe after the company was sold and the employees screwed over and the customers screwed over and the founders used their gains to financially support whatever authoritarian fantasies they had all along.
Turns out, people who are good at being ruthless aren’t doing so for a secret ethical reason: they’re just ruthless people.
Yeah... I have no idea why HNers seem more negative these days?
We are now in a timeline where dramatic concerns are legitimate. I would love to be proven wrong on this, but there's plenty of clues to show that I'm not.
Next up in the timeline - when a bad jobs report lands, the person reporting the unwanted data gets fired [0]. Undoubtedly a toadie will be put in their place who will report numbers that make fearless leader look better.
We are now well on our way to George Orwell's 1984 dystopia.
Honestly no one knows but two scenarios could play out:
1. The economy goes bad quickly as actoes realize they cant rely on data to make rational economic decisions.
2. Certain actors pay some quasi-governmental organization (say, "Friends of Mar-a-Lago Book Club") to get access to more accurate data, on the agreement that they make the stock market go brrrr, and they continue to make money.
PBS stations in major markets will likely be able to carry on due to donations and corporate underwriting, but stations in rural areas (the types of places where Internet streaming is less viable due to poor infrastructure) will be heavily affected. Some rural stations get up to half their budgets from the CPB, and these cuts will likely make them have to shut down. In heavily rural states like West Virginia, Alaska, New Mexico, and Montana, the average public media station relies on CPB funding for over 30% of its budget. All of those stations are now at risk. More information: https://current.org/2025/04/heres-how-much-public-media-reli...
I think the idea that people in rural markets are watching PBS OTA linear content is a claim that will need to be supported with evidence. Linear television is dead, pretty much everywhere.
In Montana, a state with a population of 1.1 million, Montana PBS estimated around 250,000 weekly TV viewers and Montana Public Radio estimated 70-80 thousand weekly radio listeners as of a couple weeks ago. https://www.krtv.com/news/montana-and-regional-news/montana-...
I looked only at the New Mexico numbers, and they seem to be dwarfed by their own streaming numbers through Passport. Those OTA viewers are just going to switch to streaming.
If New Mexicans were truly going to turn en masse to PBS Passport streaming, why haven't they done so already?
– Nearly one in five households lacks any fixed home internet connection. Many of those rely on cellular data that’s unreliable or capped, i.e. not viable for high‑quality streaming. [1]
– Over 20% of residents, especially in rural and tribal areas, live in broadband deserts where wired speeds of 25/3 Mbps simply aren’t available. [2]
– Among tribal communities, up to 80% of individuals may lack internet access altogether. [3]
– Even for those who can stream, broadband plans often cost around $69/month, and Passport itself requires a donation of at least $60/year or $5/month. [1][4] That may not sound like a lot to us, but it’s a non-trivial monthly expense for a family living in the 6th-poorest state in the US. [5]
Public broadcasting remains vital for people without digital access, whether due to infrastructure shortages, affordability, or demographic factors like age and tech comfort. Streaming can complement, but cannot replace, over‑the‑air reach in New Mexico. The same is likely true for overlapping reasons in the other states that OP mentioned.
this thread so patiently explains to us that these people do not even exist. Oh, but not in significant numbers. Oh, but they have other options. Oh, but they will get broadband in 20 years.
Nobody who MATTERS is impacted. Nothing to see here, move along. /s
The NM report says that there were 900,000 total Passport streams in 2024. Because there are 52 weeks in a year, that's an average of only about 17,300 streams per week.
If you're accusing them of lying on their report because it disagrees with the off-the-cuff remark you made about OTA TV being dead everywhere, then I'm not sure what I can do. I'm not a journalist. Personally I find it inspiring that New Mexico PBS has managed to become one of the most watched PBS stations in the country (often in the top 10 for prime-time viewership) when it serves the 37th most populous state, and feel that it's a great example of how public broadcasting is able to reach underserved communities.
No, I don't think New Mexico PBS is lying. I think it's much more likely that we don't understand the stat we're arguing about. Uh, I'm just going to come out and say it: even in 1995, at the height of linear television, 80+% of the NM market was not watching PBS. Sorry, this doesn't pencil out.
Streaming is not viable in the vast majority of the country. Just because it's available to the vast majority of the population doesn't mean that the minority who live in rural areas don't count.
For the small number of people using it, it’s better to spend the money on internet infrastructure to bring them into the current century. Broadcast tv is one step up from old time radio.
This sounds awfully close to "If I were poor, I would simply choose not to be poor."
If you were in a place without internet streaming, consider whether you’d have the economic means to pay for Starlink. Not everyone is earning the median Hacker News contributor’s income.
"Musk gave out free Starlinks during Hurricane Helene."
Did he?
> As it turns out, the offer wasn’t as generous as it seemed, it’s really more of a new customer promotion.
> The Register pointed out that if anyone goes to sign up for the “free” service, there’re hit with a harsh reality: you have to pay for the equipment.
> But try to sign up for the ostensibly “free” service in an area Starlink has designated as a Helene disaster zone, and surprise: You still have to pay for the terminal (normally $350, but reportedly discounted to $299 for disaster relief, though that’s not reflected in Starlink’s signup page), plus shipping and tax, bringing the grand total to just shy of $400...
> According to the Starlink Helene page, new customers who qualify for free access will be automatically moved to a paid $120-a-month residential subscription tied to the location the terminal was set up for after 30 days.
> Even if you’re a victim that happens to be an existing Starlink customer, if you want those fees waived, you’ll have to file a waiver and then wait for it to be approved. [1]
Not sure why you're taking the world's richest sociopath at his word. And even if he were as charitable as you say (which I obviously don’t stipulate), that would mean... what? We wait for another Hurricane Helene to hit every person without internet access? Then wait even longer for a billionaire to bail them out?
Nice cherry-picking. Your post framed it like Musk was Father Christmas, handing out gifts to needy kids. It’s more like Columbia House [1] for internet access, and targeting hurricane victims to boot.
So “help” and “buyer beware” are now synonyms. Got it.
> Complaining that someone would have to fill out a form to get free money is not a compelling argument.
Again, A+ effort on the cherry-picking. I call BS on the expectation that hurricane victims will read the fine print about a $120/month rate increase after they’ve just lost their homes. If Musk’s goal is to “help” hurricane victims, maybe he can offer them something better than a bait-and-switch.
If those stations go off the air, who is buying that content?
It's like arguing it doesn't matter if the stream dries up the plants don't get water from the stream, the plants get the water from the ground. Where did that water in the ground come from? The stream!
You're right, these shows aren't going off the air tomorrow. But this does affect the funding for the shows produced by PBS and NPR.
This would make sense if CPB cuts meant all stations were going off the air, but the major market stations where most of the money comes from are fine.
If 20% of your pretty static set of clients went bankrupt wouldn't that pretty negatively affect your company? Or would it only affect it if all your clients went bankrupt?
> because you almost certainly weren't watching those shows on linear television anyways.
I'm just one person, but I definitely am watching the local PBS over an antenna, and so do several members of my family (living in different households).
The local broadcast is excellent quality, I get a good signal to it, never any glitches, and I enjoy the local news and other programming too.
I don’t watch my local PBS over antenna much anymore, but it is great, just like you describe. Amazing what you can watch for free OTA, when you think about it.
CPB doesn't create programming. But they do write grants to the stations that purchase the programming. Isn't that just funding the creation of the programming with several steps in between?
> The actual PBS and NPR shows you're familiar with are generally developed and produced privately, and then purchased by local PBS stations
Purchased using funds from CPB. Most of the grants went to stations, not content producers. But pulling funds from stations will in fact harm the content producers too.
The PBS budget has been cut by 15%, and the NPR budget by 1%. That's not enough to end either one at the national level. However, local stations depend on the CPB funding for 50% or more of their budgets. (Local stations provide local disaster alert systems and local programming.) There will definitely be local station closures and major cutbacks in the stations that survive. Large metropolitan areas will be the least affected. PBS and NPR will continue at the national level, as before.
The funding cuts are the result of an executive order that Trump issued on May 1, ordering the immediate cessation of all federal funding. Similar executive orders have been found to be illegal in federal court. (Congress had already guaranteed funding for CPB from 2025-2027, and only congress can take that money away.)
However, congress supported Trump a short while later (on July 24) by passing the Rescissions Act, which officially (and legally) ended all funding for CPB. And that's the reason for the current crisis: all federal funding for CPB is ending by the end of this year, which is only a few months away.
> PBS and NPR will continue at the national level, as before.
It is not a given that they will continue as they did before, CPB's funding mostly goes to PBS and NPR for content, some programs are funded more than other via the CPB.
It is likely PBS and NPR will continue, but not as before, the cuts will impact programming and their ability to buy content that's produced at smaller stations that rely on CPB funds more.
I have NEVER tuned into PBS for weather and disaster alerts. Growing up in rural America I've seen this headline multiple times, but I'm 99% sure in my community PBS doesn't actually do any weather coverage during tornadoes or similar. You MIGHT get a required alert tone and a banner, but no radar or anything of real value.
Our local news stations do an amazing job and they don't ask me to donate.
I spent over a week in an area that went without electricity and most utilities after a widespread disaster. By virtue of living through one previously, I had a generator hooked up to the gas line, so I still had power during and after this disaster.
Internet access was down, cable was down, cell service wasn't there or was overloaded 2G that was useless, but I had did have OTA DTV. The local PBS partner station covered pertinent information about what was going on, recovery efforts, when/where to get fuel and other assistance, what kind of disaster relief to expect and when, etc.
Wasn't service supplied during the Helene hurricane with Starlink?
When I was a kid in Kansas in the 1960s, the tornado warnings were done with a siren. And yes, we got hit by a tornado, but were safe because we heeded the siren.
With a quick search online, here's a list of the donation links for the 21 states that are currently listed as "Red" (based on 270toWin.com). It's kind of a Googlish reply.
Some are a little difficult because they're kind of fractured, like Missouri is a St. Louis link, Texas is an Austin link, Tennessee is a Nashville link, so its challenging to tell if your donation is going to the state in general or just the local town PBS. (May want to check specifically if you're targeting a specific market). Most tend to be statewide portals. However, you seem like you want to support PBS, so here's some links.
One of the biggest viewerships of these programs is the 2,500,000 prisoners in the USA. Most jails and prisons just pump the cheapest broadcast plans around to all the televisions in the facilities. I speak to people in prisons regularly and I'm often asked for schedules for things like NOVA.
PBS doesn’t make PBS content either. They acquire it from people who make it using CPB money, among others. Then the stations that don’t make the content license it from PBS, mainly using CPB money. And they use it to attract members/donors.
You’ve framed this as if the disappearance of CPB and its money is basically a big nothing-burger, which is extremely far from the truth.
Source: I work in the system at a level with visibility into these things.
I don't think it's a nothing-burger. I think there will be programming cuts and layoffs even in the major market stations. But it's clearly not an existential threat to PBS.
not something one gets to say very often, but you're insufficiently cynical, tptacek.
killing this means cutting of swathes of simple, orderly funding. what remains is donations etc, which is far less regular, and requires work to get, and is also easily attackable by presidential fiat.
we already know there's a bunch of actual lunatics in charge of the federal government, with a very wide variety of very stupid hobby horses. they get to ride them now and then, so how about some guesses at future trips:
- IRS starts going after big non-profit donors to public broadcasters, claiming they're in breach of some somewhat arbitrary and subjective rule that's been poorly enforced in the past, I don't know foundation disbursement rate or something, but also nudge nudge wink wink, if you stopped giving to PBS, maybe we'd forget about it
- FEC "clarifies" that promoting non-traditional-sexuality or whatever is political and thus it's illegal for non-profits to fund it, which of course would be an extremely funny turn given how the Right Wing Lunatics Association of America actually couped the country. this could of course be enforced entirely randomly - go after the NPR stations that are loud and annoying, go after the individual donors to them that the regime wants to make an example of.
- Congress passes some law that "clarifies" the purpose of non-profit status or something, to exclude anti-American speech, which is of course a clear abridgment of the 1st amendment, but of course that's fine in 2025 if it targets notional enemies of the regime.
killing this corporation just grants more power to the extremely partisan executive branch and extremely corrupted government and turns ever more of the functioning of the United States in to just expressions of the whims of the supreme leader and his favoured courtiers.
the current deliberate structural destruction of the united states seems underappreciated - every one of these moves turns the country in to more of a Whimocracy and destroys the bedrock of society that let it weather past terrible administrations.
Nixon was a historically horrible president, but the Washington Post fucking took him down. now almost all the big media is owned by Rich Cunts who make a public show of displaying subservience to the Dear Leader.
So this certainly won't be the death of PBS, as I had feared.
Update 2: For the record (easier to respond in this original post than to each response), I am not defending the decision at all. I grew up listening to NPR, and have been on recurring monthly donations to PBS for years.
I was genuinely curious about what percentage comes from federal funds. So I am just trying to level-set and get ahead of any hysteria about the actual impact.
PBS and NPR do not operate like the commercial networks --
ABC/NBC/CBS/Fox/Etc are big corporations that produce (or commission/license, it gets...weird) shows to be distributed on their affiliates, that, depending on the city you are in, can be owned by the network OR another company that operates it like a franchise. Their affiliate agreement governs how much of the network programming they play -- though there are other agreements for non-network programming -- Jeopardy/Wheel of Fortune, for example, are syndicated and NOT network.
PBS on the other hand is more of a consortium of public TV stations around the country. Shows that you might think of as "PBS Shows" are actually produced by these individual stations and then distributed to other stations that want them. Even PBS Newshour and Washington Week are produced by WETA in DC.
Radio gets even more complicated. Many of the shows I've seen referenced on this thread aren't even necessarily NPR. Marketplace, for example, is American Public Media, which is sort of an outcropping from Minnesota Public Radio.
So funding going to ACTUAL PBS is a tiny part of this. What happens to the money going to various stations? What happens to the grants to produce and run these stations, especially in rural areas?
As others have said, the big guys (WGBH in Boston, WETA in DC, etc) will have minimal impact since they have a large pool of donors.
But the little guys will suffer more. Ultimately, I think we can all agree that we hope the impact won't be catastrophic as far as the number of listeners impacted.
Yep. Public media operations in rural and small-city markets are often as small as one full-time employee and cover large spans of territory. A cut to each of those stations might be as small as $150k but could represent much of their ability to do much more than minimal playback of out-of-market packages (which also degrade since many are published in part or full through CPB grants).
My guess is that things will largely continue as they have been, but we'll get a lot fewer of those cute little stories about a random one-off issue in a town of 300 people or whatever.
Probably not the biggest loss if I'm right, but still a major bummer, and yet another connection between the rural and the urban is severed.
I think people are interested in local news, so the gap will certainly be replaced but by monied interests, e.g. Sinclair [1] or similar. Who will promote their narrative and further polarize the information landscape.
Rural stations relied heavily on CPB funding; urban stations get most of their funding from donations or corporate underwriting. So big city public TV and radio will survive, but those in less populated areas might go under unless some other source of funding is found.
Yeah but the shows that the urban stations are running and producing are all bought by the rural stations. So the whole ecosystem needs the rural stations to help fund the productions.
The urban stations raise a lot of money locally (through pledge drives, and by hitting up local companies for underwriting, which is basically advertising). The rural stations don't, too few people. The rural stations get CPB money, and some of that goes back to fund shows that they carry, but mostly it's the cost to operate the stations. The urban stations aren't being propped up by the rural stations, there's too little money, even including the money that they get from CPB.
I agree overall that this is not a good thing for also furthering a knowledge gap between rural and urban areas. But in the age of internet streaming, wouldn't rural areas still have access to stream public radio? Genuinely asking.
I tried looking for sources on station audience sizes, alternatives they might have, etc. But it was difficult to find.
> But in the age of internet streaming, wouldn't rural areas still have access to stream public radio?
Sometimes streaming isn't an option. When Helene hit WNC we lost power, cell, internet, and water all at the same time. The local NPR stations were the only ones broadcasting updates on a regular cadence so we could learn what in the world was going on. And we're not far from downtown Asheville.
Some extremely rural areas only have spotty internet or no internet or cell at all and public radio is the only thing they have.
When I'm not busy worrying about everything else, I worry that there's assuredly an explosion of local corruption, especially outside of cities large enough to still have something resembling actual local news media, that we can't even begin to get a handle on because it's... well, it's invisible now, that's why it's (surely—I mean, we can't possibly think corruption is dropping or even remaining steady, with the death of the small town paper and small-market TV news rooms, right?) happening in the first place.
I think it's, quietly and slowly, the thing that's going to doom our country to decline if something else doesn't get us first (which, there are certainly some things giving this one a run for its money). The Internet killed a pillar of democracy, replaced it with nothing that serves the same role, and we didn't even try to keep it from happening, so here we are, we doomed ourselves by embracing the Internet quickly and not trying to mitigate any harm it causes.
My local NPR broadcasts rarely actually cover anything that's happening in like city or county politics. Heck, even talking about state politics is pretty rare.
In the SF bay area, KQED (NPR affiliate) has a lot of coverage of local SF and Bay Area politics. The Pacifica station, KPFA (public radio but not an NPR affiliate) has more.
As a long time listener of AM radio. Literally nothing has changed from a programming perspective. The only noticeable difference is who supplies the on the hour news.
Well a counter argument would be, how would you know if anything is changed? If you're not part of the editors for a newsrooms how would you know which stories are cut and which make the broadcast?
> PBS only receives about 15% of its funds from federal funding
I'm a big fan of PBS, but I wonder if this common stat is misleading. Don't a huge portion of PBS funds come from member stations, which get a portion of their funds from federal funding?
Yes it is so obviously misleading and incorrect that only the mainstream media could have perpetuated this unquestioned for decades.
The federal money goes to member stations which then hands it right over to NPR to pay for programming, I believe it’s $500 per hour. It’s 1 layer of indirection but no one seemed to mention this in all of the reporting
> ...hands it right over to NPR to pay for programming, I believe it’s $500 per hour...
So - does that mean a member station could just cut back on their NPR-sourced programming, then fill the air time by playing more Frank Sinatra, and broadcasting local HS football games, and such?
I suspect that many will be forced to close entirely now. Others may not longer be able to afford pay for NPR shows at all (they'd have to pay for both membership and individual shows), while others will have to fill their airtime with things besides news and other NPR programs
$500 per hour for a media production seems like a weird number. It's either fantastically cheap for production costs and an atypical model for licensing costs. From what I understand radio licensing is usually done either per listener per time or per content (which might be only 25 or 50ish minutes a piece to allow for ads). It's quite high if it's the latter and would probably be a significant fraction of the operational costs for many smaller stations, far above their music costs.
I am also really annoyed when people repeat that it's only 15% government funded or whatever. It's a misrepresentation to the point of lying. Which is further reinforced by: if it's only 15%, why are you having to shut down? It's so dumb.
I don't know about the situation at all (non-American here), but hypothetically if a local (say State level or something) organisation, that was 100% funded by the federal government, chose to donate 10% of their revenue to PBS, then PBS would accurately classify that as a donation rather than federal funding, but it would still potentially be affected by federal funding cuts.
I've no idea of that is at all the case with any of PBS' donations, but it seems like a hypothetical that might be true and that could be hidden despite you being diligent in finding out what PBS truthfully reported.
Man, sometimes losing 15% is enough to make things unsustainable. It is not like they are an Ivy League university with an endowment bigger than a developing country's GDP.
I think your usage of the word “only” is a mistake. This is an important piece of information but if you are going to imply value like that then you should also explain the consequences of that cut.
That's a nice chunk of change, though low enough that a few friendly billionaires could put some pocket change into a trust today and make up for this funding in perpetuity. And there undoubtedly will be a massive surge in donations from small donors in response to this.
As long as the bigger fish are willing to subsidize the smaller rural stations, I don't think there is anything to be afraid of.
The removal of this Sword of Damocles is in my opinion a great thing for PBS and NPR.
A few friendly billionaires could have funded them entirely for the last 60 years. I see no reason to think that they suddenly will now. Many stations will be closed, and people will lose out on valued programing.
No I totally understand. I'm not trying to defend the decision or anything.
But I am just trying to set expectations of what people should expect to see. I'm trying to get ahead of the predictable hysteria about the death of public radio/tv.
Honestly, given the news that the Trump administration now has editorial control over all of CBS, it’s probably good that they’re no longer holding NPR’s purse strings anymore.
> Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country,” Harrison said.
If that was true, losing the CPB would be a travesty. But as a loyal NPR listener for decades, I've found their stuff lately to be unlistenable. It's Fox, but for the Left, and with a bit more of an intellectual spin. What makes it most annoying is their utter blindness to their own bias. The Fox hosts know that they're taking one side of a story. I've never gotten the impression that any of the NPR hosts are even that self-aware.
There was a distinct shift to the right at NPR when Obama took office, and by the time he took his second term, NPR News' social media was posting clickbait trash instead of real headlines. "The liberal media" is an irrational boogeyman used to whip ownership in line. Everyone who complains about "bias in the media" is arguing in bad faith while they continue to turn a blind eye to the overwhelmingly dominant conservative slant of the 21st century American media.
No. If that's what you took from my post, I've miscommunicated.
NPR has turned rightward. The entertainment shows are, without a doubt, liberal, on the American political spectrum. There are countless discussions and papers about the role empathy plays in successful entertainment.
The editorial content has turned rightward - and the leadership has turned rightward. This has been ongoing for at least two decades, probably longer, but I wasn't paying attention at that level when I was under 20.
I thought they meant NPR was generally neoliberal left of center, and their coverage has perhaps moved toward the center post-Obama while still being left of it.
I think the center in modern American politics has historically been neoliberalism, which explains why the center keeps holding. Neoliberalism is only now having to respond to populism on the left and right, which has caused the balance of power to shift on each side. The neoconservative bloc has attained power on the right with the rise of Trump and the Tea Party before him, and some folks on the left have acquired influence, like Bernie Sanders and AOC. The center is holding less and less as the bureaucracy is being fired and defunded.
I don’t mean to be dismissive, as I think your reading is also accurate. The center of mass is shifting, but I’m not sure the locus of control is as much.
Sanders and AOC are fringe socialists who hold no power in either the press, or the political establishment.
MAGAnuts are now the mainstream face, body, and soul of the political establishment.
Where exactly is the 'center' between the latter and Chuck Schumer? Where is that 'center' going to be in three years, as every month, MAGA picks up the goalposts and moves them a few miles right-wards?
I think AOC is closer to the establishment than even I realized. AOC walked Khalil out from within the security perimeter to meet with family members and waiting press including Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, in this video:
AOC is doing the important work that Congresspeople do. I don’t know if it’s fair to say that she’s fringe. She’s showing up and doing the work that other people don’t show up and do. If it’s fringe work, that is fair to say I guess if you feel that way. I was surprised to see her in this video but at the same time it seems totally in character for her to be there. I think she’s probably going to run for president or vice president at some point in the next few cycles if I had to guess, and these are baby steps to build trust with the Muslim community and get in front of reporters on a national issue.
NPR and especially its editorial content has turned steadily more leftward over the past 9 years (especially since Trump’s election in 2016) and moderately accelerated during COVID/around the talk of the death of one of the hosts. I say this as someone who is left-wing.
I didn’t think there was much debate on this point, it’s rather well documented/easily searchable online. If you genuinely think NPR’s editorial content has turned more right from the left, you are probably operating on a different scale than the general American public. There has also been a lot more scandals with their editorial content and the information accuracy in recent years with the bias being more and more left.
Yeah I've been bummed by how far NPR has swerved leftward, especially since 2016. Even ten years ago I liked tuning in because it was quality journalism that still made an honest effort to cover multiple sides of an issue, even if the topics they chose were primarily "liberal" topics. But yeah, now they seem just as tribal as Fox.
Not every side deserves to be covered for each story. This is the problem with major media today, they give equal opportunity to people that have no idea what they are talking about. It's like one side says 2+2=4, the other 2+2=5, and media gives them equal air time.
Can you point me to a good source that actually gives equal opportunity to multiple sides of a story? Because I rarely see that (regardless of which side), the whole reason why I subscribe to things like ground.news.
Axios does a pretty solid job of covering point and counterpoint on their stories not bias towards "equality" for different perspectives, but actually covering fully the different angles of a story.
See yourself in their article from a couple of weeks ago about the federal funding cut of CPB.
> Ahead of Trump's second term, Project 2025 wrote in a detailed memo foreshadowing the president's agenda ways the administration could pull funding for public broadcasters. The Trump administration started taking actions to scrutinize public broadcasters shortly thereafter.
There's no mention of why they want to defund CPB beyond "Trump administration efforts to strip funding." Muh Project 2025 is referenced briefly, but the rationale isn't explored.
They provide quotes from those opposed "unwarranted dismantling of beloved local civic institutions,... gutting" without the For Side saying anything e.g. that this is no longer necessary due to media landscape.
It doesn't consider whether it's necessary and while saying it will be a loss to rural news never looks at the fact it's used less and less there, whether gap will be filled and in part has.
It centers the negative consequences, it has very limited perspective by supporters and centrally frames Project 2025 despite questionable connection. There's clearly a tilt, but it performs neutrality that less critical might accept.
"The choice of what to include and what to leave out, what to emphasize and what to downplay, inevitably reflects a point of view."
lol, I stopped caring about them because they weren’t willing to say anything about Gaza and bent over backwards to excuse what Trump was doing. If center-right NPR is too liberal I shudder to think of your politics
Many major establishment news orgs are similarly guilty of a heavy pro-Israel bias (WSJ and NYT as other examples), but I would argue this is more on the establishment vs independent spectrum, rather than the left vs right spectrum.
Equating a for-profit news corporation's politics with how they handle a singular topic like Gaza would be a bit reductive.
The one that gave up the game for me most re: mainstream liberal media was how often NYT ran the Claudine Gay story (front page ten consecutive days). The entire controversy was completely manufactured as a right wing cancel culture operation and the New York Times laundered it under their ‘liberal’ reputation.
NPR is better than most as their are not owned privately by a billionaire or collectively by billionaire shareholders. But they play the “both sides are reasonable” game annoyingly often with every issue, as if there is some sort of sensible middle ground to be reached somewhere between Obama and Hitler.
Seeing Gaza in particular covered this way - one the most appalling human rights catastrophes of my lifetime aided and funded by my own government - was too much for me to stomach.
I am always confused by this narrative. People extolling the virtues of old media organization as if those people weren't toeing the government line and were cold robots with no bias.
It is the rise of media org like Fox news where these kinds of comments have started surfacing. Because for Fox news is more commentary than facts. And then the narrative trick from Fox and other conservative media outlets have constantly pushed an agenda - "others do it too".
It has led to comments like these and this is fine.
> It's Fox, but for the Left
But then when you start adding stuff like this:
> and with a bit more of an intellectual spin. What makes it most annoying is their utter blindness to their own bias. The Fox hosts know that they're taking one side of a story. I've never gotten the impression that any of the NPR hosts are even that self-aware.
It becomes clear you are regurgitating RW talking points and both side-ism. And because Fox is worse, the only saving argument is that Fox at least knows their bias. God help this country if this is level of intellectual spin people can give to reinforce their points.
As you can see, it’s mostly gotcha quotes and unfair glosses. For example:
> 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.
Of course, it’s a historical fact that many minority neighborhoods were bulldozed to make room for interstate highway development, among them Cincinnati, OH and St. Louis, MO.
Robert Caro details Moses' role wrt highways & suburbia in NYC, nationally, and even internationally.
IMHO, having never Moses, I'd wager he was classist. (Moses allegedly also hated poor and immigrant Jews.) As you know in the USA economy & society, classist ~= racist.
How about using terms like "pregnant people"? Or the fact that on my local NPR station I can count down from 60 and something like 80% of the time, before I reach 0, they've talked about race or ethnicity at least once.
That's my complaint. Decades ago I enjoyed NPR when I drove to work. It was always left leaning, but at least the programs discussed topics I found interesting or cared about for one reason or another.
These days the only thing they talk about are racial and sexual minorities. I can't express how little this kind of factionalism interests me. I'm not arguing that kind of content shouldn't be produced, but I don't want to pay for it.
Look, I hate to say it, but if this is the type of stuff you're complaining about, then you have a weird persecution fetish. This is simply not a real problem. It is made up. It is culture war bullshit. You sound like a cry baby.
> before I reach 0, they've talked about race or ethnicity at least once.
Yeah because race and ethnicity have A LOT to do with crime. Again, you can cover your ears and go "lalala not listening!", but after a certain point we have to call the delusional, delusional, and move on with our lives.
It's not like race wasn't a thing in the past. It's just that nobody talked about it because they were racist. That's how that works. Now, we're not so racist, so when race is a factor in things we don't just fucking ignore it.
That’s not why they talk about race and you know it. And the pregnant people thing is just a dogwhistle. It’s not my fault most of American science has been captured by the far left.
I'm not against abortion. In fact, I actually see the legal necessity of it in an overpopulating world. But NPR's bias on the front does not align with my own bias or, I think, with most people.
Everyone has bias and that's perfectly human. The problem is when we don't own up to it. NPR tries to cover theirs with circuitous language and lies-by-omission, https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2019/05/29/7280694.... That double-talk served well in insulating them from criticism, but it ended up costing them the public trust.
It's verbal sleight of hand in the cultural tug-of-war to emphasize or de-emphasize the future human. The point is that massaged language blunts or sharpens its impact, and an org's political choices therein reflect the bias.
The baggage isn't calling fetuses what they are. The baggage and bias comes in when you lie about what a fetus is, depicting it as a human baby, which it is not. The right does that specifically to emotionally manipulate people and feed a narrative of baby killing.
Who here is doing the verbal slight of hand? The people using factual terms, or the people lying? This should be an easy one to answer.
In medical jargon, sure. In common usage, including among medical professionals, it's extremely common to just say "baby" in many contexts, especially when the baby is wanted and expected to be viable and brought to term. Nobody but a few weirdos or people trying to make some kind of a joke are gonna say to their partner "oh, did they give you any pictures of our fetus from the ultrasound? Oh look at our fetus' tiny little hands!"
(I'm pro-choice but think the "acksually they're fetuses" angle is fucking gross, both on an intellectually-honest debate level because it's semantic bullshit, and because it absolutely reads as a move toward dehumanization, and I hate to provide reasons for those kinds of accusations from pro-lifers to ring true)
I highly doubt anyone in your actual life has said this to you, or distilled the entire argument down to this point.
> because it's semantic bullshit
Obviously, semantics isn't "bullshit" because there's been a massive decades long debate over semantics, including millions and millions spent by the right to define the semantics.
I can concede that some people hear this debate and think they're under attack in a "culture war", which I'm really not sure what the solution to that is because semantics is important.
Adam Carolla was interviewed by NPR and tried to Gotcha him by saying he said racist comments against Asians, but the comments were from an Asian comedian. NPR canned the interview and never aired it, despite telling him they would air it.
Why would anyone care about A's criticism of competitor B?
--
FWIW:
"The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC."
eyeroll. Might want to look at the original article by the NPR veteran himself which was the first one posted, but has a paywall. The Washington Stand only elaborated it. Argue based on the facts and merits of the article.
Of-course, I am sure a government funded 100%-republican news and broadcasting agency with news pieces spouting right-wing talking points trotted out with regularity would be fully accepted as an excellent use of taxpayer money in the public interest by democratic politicians.
The difference is that being a republican is an ideology you choose. Republicans can stop being republicans at any time - but they don't, they continue, because they enjoy being republican.
What I mean is, republicans choose to be ideologically opposed to journalism and ideologically opposed to education. Why would they become journalists? They hate journalism, by choice.
There is a surprising amount of influence in terms of what stations you listen to, not just due to the local programming but due to their choice of which national programming they air.
Oh, I agree, don't get me wrong. I'm just kinda shocked people think it is leftist. It's like they have no idea what the term means (it's not "left of my personal beliefs").
The right in the US is so far right that centrism looks like communism to some people. NPR and PBS are far more influenced by their corporate donors than they are the political leanings of their audience.
Considering that reporting factual information gets blamed as left wing bullshit... I don't think your post has merit.
See: COVID, vaccines, climate change. You have one side explicitly denying what we can do with the scientific method and decades of peer reviewed research, and then blaming anyone who contradicts them as biased sources.
Comparing to Fox News is even more ridiculous. You say that them knowing they're spouting bullshit is better than the people not spouting bullshit at all?
Cmon now. Take the group that is actually trying to engage in good faith rather than the one that is knowingly producing crap. Maybe this is why people voted for Trump: he told them what he is, and they liked the honesty.
The real narrative problem is that relying on "science" as truth.
Science has been weaponized by all sides it is incredivly easy to manipulate research into a narrative. But the left's media empire is by far the most effective at doing this and with heavy left bias in academia it's a corrupt system.
Data has a priority say in everything we do but dropping context and information then calling everyone dumb for not "trusting the science" is propoganda. The response of the left is to simply call everyone who denies today's science as ignorant.
This is how you get climate deniers. Weaponize science and unsuprisingly you get countless people who stop believing ANY politically angled research.
Not sure how much you've spent in academia but modern science is nasty buissness. Incentive structures are completely warped.
Must see TV when I was little was Mr. Roger's Neighborhood and Sesame Street. As I grew and my interest in what makes the natural world work became more sophisticated, Nova was something I watched regularly. Every one of these programs was supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I am saddened by this loss.
This Old House taught me mortal fear of water damage, and The Woodwright’s Shop taught me terrible, terrible puns. And some woodworking skills. Roy, you absolute legend.
I listen to NPR every day and, honestly, I think this might be for the best. It's going to hurt for a while, but in the end, I think public broadcasting will be stronger when it stands on its own without interference from politicians.
"From the people" = supported by taxes. If it's supported by some small pots of private money, then it's not from "the people", it's from a select few people.
For example, Bezos "donates" (owns) WAPO. Would you classify WAPO as "from the people"? Obviously not. Just doing private money exempts you from being "from the people".
"For the people" = equal access. The only services that have equal access are tax payer funded ones.
Is your private insurance equal access? No, it's tied to your employer.
Now what about roads, parks, sidewalks, the fucking DMV? Are those equal access?
I'm sure someone, somewhere, can find a counter example, but a counter example does not a rule make. 99.99% of the time, "private stuff" = only for some people, "tax payer funded stuff" = everyone at least has an equal opportunity to access it.
Yeah, as in "We the people". As in "Of the people, by the people, for the people"
Taxes are how "we the people" pay for public things (libraries, parks, highways, sidewalks, schools, etc.)
See my comment below: in usual terms, in Europe “public” means technically “supported by taxes” -which is why most “public” media is most of the time pro-government (bar inertia).
Then it becomes an organization dominated by those who donate the most -- and there have already been cases where a PBS affiliate self-censored and modified its editorial in an attempt to placate a potential donor[0].
The American public's attitude towards using taxes to support media has shifted over the past few decades. There's a perception (right or wrong) that public media is liberally biased, and it's getting government attention now, and so we're seeing the consequences of that.
Are you saying that non-commercial broadcasting does not count as a public good, or that taxes should be voluntary, or that it does count as a public good but taxes should not be spent on it?
>I suspect the post office is still supported by a durable majority. If it isn’t, then it will probably lose government funding as well.
To which funding are you referring?
In fact[0]:
"Unlike many government agencies, the United States Postal Service (USPS) does not receive direct taxpayer funding for operating expenses. Government appropriations are limited to specific purposes, such as the Postal Service Health Benefits (PSHB) Program."
And[1]:
"In 2006, Congress passed a law that imposed extraordinary costs on the U.S. Postal Service. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation."
I don't think this is correct. The majority of people prefers states to have more influence on school curriculum and federal government to have less. Yes, there are downsides to that, but it generally means that hours on STEM will increase and hours on ideology will decrease.
Removing federal influence in setting agenda while sending federal funding directly to states without federal oversight of programs would not be a bad thing. My 2c.
No, teaching what the local parents believe is best for their own kids. While there are certainly a few of those who will want bibles, most in my experience put much higher value in the extra STEM unhindered by ideology.
My kids high school recently cancelled advanced math classes because the racial composition of students there was not what the school hoped to see. No, thank you, I want parents to have a much bigger influence on what schools teach.
Are you trying to distract from the fact that you can't actually give any specifics about any of this and sound like you are working from talking points by asking me about my children?
The right is ideologically opposed to education. The belief that they are doing so to.. ugh... "promote stem... unhindered by ideology" is, frankly, delusional.
Same with public schools, public parks, public sidewalks, public libraries, even police and fire departments. We have to give billionaires trillions in tax cuts while watching most Americans backslide into poverty so obviously it'd be fiscally irresponsible for the government to fund public services for the peasant class
You can't shut conservatives up. When you give conservatives what they want, they don't become less extreme - they double down and become more extreme.
What you're referring to is a kind of "respectability politics". Basically, if we're nice and do what conservatives say, then things get better and they ease off.
We have literal hundreds of years of proof that this is not the case, and the opposite happens.
Think about Donald Trump. When we legitimize him and continue to do so, has he gotten less extreme, or more? In 2016 versus now, is he less extreme, or more? Much, much more. But he got what he wanted, right? Yes. And then he wants more, because he feels emboldened. It's an ideology built on Greed.
If you give conservatives an inch, they take a mile. If you ease up a bit on reconstruction, then suddenly you have Jim Crow. If you you give them a teensy little bit of morality legislation, then suddenly you have mass censorship proposals and the Ten Commandments in schools.
As a gay man, I see this time and time again in my own community. I have been told we are too vulgar, too sexual, too gross, and this is why conservatives target us. That if we just acted more normal, more respectable, they would leave us alone, and the world would be happy.
But there was a time when we were respectable, when we hid in the shadows. When we got wives just for show, just to please the conservative narrative. When we only acted like ourselves in our own hidden bars, our own hidden spaces. Out of sight, out of mind. And, well, how were we treated? Was it better? No. It was much, much worse.
No it won't. The modern GOP is fueled by grievance. It needs an "other" in order to exist. They'll have a new enemy to rail against by this time tomorrow.
This is naive. If conservatives continue to perceive outlets like PBS as a thorn in their political sides, they'll go after their broadcasting licenses or target them with ruinous lawsuits - both actions that have been discussed or taken by conservative politicians already.
Can we call it public broadcasting when it fails to even dimly reflect the diversity of ideas for the areas it serves? Milk toast conservatives like Juan Williams were deemed intolerable a long time ago, so calling it public radio at this point is a misnomer and a sad farce.
Juan Williams wasn't let go because he's conservative; it's because he's a bigot (unless you think being a bigot is a conservative qualification):
"Look, Bill [O'Reilly], I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."
"NPR, like any mainstream news outlet, expects its journalists to be thoughtful and measured in everything they say. What Williams said was deeply offensive to Muslims and inflamed, rather than contributing positively, to an important debate about the role of Muslims in America."
NPR can also be a bit of a meme sometimes. Maybe it's just circumstance but every time I hear NPR for any period of time longer than about 20 minutes they do a segment on a topic like polyamory, how women are proudly reclaiming the word "bimbo", or people protesting the administration using interpretive dance.
It is certainly not programming with much mass market appeal.
> The beautiful thing about public media is that it can broadcast things that don't have a profit-motive for being broadcast.
True, so one would expect to have heard much more about Bernie Sanders when he was making runs for president. Unfortunately the only coverage he usually got on likes of NPR was when it was something negative about him.
> when it stands on its own without interference from politicians
Why on earth do you think it will be free of interference? Obviously they will find other ways to pressure and censor them. As they have done in many cases already.
It's been a political football for decades. Conservatives use it as an example of liberal spending run amok, so public broadcasting has had to constantly look over its shoulder during that time.
No, I would like to eliminate corporate influence as well, but that might not be possible in a capitalist society.
Take a tax supported public good, remove the public support and then claim to worry about corporate influence? What do you think was holding that corporate influence at bay?
Unfortunately, the necessary level of public support doesn't exist, so relying on government money isn't viable. I hope public broadcasting will get enough money directly from individuals to resist excessive corporate influence, but we'll have to see.
Most of NPR's news programming has been terrible for many years.
Pay attention to how many segments—even that are sort-of connected to an actual news event, which, many aren't—revolve around political strategy, poll numbers, and (in season, which is now like three years out of four) electoral race polling.
It's, like... a lot of them, outside the human-interest and arts coverage stuff. They consistently divert into talking about political media messaging strategy and poll numbers and crap, and they do it so very much that it's got to be something they're doing on purpose. This isn't news reporting, it's lazy, safe (because you don't have to engage with substantive questions of policy and outcomes, nor even questions of fact) horse-race bullshit. It's a complete waste of the listener's time, if they're there for actual news reporting.
On the flip side, though, I'm not seeing a lot of "sink or swim in the market" US media doing much better, so I wouldn't bet on them shifting to anything better (though shift they might).
Contrary to the conservative spin over the years, I have found public broadcasting to be one of the least biased sources of headline news and information available. (For their national broadcasts at least - local ... can be hit or miss).
In particular, their kids programming is the absolute best. Nothing flashy or exciting, but it's laser focused on education and has zero agenda. And the PBS kids apps are one of the few things I can hand to my kid worry-free. And the fact that it's money-free and ad-free to access in this modern age is a miracle.
The only people who could support this are not just wrong, they are people out of touch with reality. These are people who think public parks are a waste of space. Or that having nice things to share is elitist.
Thats expected. In functioning democracies state media is run for the purpose not profit. It doesnt have the corrupting influence of political money. PBS in the US could be so much better. Just look at what BBC is able to do in the UK.
PBS Newshour is pretty much the best/balanced news programming on US TV at this point. They take deeper dives into issues than most of the other shows out there. And then there's Frontline which is excellent and goes even deeper with a documentary format. The rest of PBS - there are a few good parts like Nova, but a lot of what plays on PBS stations these days is UK crime dramas - man, there seems to be a lot of mayhem going on in merry old England these days.
Haven't watched this since I was a kid. Just scrubbed through the latest episode. I was surprised, it's not bad. Left-leaning to my eye, but FAR less so than any other left-leaning mainstream TV media I can think of. And as you point out, more substantial and meaningful coverage than you typically get anywhere else. I would be happy to encourage anyone to watch more PBS Newshour based on that
The show had six guests on- 2 left, 1 right, 2 neutral(?) and 1 CIA deep state mouthpiece. The show gave mostly balanced coverage of every issue covered, but declined to dig into the Epstein issue beyond "Trump+Epstein", gave the deep-stater seven minutes to defend the CIA without meaningfully pressing into any of the other questions raised by the latest declassifications (such as HRC & DNC involvement in orchestrating Russiagate), flashed a debunked/misleading statistic on screen about Russians influencing the the 2020 election via social media, and gave a one-sided take on redistricting in Texas ignoring the side that says redistricting after a Census is normal and routine.
> such as HRC & DNC involvement in orchestrating Russiagate
I'm not trying to be dismissive of your viewpoint, but why should anyone bother speaking to this? Absolutely nothing new was divulged. It's not the media's responsibility to give airtime over every government press release.
All you see are staffers at the Hillary campaign discussing the news of the Russian influence campaigns (which this report reiterates are real) and how they can use it for their campaign.
Nothing in here is novel or even that salacious. How is this newsworthy?
Texas already completed redistricting in 2021 after the most recent census (2020). They are only redrawing the maps again now because Trump is demanding an even more egregious gerrymander.
In that case I wish Newshour had made that detail plainer. I see now they lightly brush over it in the intro of the segment. Thank you for the clarification.
Is there much to say on Epstein besides "Trump+Epstein"?
Epstein was not some Darth Vader or Joker (The Dark Night version) or Commodus (from Gladiator) or Sauron or Voldemort type of villain who was openly villainous and did not have a public good side (either an actual good side or a front to try to hide his villainy).
Epstein was more a Han from Enter the Dragon kind of villain.
Epstein had a fairly extensive public good side (maybe real, maybe just a front, probably a mix of both) appearing as a legitimate businessman and a philanthropist.
A big part of his philanthropy was directed toward supporting scientific research, universities, and the arts. He liked to invite top people from particular fields, like physics and AI, to events on his island where they (the invited people) would discuss major scientific and philosophical issues from their field. Get an invite to one of those, and it was a chance to go spend a few days for free in a resort setting, participate in some pop science level discussions to keep the rich guy happy, and maybe try to talk him into funding your lab.
Because of this most of the time it isn't all that interesting when some famous person shows up in Epstein's documents.
It becomes interesting with Trump because he spent a lot of time using his opponent's Epstein connections against them in ways that made his followers come to believe any association with Epstein is practically proof that you are an active pedophile.
He did this even though he knew he himself had connections to Epstein (including to people who actually were part of Epstein's villain side). And now that's biting him.
> PBS Newshour is pretty much the best/balanced news programming on US TV at this point.
Ah yes, the news show that has a weekly politics round table that brings in a balanced approach to see issues from both sides: The side of an anti-Trump Democrat and the side of an anti-Trump Republican.
How many pro-Trump Republicans actually want to engage in a fair round-table style debate?
This administration makes a point that they only do interviews with sources favorable to them. They can't opt out of the media and then pretend to be victims.
> How many pro-Trump Republicans actually want to engage in a fair round-table style debate?
There's plenty to pick from. The problem is that having someone effective in that position would anger the one people that PBS actually cares about, their donor class. It doesn't matter that Trump won the popular vote in the most recent election, they'll still go out of their way to ensure that the token conservative voice is against him.
> This administration makes a point that they only do interviews with sources favorable to them. They can't opt out of the media and then pretend to be victims.
This is the most accessible and transparent administration in decades, if not longer. The POTUS has held more interviews, with just about every national media organization, and regularly holds open ended press conferences with pools of reporters.
What you're describing is the previous administration which not only hand selected the reporters, they even gave Biden a cheat sheet of reporters (with pictures!) so he would know exactly who to call on: https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-defends-bidens-cheat-sh...
>This is the most accessible and transparent administration in decades, if not longer. The POTUS has held more interviews, with just about every national media organization, and regularly holds open ended press conferences with pools of reporters.
This is simply an absurd lie with no basis in reality, I really don't know why you even spouted it. It contradicts observable truth. Strange.
This is funny because BBC is a prime example of being a propaganda channel for the government of the day. And that's not new at all just look back at the coverage of the Troubles or the miners strikes in the 70s-80s.
Yes it's not on the level of CGTN or Russia Today but BBC is not neutral at all
A lot of people are unable to see their own political bias; they look at BBC or Fox News and see “unbiased true reporting”.
I highly suggest using Ground News (ground.news) for a week or a month as your sole portal into news stories, and then use their features to analyze bias in your selection of news stories and outlets.
I use it regularly to try to offset my own biases.
The comparison for something as openly partisan on the left as Fox News, in US media, would be something like Democracy Now! or maybe The Nation.
The thing is, though, there are a few components here: there's level of favorability toward a certain kind of politics, which some barely-popular left-leaning outlets roughly match Fox News on, plus propensity to lie and exaggerate. And there's reach.
Nothing left-partisan in the US that I'm aware of touches Fox on either of those latter fronts—propensity to just make shit up, and (certainly not) reach.
Nobody's putting Democracy Now! on in waiting rooms. Hell IDK maybe at Planned Parenthood, never been, wouldn't know, but not at a dentist's office or at the auto shop or what have you.
There are equivalents to Fox News on the Left (Fox News viewers think it's MSNBC because that's what Fox News and AM radio told them, LMFAO, no) in the US, in terms of level of commitment to supporting partisan causes. There's nothing like it as far as willingness to deviate from reality to do so, nor in reach. Nothing remotely close.
Also the Wikipedia Current Events portal [1]. It’s definitely biased by the Wikipedia editors decisions on what to add there (especially the “Topics in the News” box) but it gives a more or less neutral dump of the daily events.
It’s pretty much the only place I know to find news on all the conflicts that Western media tends to ignore.
Notably when I was checking the Current Events Portal for a while, most coverage of the Israel/Hamas war was sourced from Al Jazeera and it definitely felt biased. Checking it just now, it appears to be more balanced now.
Ground News worries me because now we don't need to use our brains the app just tells me the bias! Ground News could be biased!
Leads to shallow discussion where all news sources are tossed out for bias leaving nothing (or what ground news wants you to listen to). God forbid we critically examine for ourselves the information we consume.
Ground news links all of their sources on a per article basis and you can simply scroll left/right through each news source. And you can add your own sources!
You didn't address the meat of my argument. The sources are irrelevant. They try to tell you the media bias which can itself be biased and gamed and which (I think) leads to readers not critically examining sources for themselves.
If somebody is going to be uncritical I don't see how any of this actually helps, but that's totally on them.
I'm not going to argue with them saying that Fox News is right wing or that MSNBC is more left wing. "Duh".
Maybe we're looking at this from a different angle, or maybe we just use the service in different ways.
The "bias" part that is relevant is showing you the difference in headline and contents between dozens or hundreds or thousands based on historical leanings of the news org, and which ones are even reporting on a particular topic.
It's not saying a particular article leans a particular way, it's saying the source does.
I don’t get the sense that Ground News is trying to influence what news stories I select; I think they are presenting metadata that allow me to look at the story from my preferred frame of reference and from the opposing frame of reference. I find it valuable; you might not.
I think that the media bias ratings on Ground News are slightly biased and the factuality ratings are highly biased, not intentionally but due to flawed methodology of their sources. I have contacted their support to raise that issue.
I still find the site tries really hard to make you aware of your own predilections, and I think it does well as that, and if you find yourself gravitating towards one set of sources you can always sample the “other side”.
I agree that left-right doesn’t capture the richness of American politics but for better or worse they are convenient labels for our two party system.
At your recommendation I took a look at Ground News.
I'm not a fan of the continued reification of "left" and "right". I have heard conservatives lament that MAGA isn't truly conservative. I've heard economic reformers lament that liberal social policies are sucking the oxygen out of the room for real structural reform. In both cases the idea of a single "left" and "right" as a group, or even worse as the two sole options on the menu of how to think, is severely damaging to productive political dialogue.
Framing everything as left-vs-right is like doing PCA and taking only the first principal component - sure it might be contain some signal, but it flattens any nuance. Critically, it also pre-frames any debate into competing camps in a way that harms rather than serves. I would challenge groups like Ground News to offer other framings - why not "owners vs workers"? Why not "rural vs urban"? We should ask why they chose the framing they do. I have my own cynical opinion but I'll refrain from sharing.
I don't know about your suggested site, but I use foreign news for this. I have switched to "consuming news" [0] almost entirely from a variety of English-language foreign services.
All national media services have their own bias and propaganda, but if you switch them up it becomes obvious very quickly. It also means that I miss out on most of the US political noise [1], which is a benefit to my mental health [2].
[0] Hot/lukewarm take: "consuming news" is a waste of time, and should be minimized. This really hits you like a brick to the head when you see the stuff that foreign countries are obsessing about, and how tiny it feels to you. Guess what: your news media is filled with the same crap.
[1] I still get the foreign opinion on it, obviously, but this is usually pretty mild. Most countries don't care about the US nearly as much as US citizens think they do.
[2] If you think that CPB/NPR don't have bias, I strongly suggest that you try this. You're probably in a bubble, and an "international perspective" is something that most NPR listeners claim to value. Removing US media from my life eliminated a huge source of angst (particularly after 2016), and revealed that all of the major US media sources are various forms of hyper-polarized clownery.
I suspect most people who look at international media and think it's better are using rose-tinted glasses.
Indian media is broadly worse if anything, latin american media is a trip if you have any understanding of the complicated political landscape, Aus is central to the Murdoch news dynasty, and East asian media has lots of famously partisan organizations. Maybe middle eastern media, explicitly funded for soft power political goals or African media, which span the gamut from bloodthirsty factional rags to leftover colonial institutions to tightly controlled extensions of the state apparatus?
They're differently biased, but you can't escape consuming media critically. "Averaging" by listening to a lot of different perspectives is 1) a lot of effort and 2) also something that can (and is) manipulated by making sure there's lots of "both sides" messaging present.
> I suspect most people who look at international media and think it's better are using rose-tinted glasses....They're differently biased, but you can't escape consuming media critically.
I went out of my way to head off this exact criticism, but I guess I didn't put it in blinking, bold, 30 point font.
Again: every national media outlet has bias (indeed, every media outlet has bias). My experience is that it's pretty easy to notice when you switch your sources regularly.
It doesn't take me any effort to do this, and even if I hear a hyper-partisan take, it doesn't melt my brain. I go "oh weird, so that's what the Indian government thinks" -- which is still vastly preferable to hearing what some reporter at NPR or CNN or whatever thinks about what India thinks.
To quote David Mitchell - "news is a very small of the BBC...BBC is an organization that is loved around the world for its drama and stories and not just the ruddy news".
How is it not neutral ? I follow some of the news. They've criticized both Conservative and Labour governments. Of course there are problems like the whole Martin Bashir thing but recently I've seen the BBC be more self-critical than other private TV channels. If we're comparing mistakes from the past then in the 90s, Roger Ailes was molesting women behind locked doors. Lewd comments were the norm across several news rooms. Doesn't mean that all private media is bad.
>They've criticized both Conservative and Labour governments
this is really the main problem with the bbc. for example one week they publish a story talking about something horrible israel has done then the next they publish another seemingly taking their side on something. it just ends up annoying and confusing both sides instead of one
I do think it is pro-establishment but as a remainer I was exasperated by both the outsized presence Mr Farage got on BBC programming and also the uncritical nature of the coverage of the post-Brexit negotations and treatment of dissenting MPs, so I am not convinced at all the BBC had a particularly pro-EU position.
I think you could argue it had a sort of pro-Cameron lean to it for a while simply because he initially positioned himself as quite a boring centrist, but I don't believe there was any policy alignment generally.
Less sure re: the scottish independence vote but I think in that case the BBC was sort of paralysed by what the outcome would mean for it, and that may have made it difficult for it to comprehensively handle.
BBC has unparalleled quality TV programming for both kids and adults, but their news channel has been compromised by conservative influence (namely the director Tim Davie) for a while now.
Channel 4 news is surprisingly now the better news source for actual events.
Channel 4 unfortunately doesn't have the breadth of news coverage (though they definitely have the depth) that the BBC has. They don't have anything like the local/regional news coverage and have to be very selective about what they report on. They're also 1 medium only (TV) whereas the BBC are TV, radio, and what is effectively the UK's biggest online newspaper.
They're also living on borrowed time. Channel 4 is publicly owned but completely self funded, largely through ad revenue. Ad revenue for TV is not what it used to be.
There's been serious consideration given to the idea of merging Channel 4 into the BBC to share admin costs but keep it editorially separate.
BBC is not 100% neutral on all issues. No one is. One could argue that it is less bad than the for-profit channels in the UK but no channel is without biase.
BBC is a bad example because they clearly cater to local politics and their monopoly on programming and news for large swaths of their country is not particularly healthy.
State media is inherently going to be pro-establishment and failures to report on their own internal scandals I think should give everyone pause about being all-in on something like the BBC.
Every household that watches BBC in the UK needs to pay £174.50 ($230) a year. (the wording here has to be done carefully, let's not digress into being exact on who has to pay it)
Federal funding for public media distributed out to $1.54 per person in the US last year.
There's... uh... a bit of a difference in the national funding for the BBC and public media in the US.
Agreed. My argument was that US has a much stronger economy than the UK and clearly bigger state coffers. With proper funding there's no reason why state run media can't put out good quality stories and content. Not just news.
Every household that has a TV, regardless of their use of the BBC. I don't know why people who essentially use a TV as a monitor for games consoles need to pay it.
True. I personally do (and I don't currently own a TV!) but I think non-payment is going to become a significant enough issue within the period of this parliament that we will likely see an end to the licence fee shortly after the 2030 election if not sooner.
> In particular, their kids programming is the absolute best. Nothing flashy or exciting, but it's laser focused on education and has zero agenda.
I dunno, the Odd Squad has almost as much green screen as a Guardians of the Galaxy movie. If that's not flashy, I dunno. And Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman was pretty out there; a space ghost style host ordering kids around the streets of Boston.
Also, the reboot of CyberChase was pretty clearly on the Ag agenda, all about Organic this and that. Maybe that doesn't count as an Agenda because the department of agriculture was funding it.
Also, Sesame street has always been in the pocket of those letter and number sponsors.
I was indeed unaware that the Odd Squad was foreign propaganda, but a lot of the stations broadcasting it were supported by CPB, so I think it's still fair to call it out as flashy, regardless of the location of my tongue with respect to my cheek. I think it's also fair to call out Guardians as Odd Squad for adults :P
I agree. I swore off of cable news many years ago because they're ALL toxic. They all have to keep people watching so it's stuffed full of breathless journalism making you think something major is happening any moment now. We'd all be better served with NO 24/7 news networks at all. NPR is not breathless, and is very fair.
I hated Fox News because it's so full of lies. I hated CNN because it's making mountains out of molehills and manufactured outrage. MSNBC was less yellow, but it's still full of opinion shows engineered to make you upset. NPR didn't do that, ever. They'd say when democrats screwed up just as much as when republicans did. It was true.
Right now I'm drinking out of my NPR mug that I pay $12/month for. I've been a daily listener since college, it's my default radio station in the car, and when I road trip I like searching for the local station. But I disagree with this. There are a number of nationally syndicated shows (at least, in all the markets I've lived in) that I'd put in this category. 1A just off the top of my head. Reveal is another, but that's because their mission is to find things that need to be revealed and they're usually pretty upsetting.
Sorry, to be clear I was referring to programming labeled as news only, not non-news content. There's lots of opinion content, but they don't call it news, unlike cable news networks.
I didn't mean to say there's never incorrect or partisan content.
I wasn't very happy with the PBS defunding. One of their best shows was Frontline and the amount of just straight down the middle documentaries they did was great. For a lot of the issues that became very politicized, I would regularly turn to them for an unbiased view of what was going on.
I agree on the educational stuff as well. How many generations of kids grew up watching PBS kids shows? My parents donated regularly and supported PBS the whole time.
Hopefully they can continue, I'm sad to see such a pillar of goodness go away.
I’m socially liberal by American standards, but on the subject of government funding for media I feel like a small-c conservative. Government funded media faces constant pressure to become propaganda.
I’m rather looking forward to public radio programming that would strike you as liberally biased, now that public radio productions no longer have to please Republicans in government.
Do you have examples where PBS or NPR were forced by the government to spew maga talking points? You'd think that if public media in the US were busy pleasing Republicans all day and all night they wouldn't have had their funding cut
It's not like "spewing maga talking points" is the only way to show fealty — accepting Republican framing of issues suffices, such as "the national debt is a problem so the only option is to cut entitlements". The joke goes that "NPR stands for Nice Polite Republicans".
I look forward to at least some of public radio going full pinko commie since Republican as a group have spent so much time demonizing them. With the government funding gone, there's no point in trying to stay in Republican good graces when public radio's listeners and donors are elsewhere.
Your parents efforts, like many of the the good efforts to move humanity forward over many decades, have been thrown into the trash. The next generations of Americans will have social/educational gaps that CPB/PBS filled for educational, cultural, historical, and sociological reasons; not because they liked influencing little kids ideologically. And the future will suffer for it, as they say, if you don't learn it at home, society foots the bill to correct it.
Every parent reading this knows full well how much time their kid has spent watching PBS Kids and playing the many pretty-decent games on the PBS Kids app.
> but it's laser focused on education and has zero agenda.
I totally support public broadcasting of all stripes, and do not advocate for this POV at all, but ... there are people who claim the opposite. Sesame Street is 'full woke', apparently, because it has talked about skin color and race with muppets.
What many people consider normal... is 'full woke agenda' to others.
> 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.
Yeah yeah. If you want to find the Republicans in public broadcasting, look at the board members. Same thing happened with newspapers and local TV news after Bush 2 loosened media ownership rules.
Next you're going to tell me the New York Times has a liberal bias, right? Save it.
Is there some written work online that represents your viewpoint on the NYT? I'd genuinely like to read it. I'm a centrist person who can absolutely see that Fox is on the right. But, I can also see that NPR and NYT are on the left. It's hard for me to understand how someone could with any seriousness disagree. But I'm interested in reading more about your viewpoint on this.
“The Left” does not mean to the left of you personally. It’s like how there’s only two types of drivers, insane speeders and insane slowpokes and that’s true no matter how fast you drive :p
The “left” in terms of voters is against the genocide in Gaza and for socialist policies and candidates like Mamdani. Plenty of polls and evidence supports this.
NYT undid their endorsement policy to specifically Not endorse mamdani and is very biased against Palestine. Their opinion columns like David Brooks etc are blowhard conservatives too.
In terms of mainstream news sources, I consider the Guardian US to be a reasonable big tent news source for the center left.
NPR is centrist. They take no sides even if (imo) one is obviously correct.
NYT and WaPo is the ‘reasonable right’ (still report facts but with a right wing spin- see their billionaire owners).
Fox etc. are not news they are ‘entertainment’ and do not report facts and are a vile propaganda engine that must be destroyed
The NYT is not right. WaPo is perhaps a touch more right than the NYT but both are left-leaning and liberal. NPR is centrist but its editorials lean liberal.
You’ve cherry-picked a few stories where the NYT leaned more right, but on the whole the NYT, WaPo, and NPR certainly lean liberal or left of the general American public. The point of labels like right,left, liberal, conservative, etc. are relative valuations to the general American public. Just because the NYT leans less to the left on issues you are more to the left on does not make the NYT right-leaning.
Picking more: they pushed HARD the Claudine Gay story, putting it on the front page ten consecutive days. That story was a manufactured right wing operation to oust her. They also are still very anti-trans.
I am operating on: if they are to the right of mainstream democratic voters, those that won Mamdani the primary and overwhelmingly support Palestine, then they do not get to claim to be left wing.
If I entertain your opinion that they are right of mainstream democratic voters (debatable, but let’s say so). How would you reconcile that with the fact that they are far more to the left than mainstream republican voters?
You’re operating on a fundamentally flawed premise. This is why if you’re using labels you have to compare against the general population. Just because you’re more left than Bob doesn’t make Bob right-leaning.
> The “left” in terms of voters is against the genocide in Gaza and for socialist policies and candidates like Mamdani. Plenty of polls and evidence supports this.
Not only are "left" and "right" vague relative terms used to classify the electorate in the US, they also encompass a whole array of issues an things that aren't binaries that fit on the axis. Someone can be pro-Israel and yet overall of the left; just as someone can be very pro-Palestine and yet overall of the right. In fact on this particular issue this seems more and more common - the real divide is probably generational versus political. I recently heard a segment on the radio from a convervative evangelical bemoaning that their future leaders were increasingly "anti-Israel" and this was a huge problem.
In America, we simply roughly assign Democratic positions - left, Republican position - right. These are both really big tents. "Left" positions include support of candidates like Sanders or Mamdami but also in practice even stronger support for candidates like Clinton and Biden.
Arguing that someone is "on the right" simply because they don't support your candidate of choice is silly; it's sort of like the rightists out there arguing Trump is a liberal RINO because he doesn't support the bedrock conservative principle of free trade.
> Their opinion columns like David Brooks etc are blowhard conservatives too.
NYT does make a show of having a "balanced" opinion panel and David Brooks is one of the token (2 of 11 in the source link) conservatives, but it seems strange to describe such a bland, anodyne person (also anti-Trump, by the way) as a blowhard. IIRC one of the complaints from the opinion editor that got fired for printing pro-Trump letters to the editor was that not one single columnist was pro-Trump and therefore obviously didn't represent any mainstream conservative audience.
Idk, it feels a lot to me that NYT is taking marching orders from the same people that control the Fox News propaganda machine.
Obviously NYT is rarely explicitly pro-Trump but that's not their point. Instead, they give a liberal’s framing on right wing talking points.
For example, they ran the manufactured Claudine Gay story front page 10 days in a row. They give the “sensible liberal”s take on why trans people should not get healthcare. Article 3 today is pro tariffs.
Yes, the NYT leans liberal. You can have your own political scale and that’s fine.
But the value of pointing to things and saying they’re right or left or conservative or liberal is a relative valuation measured relative to the general American public. And relative to the general American public the NYT is liberal. Just because you are more liberal than the NYT doesn’t make the NYT conservative.
> When I asked Uri, he said he “couldn’t care less” that I am not a Democrat. He said the important thing was the “aggregate”—exactly what his 87-0 misrepresented by leaving out people like me. While it’s widely believed that most mainstream journalists are Democrats, I’ve had colleagues that I was pretty sure were conservative (I don’t ask), and I’ve learned just since Uri’s article that I am one of several NPR hosts of “no party” registration.
To a broader point, viewpoint diversity != unbias. If I staff half a newspaper with Stalinists that doesn't mean the reporting is going to become more factual or the coverage less biased. If it's become a Republican party position to attack mainstream media, we shouldn't expect them to even be applying for these jobs.
Just because conservatives hate kids and don't want to be teachers/educators/work at universities doesn't mean it's biased or bad.
It's like if you wanted a diversity of opinions designing a rocket so you decided to pull in flat earth's as well as new earth creationist. You're not getting a better rocket. Perhaps a better fireworks show, though.
Yeah, because hiring qualified female, black, and queer people is exactly the same as hiring someone who hates what the job and what it's trying to accomplish.
> Nothing flashy or exciting, but it's laser focused on education and has zero agenda.
That’s not true. It just matches your agenda which you feel is no agenda. Of course you are against getting rid of instruments of persuasion that agree with your world view.
In the end it’s better for you too. Government shouldn’t support media.
The national stuff was okay to good. The Children’s programming was in general good.
The local stuff though was quite questionable. For example they’d support different causes or efforts by referencing a single poorly supported research paper. Usually those research papers supported some narrative. It could be homelessness, drug treatments, etc., however there was little if any scrutiny of the paper the whole effort or narrative was based on.
They also had annoying presenters like Kai Ryssdahl. He was insufferable but hardly the only one.
Also, despite being a public system, individual comp is high relative to their listeners', I'd say[1]. I'd guess most listeners would not imagine their comp being as high as it is, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Public_Radio
[1] In addition, those at the top enjoy perks like being invited to elite events, and the perks of schmoozing for donations. Those are experiences that are alien to the average listener.
>Contrary to the conservative spin over the years, I have found public broadcasting to be one of the least biased sources
Can we break this down?
You open with a effectively derogatory accusation about conservatives making things up…which I have no opinion on.
That immediately shows your own likely liberal bias and then you say you saw no problem with the programming.
Isn’t that exactly the issue? That you saw no issue and everyone that disagrees is just wrong?
How do you know? How would you know if CBP’s biases weren’t just your own?
Do you know the arguments against the biases of CPB, NPR, PBS from the people that can make their most effective arguments against those orgs, or do you know the lines of the people that already agree with you?
Jon Stewart Mill’s On Liberty has a great part about this… [It is not enough to know the refutations from your own teachers, you must learn them from the people that present them in their truest form].
Your argument is just assuming the (1) previous poster has liberal bias, (2) CPB has liberal bias, (3) previous poster is unable to recognize their own or CPB’s liberal bias.
Maybe these are true, but I don’t see the basis for it here.
And this is a liberal site; regardless of how the “intellectuals” like to talk about ACKSHUALLY it’s bla which ends up being San Francisco liberal with more steps.
I consider my estimation to be two points of evidence. Along with the user’s post history of course.
I don't want to be "that guy", but I often find myself as the "intolerable lib" in some situations and the "intolerable con" in others, so here we go:
There is a degree of quasi-political messaging in PBS children's shows. I can say this because I've watched more hours than I'd like of several of them, but I'd like to focus on on Molly Of Denali. It's a good children's show about an inuit girl who lives in Alaska and teaches children general good morals and specifics of inuit and Alaskan culture.
When I say it's political, I mean that it makes points without nuance on historical and current issues which range from widely accepted and important ideas (example: They didn't let Native Alaskan People vote in the past, so it's important to exercise the right to vote now), to what I would consider less widely agreed upon and important ideas, such as it being deeply upsetting and disrespectful for a "white" teacher to call a native child "T", because she had trouble pronouncing his native name. Another example is them introducing the importance of "land acknowledgements" in a children's show. A final example is the "clueless white" trope wherein the offensive rude white visitor has to be educated by the wise natives over and over and over.
I'm not trying to say that any of these examples are "right" or "wrong", but they do represent "politics" in the mind of wide sections of the population.
This said I like the show and of course we need to fund public broadcasting, I would just prefer if we did our best to keep the most controversial stuff for when the kids are a bit older to make it a smaller target for outrage (from the right or left).
The most jarring part, to me personally, is the drastic shift in tone and presentation for injustices with wildly different levels of impact. Perhaps rudely, I think to myself in the voice of the Inuit grandfather from the show "The white man took me from my family, did not allow me to speak my language, beat me and did not allow me to vote, and worst of all...... He did not let me smile in photos"
I don't mean any of this as racist or disrespectful and I hope this is a nuanced comment for consideration and not a kneeejerk reaction or evidence of my subconscious biases run wild.
> When I say it's political, I mean that it makes points without nuance on historical and current issues which range from widely accepted and important ideas [...] to what I would consider less widely agreed upon and important ideas
Another example of this: when Mr. Rogers invited an African American neighbor to share his pool. It certainly wasn't widely agreed upon at the time.
I understand and sympathize with the desire to directly equate every current social issue no matter how small with a social issue from the past as part of a larger "chain of social progress" because I think it originates with the desire to correct past injustices and treat everyone with respect and decency.
I disagree that this is a useful or accurate way to engage in discussion about an entirely different and specific subject in an entirely different context. The only way they are related is with this "chain of social progress" framework, and even within that framework, they are not the same issue.
I perceive it to be a dismissive approach which shuts down conversation, and I think it's clear when viewed plainly in the opposite direction: "If you have concerns with any of the political messaging in children's shows, you would not allow a person of a different race into your swimming pool", or in a slightly different way, "If you have concerns about this you are explicitly the "bad guy"".
> The only way they are related is with this "chain of social progress" framework, and even within that framework, they are not the same issue.
The way that they are related is that PBS childrens' shows deliberately address political content, and have done so for many years, and that is both important and good that they do so.
I agree with you generally, but the two points I want to make are that these shows are messaging politically (I know you agree with this, and I appreciate you saying so as many others in this thread do not agree), and that this political messaging is not inherently good in and of itself, and must be evaluated on a case by case basis, both for the "correctness" of the political messaging, and for potential concerns of alienating audiences when a specific case is included in a children's program.
> such as it being deeply upsetting and disrespectful for a "white" teacher to call a native child "T", because she had trouble pronouncing his native name.
Imagine not finding it disrespectful for your teacher to just completely ignore and disrespect your heritage and you're expected to just accept it and be totally OK with it.
IMO kids should be taught to be proud of their names. Apparently, that's a political stance.
I have many coworkers who I have trouble saying their names. I try as best as I can to say their names and be as respectful as possible. I wouldn't just go "I can't say your name, so you're just T now."
I agree that it's generally important to respect other people and other cultures, both ethically because it is a ethical thing to do, and practically because it helps us all "get along".
I find, if we strip this from the colonial context, or remove it from the racial context entirely (this is now a conversation between two Han Chinese people of the same social class, for example) there is some relationship between what I perceive to be an increasing focus on the critical importance of a child being called their exact name and no abbreviation, mispronunciation, standard nickname, or contextually assigned nickname, to be a symptom of an American hyper individualism and "rights culture".
As an aside I have been told by more than one person with a foreign name before even attempting their name that they would prefer I just call them an Americanized abbreviation of their name for convenience. Obviously I want to try to do what they would like, but if they were to insist on a name I struggled with, I would consider them to be a generally annoying person.
Wanting to be called your name and not liking having a person in a superior position arbitrarily rename you as an example of "American hyper individualism". Incredible.
It is literally someone over you stripping you of your own choice of identity.
Even if we removed the idea of teacher/student relationship from this, are you still fine with people just arbitrarily renaming you? That someone respects you so little they won't even respect your own choice in name, that's fine?
I'm absolutely fine with someone who has a name which could be difficult to pronounce in the local language choosing to go with another name. It is their choice. That's the big difference. They're choosing to go by that name in those contexts. It wasn't just arbitrarily chosen for them.
Counterpoint, when these episodes were first aired, these weren't viewed as political issues. Only in response to these ideas have they become politicized.
And since PBS has backed away from making episodes like these.
I might be missing what you mean, but I tried to explain as best as I could how I would understand these things to be "related to "politics" ".
Offensiveness of difficultly in pronouncing native Alaskan name - I believe this would be grouped under the umbrella of something like "linguistic imperialism" by people of particular political bents, which is an issue that at least heavily relates to politics.
Land acknowledgements - As far as I can tell, these have always been politicized because they originated "with indigenous Australian political movements and the arts" at least according to Wikipedia. I don't know much about the subject
Rude clueless white trope - I think this is to some extent a "positive" inversion of the "noble savage" trope, which Wikipedia tells me was historically political.
None of these things are inherently political unless you interpret them to be.
They have several shows that depict interracial marriages, while some people might try to take this as a political statement, most of us would not see it that way.
In a similar vein, I don't see how pronouncing names correctly could be a political issue.
I agree with you in that the question of something being "political" is inherently related to the context, and that some things some people might find political (like the importance of voting from my original comment) are not "political enough" to be something which shouldn't be in a children's show.
I would also agree with you that pronouncing names generally is not (and largely probably should not be) a political topic, but that it necessarily is in this context because of it being included in a show about native Alaskans. If the teacher were inuit, or the student also white, or it was presented a simple misunderstanding along the lines of "can I call you T" "No please don't" "okay sorry I'll do my best" it would not be "political". Because it's in this show in this context and explicitly connected to previous abuses of native people being made to use "white names", my contention is that the creators of the show intend for it to be political .
I appreciate the poetic response and think that the point I believe you're making: "people who are inclined to criticize anything which isn't exactly as they'd like it will never be pleased, so you can't spend all of your time trying to please them." is correct and useful generally.
Where I might disagree with you, if I understand you correctly, is in how applicable your comment is as a response to my mine. At the outset I attempted to communicate that some of the things that the most likely to be outraged people would take issue with (the importance of exercising the right to vote - especially if your ancestors didn't enjoy the right) are pretty universally accepted and even presenting it without nuance inside of a children's show is acceptable because it is done so with a positive focus (be involved in the democratic process).
>the importance of exercising the right to vote - especially if your ancestors didn't enjoy the right
So we shouldn't talk about the 19th Amendment[0] because it's no longer an issue because your mom, sister, wife and daughter are now allowed to vote? As such, we should actively stop talking about the fact that there was ~150 years of activism, protest and discussion before half the population was "allowed" to participate in the political life of the US?
Is that your contention? If not, claiming that we should ignore those same issues around the right of indigenous peoples to vote seems more than a little hypocritical.
Your thoughts on this would be appreciated. Thanks!
No sorry, I was including that example because it's something "political" that is also pretty universally accepted and uncontroversial, and as a consequence could only really upset the most upsetable. I meant it as a contrast to the other more controversial political topics that would require more consideration before putting into a children's show.
The original premise of the first comment I replied to was that PBS kids programming does not include political content, and I wanted to provide examples of two kinds of political content it included.
I don't in any way blame you for misunderstanding what I was trying to say, because I think a lot of people who read my comment did based on the negative point score (?) it ended up with. I think that we (and I include myself in this we) tend to jump past the specific content of a response, and only "hear" the tone of the response and presume intention from it. This isn't necessary an ineffective strategy online where there's a Tsunami of legitimately (from my perspective) evil positions (some of which I previously held and now am ashamed of, shout out God) and the odds are that a person (or bot or person working for an influence campaign) stating anything other than complete excited agreement is probably trying to convince people they should also hold a particular evil view.
The trouble is, this tends to kill nuanced conversation. I get it, I'd be furious if I thought the person I was replying to online was telling me they don't want me to be able to vote, but it's entirely possible that's not what they're saying.
Another example might be "How many Jewish people died in the Holocaust". If you asked me this I would answer, based on my limited knowledge "Somewhere between five and a half and six and a half million, probably closer to six.". I would do better socially if I simply said "like six million what a terrible tragedy", but my goal wouldn't be honesty it'd be social positioning. I understand that most people who don't instantly say "six million what a terrible tragedy" are doing so because they are trying to do an evil thing (Holocaust denial/revisionism), but that's not the only possible reason someone could do it.
>No sorry, I was including that example because it's something "political" that is also pretty universally accepted and uncontroversial, and as a consequence could only really upset the most upsetable. I meant it as a contrast to the other more controversial political topics that would require more consideration before putting into a children's show.
Fair enough. However, you didn't really (at least IMHO) make that much of a contrast, especially considering the "contrasting" example (a teacher misnaming their student because they can't even be bothered to try pronouncing their name properly). You've significantly clarified that in the comment to which I'm currently replying -- and thank you!
>I think that we (and I include myself in this we) tend to jump past the specific content of a response, and only "hear" the tone of the response and presume intention from it.
That said, the negative reaction to your comment[0] isn't all that surprising, given what appears to be the tone you've taken.
While the HN guidelines clearly state that one should try to see the comments of others in the best possible light (and I tried to do so -- which is why I asked about it), but there's a more universal idea: who you are -- at least as far as others are concerned -- is how you are perceived by those others.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be true to yourself and your principles. Rather the opposite. That said, it might not be a bad idea to try and see how others might perceive you based on what you write.
I am emphatically not telling you what to do here. Rather, I'm just pointing out that others likely don't see the decent, fair-minded person you consider yourself to be -- because all they have to go on is what's right in front of them.
I hear many things on broadcast media that are contrary to my values, and tend to prune those sources from my media diet. When I am obliged by law to support those sources anyway, I get resentful. So I have been wishing for this since Ronald Reagan proposed it.
To me the bright line of "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" is crossed at least in spirit when the state seizes a dollar from a taxpayer and spends it on speech, because that abridges the taxpayer's resources for speech by a dollar. "You have free speech but I can take the money you use to be heard to speak against you" is a big loophole.
While I sympathize with the feeling, it’s a stretch to say “obligated by law”. You pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend. We elect them to speak and choose on our behalf. It isn’t a “loophole” when this runs afoul of an individual’s values. It is simply that we have a representative government that makes decisions by majority votes. I don’t agree with most defense spending, but I acknowledge that a majority of this country wants it. This is the purpose of compromise. If there had been a good-faith proposal to reform CPB [1], we could have made it better. The collateral damage from destroying the good parts (e.g., PBS) due to our failure to compromise should not be celebrated.
[1] Such a proposal isn’t hard to imagine. A key purpose of local stations is to give a platform to the voices of local people. Simply shifting funding from national programming to local programming (without changing the total) would have accomplished this “debiasing” and empowered the (tragically endangered) local news.
you can either pay taxes at gunpoint or you can pay tribute/protection/insurance/ransom/bribes at gunpoint. not sure there are (or have ever been) many places in the world where you don't owe some debt of obligation to a larger organization, be it a government, organized crime, or something else.
I’m not sure if you are intentionally trying to miss the point. The comment was claiming they are obligated by law to support media they don’t agree with. We are all equivalently obligated by law to not steal or commit other crimes. We pay taxes. They are part of the contract of our society. What our representatives decide to spend them on doesn’t change that.
"We are all [...] obligated by law to not steal or commit other crimes" is NOT equivalent to being "obligated by law to support media [one does not] agree with". Not even remotely. Negative obligations != positive obligations.
> While I sympathize with the feeling, it’s a stretch to say “obligated by law”. You pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend.
Without limit? If Trump and the Congressional GOP force a bunch of tax-funded in-your-face right-wing propaganda that would be ok with you because "[y]ou pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend"?
Well they're already doing this and much worse, so no need to appeal to something fake. There's plenty of actual awful things our elected officials are doing which you can point to.
But, the idea is, that we're not out here proposing that we stop paying taxes. We're not the ones committing a Jan 6th, are we?
The solution to Trump isn't assassinating him or whatever, it's legally impeaching him or not voting for him. That's how a democracy works.
The government is allowed and required to say things about the current state of the law (i.e., they must publish the law, and they may educate the public about it, and they must enforce it). The government is not required and perhaps should not be allowed to say anything promoting specific political opinions or promoting specific Acts that have not passed yet. By "say" you [I think, and therefore] I mean as in publish with taxpayer money, because naturally elected officials and even appointees should be able to speak with anyone, even interviewers, and publish on their own dime as long as they don't do anything to prevent the opposition also speaking in that way, but publish? as in print or broadcasting? OP here thinks not, and OP has a very good point.
And the current government is so impartial with their news reporting that only right wing outlets get added to the press pool which becomes the de facto voice of the government since anybody else gets sued or defunded
When Congress passed the CPB defunding bill, the Republican sponsors paraded around the most deranged takes to air on NPR in the last few years and asked, why should our tax dollars keep going to this?
And I'll be the first to admit that NPR has completely lost its mind, it's losing its listenership, and it needs to be humbled a bit. But audio is much cheaper than video and NPR's remaining listeners will easily be able to make up the shortfall. Meanwhile we're going to see PBS, whose news coverage mostly avoided the pitfalls NPR fell into and who run a lot more non-news programming, take a huge funding hit and resort to even more pledge drives and reruns, while local affiliates in large swaths of the country have to close entirely.
This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and not even throwing out the bathwater.
This is true. We can't view every postwar boomer institution as sacrosanct. These organizations aren't meant to grow in perpetuity.
I just wish Americans saw some of that saved money either in their pocket or public works. But the reality is probably just going to be one more missile shipped to a foreign country.
I think the children's programming is a really undiscussed aspect of this. Some investments don't have immediately measurable outcomes. But as someone whose parents worked long hours growing up, I'm really grateful that my exposure to television was PBS rather than cable children's shows.
If your parents couldn't afford cable, then you couldn't get round the clock children's content from Nickelodeon. Your content during day time would have been stuff like the Maury Show, all the Judge shows, soap operas, and day time talk shows. PBS would have been the thing that offered the free children's content.
Woah! This stuff is unwinding faster than my priors. I'm going to have to re-evaluate everything I thought true about the US. I just always assumed "strong institutions" meant something here. That it was all a house built on sand is disconcerting.
Before you think this is happening quickly, do note that public institutions have been under attack from the right for generations, including publicly funded education, public broadcasters, public health and social programs.
These attacks are not unique to the United States; there is a coordinated effort across many countries by public policy groups and private interests. The United States are highly visible due to their ownership of global media, but the Republican party has been pursuing these objectives publicly and clearly for more than 30 years, and has made incremental progress to the point where they were able to re-engineer the Supreme Court and lower courts, as well as elect far right politicians who would tear up the rules to make it happen.
This is the sharp upwards curve of increase in velocity that is the result of sustained accelleration over the last few decades. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and not just in the United States.
This has been a project under way since the friggin' John Birchers and the postwar "think-tank" boom. They've (this specific set of interests, not conservatism in general) been successfully ratcheting things toward authoritarianism since their Chicago school pals got the right people in the right places to radically change how we enforced anti-trust in the '70s (that is, they made it impossible for us to enforce in all but the most egregious cases, period) and have been winning one boring but effective battle after another ever since (plus the occasional headline-grabbing one).
Often these victories have contributed to further momentum—concentration of wealth means more money for the cause; death of the "fairness doctrine" opens up the possibility of wholly partisan media for propagandizing, which was instantly capitalized on with a boom in right wing AM radio; Citizens United decision de facto ending campaign finance regulation, well that's sure convenient; all kinds of things.
This has been more than a half-century in the making.
The books Democracy in Chains, Lobbying America, and Dark Money are three (of many, many) good intros to the conservative reaction to the The New Deal.
The dissolution and dismantling of US gov institutions that we are witnessing is unprecedented in modern times. Hell, a few of the agencies being attacked were created with bipartisan support.
I would say it isn't that our institutions were built on sand, more that its hard to stop a madman who broke into your house with a chainsaw (a la Musk) from knocking down a few load-bearing walls.
It is easier to destroy almost anything than it is to create it in the first place.
Why must everything be viewed as Democrat vs. Republican? Trump is best viewed as a case of outsider vs. entrenched bureaucracy / deep state. Party is irrelevant.
Because he is being backed to the hilt by the Congressional GOP, and most of the GOP-leaning states, a fact which I feel sure has not escaped your attention until now.
I'm guessing you only started to pay attention to the right in 2014.
Everything really changed with the bailouts then the tea party movement. The republicans went from big business, lower taxes, exclusively to populism.
The dems are going through a similar bend currently and probably would have happened sooner if they hadn't undermined their voters nomination of Bernie in 2015.
The republicans (love um or hate them) didn't change the rules to scuttle Trump. One party is listening to their base the other is trying to control them (and imo is imploding because of it). I'm honestly a bit of a neo con so there isn't a place for me in a populist republican party. I'll just keep throwing votes at Chase Oliver / similar outsiders until we have a return to sanity.
Your guess is wrong by about 20 years. In any case, I was not opining on the causes but only on the fact that Trump has almost unanimous backing from Republicans in the legislative branch.
> I would say it isn't that our institutions were built on sand, more that its hard to stop a madman who broke into your house with a chainsaw (a la Musk) from knocking down a few load-bearing walls.
This isn't due to one man (Musk) or a rogue government agency, or even the executive branch.
This is Congress, which tells you how bad things have gotten.
The institutions that are not being dismantled are the ones required by the constitution. The ones being dismantled, being statutory in nature, are fair game, and if anything this shows that the constitutional institutions are in fact able to rule over the statutory ones, thus the constitutional institutions come out of this stronger, not weaker. The constitutional institutions are:
- Congress
- the Executive
- the Judiciary
- the States and their constitutional
institutions
- the jury
CPB and the like are statutory institutions. Those can come and they can go. Sometimes they go. They can come back you know. The next time the Democrats are in power they can bring all those institutions back and then some, and they can tear down any institutions that Trump creates or takes over. The critical thing is that it be possible for the Democrats to win again in the future, and then that Republicans be able to win again in the future, and so on.
This isn't Musk's fault; he's just the asshole scapegoat. This is directly from the Conservative Think Tanks who finally got a President willing to strip everything down in government while increasing insane spends elsewhere (e.g., $200MM ballroom for the White House while cutting revenue) based on the will of 44% of the voting population of the country.
If anything, government should have been cut AND revenues increased; but, that's not how either party works. (disgusting oversimplification: Republicans reduce revenue and reduce spend while Democrats increase revenue and increase spend).
This is it. It always was a house of cards. A house of cards that everyone tacitly agreed to protect and preserve through norms. Then, the Conservative Think Tanks found someone who was willing to dispense with all of those norms. They gambled that people and Congress wouldn't really care (in the short term, anyway). And they were right.
What else could it be? Elected institutions are made up of people who agree to a laws, rules, and norms that everyone else agrees on. It's all a farce built up on agreements to keep things running smoothly.
There is no system you could structure rigidly enough that it would not be vulnerable to bad actors. You can insulate yourself by distributing authority as we have, but if those authorities stop playing following the laws, rules, and norms well you end up where we are at, devolving into facisim.
My point here is that "strong institutions" were supposed to stem this tide. Of course, I should have thought through who made up these institutions. In some ways institutions kind of held up pretty well 2016-2020. Which is why I was a little less worried. But looks like that was a dry run. The efficiency with which this is happening now is shocking. Honestly, I'm kind of impressed. If we applied this much efficiency constructively in the US, we'd probably see post-war prosperity levels. I imagine even NASA would approach the 1960s productivity.
It's not like we abused people's trust, and then they stopped trusting us. No, a cabal of evil tricksters tricked them into not trusting us anymore. We're totally trustworthy.
My "holy shit, we're in for... interesting times, and like, soon" moment was when Trump suggested his supporters might shoot Hillary if she won ("If she wins, I can't do anything about it. But the 'Second Amendment people'...."), and didn't see a huge hit to his popularity, and supporters in his own camp distancing themselves, immediately.
Norms are dead, you can just suggest assassination of your opponent and still win a Presidential election now, the batshit crazy stuff's not just for races in rural Montana or whatever. Like, IDK how this reads to younger folks, but I assure them that things are now happening practically daily that would have been unthinkable 15 years ago, let alone farther back. Things got visibly weirder fast.
I'm in my mid 30s and have definitely noticed a gap in perception between people in their early 20s who haven't experienced much of pre-2016 politics and the older folks. The younger folks are much less alarmed because they weren't familiar with the "normal political discourse" that occurred when they were children.
It makes it hard to be optimistic that there is any plausible roadmap back to some form of normalcy in the medium term.
What you want to look at is how countries navigate back to normalcy after coups or assassinations. It's not usually a smooth process, you have to do amnesties or hash out disagreements somehow...
Just this week Trump posted on his social media that Obama should be indicted for treason, aka, executed and not a blip from the supposed left-wing media
Capturing the Supreme Court so completely was the turning point, in terms of ability to enact their agenda quickly. It's been conservative my entire not short any more life, but it's strongly packed with disingenuous, ideologically-motivated jurists vetted and guided by the "correct" organizations, now.
I wish anyone with even a little power were talking about ditching the position of "Supreme Court Justice" and just drawing for the role by lot from the "lower" federal courts each term. That could be done with a law, not an amendment-there has to be a Supreme Court, and federal judgeships are "during good behavior" (de facto "for life") but Supreme Court Justice per se doesn't have to be a permanent role. The closest I hear anyone talking about is court expansion, but that's a less-effective fix, and one more likely to draw strong push-back and to be unpopular, I think.
The problem with the Supreme Court is the handshake-agreement to limit the court's size in combination with lifetime appointments and the Senate majority leader's pocket veto. Going back to 1992 (eight Presidential terms, three served by Republicans and five by Democrats), Republican presidents have successfully nominated six justices while Democrats only five (including a no-vote for Merrick Garland).
The better thing to do, in my mind, is to limit the term length of a justice and eliminate the pocket veto, but I can't think of any way in which the elimination of a pocket veto also can't be exploited in some way (eg: with a 6-3 court, if a Republican-aligned justice stepped down, a Republican president can knowingly put forward a candidate they know won't get approved to keep the margin 5-3 vs. 5-4).
Europeans seem to understand this better than Americans, because the US has never really devolved from democracy into authoritarianism, but several European countries have. That's why e.g. in Germany it's possible to ban political parties that have as their goal the overflow of the democratic order.
NPR in particular has been an insane parody of leftism for at least a decade at this point. The fact that it took this long to lose funding is a testament to how strong it was as an institution.
This has been an attack on democracy over 40 years in the making. Conservatives have been openly saying what they've wanted to do all the time, but most people thought there'd never be a moment where they'd actually have enough power to pull it off. Meanwhile, liberal politicians have and still are operating under the delusion that they don't have to pass laws when they gain power, they can merely cast feelings and hope that the courts will back that up.
Institutions are only as strong as their defenders and supporters - and like countless Empires before it, the USA has bled its institutions dry of credibility and/or resources over the past several decades in a futile attempt to satiate a handful of wealthy extremists.
This was entirely expected and predicted once neoliberalism took hold in the Democratic and Republican parties and began rotting out the central pillars of American Democracy and Empire.
A lot of people are learning that institutions aren’t these bulwarks against hostile actors, but in actuality are collections of people aligned on a given mission. For decades, Americans have neglected these people, cut funding to the helpful institutions, and granted far too much funding to negative ones. This culminated in the vilifying of these pillars and their members by a cadre of politicians backed by wealthy donors seeking change preferable to their personal agendas at the expense of the people, and it takes decades of continuous chipping away to get to the situation of today.
None of this is sudden, new, or shocking to those of us who have been staying informed, consuming legitimate news sources, and doing proper research with high-quality reference material. To the average person who merely consumes Cable News or mass media, this may all feel very sudden or surprising and therefore reversible.
As with many things, I wonder if we should start unbundling services the federal government provides. If many states like public broadcasting, what if a pool of states were to opt-in to continuing to fund it (and decide whether to limit it to supporting stations in those states)?
Some things (defense, diplomacy) perhaps can only be done through the federal government. But so many things (national weather service operations, HUD housing assistance, grants for local PBS stations, SNAP benefits) have a largely local or regional benefit. Rather than disassembling these things entirely, why not allow them each to be run by and for a coalition of states (or even cities?) which opt to participate?
> But so many things (national weather service operations, HUD housing assistance, grants for local PBS stations, SNAP benefits) have a largely local or regional benefit.
You should look up which states/regions/counties provide the funding and which states/regions/counties receive the benefits, it's disproportional. Unironically, unbundling HUD, SNAP, and NWS would probably cause famine in Mississippi.
Oh I'm acutely aware that my taxes have been subsidizing people in red states that call me a slur.
But it's pretty messed up that presently the places that _were_ willing to pay for these things are deprived of the benefits. If instead we kept things alive on an optional basis, the participating states might get _better_ services and outcomes for a while because some poor red state communities would not be a sink for funds. But also, if the political pendulum swings the other way in a future election cycle, and more places opt-in, then having kept these programs alive in a reduced form would put them in a better position to resume activity.
From Claude -> Notable Programs They Fund: Public television shows like Sesame Street, NOVA, PBS NewsHour, and Masterpiece, as well as NPR programming like Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
I like all of those. NPR: $300m budget / 42m listeners = $7.14/yr. Sounds like if I donate $5/mo to KQED and $5/mo to KCSM, I'm supporting them to cover myself and couple other citizens?
I don't get what I can do to support PBS - when I press donate on PBS site, it sort of wants to direct me to KQED/KCSM donations again.
Anyone here with a little more time to understand/explain it?
I am quite literally in the middle of reading this now [0]. This would be great required reading for high school students. Anyone that runs across this comment should put it at the top of their reading list.
Most frustratingly, many people know how to be properly skeptical. To use Sagan's example, it comes out in full-force any time someone buys a used car. Never trust the dealer. Everybody knows that.
I really appreciate that Sagan refrains from looking down on anyone. It's all too easy to do and I am guilty of it at times. It also leads to a much more useful conversation. Sagan provides hope that we can educate better. Compared to say, Dawkins, who I think has ultimately hurt the cause. Nobody will listen when they feel insulted.
> So sad to see its worst predictions come true.
The most recent bit of the book I read involved James Randi. I was curious about the guy so I did some other reading. Randi gave out an annual "award" called the "Pigasus Award" to fraudsters and similar. Mehmet Oz received the award [1] three times. Now Oz runs Medicaid!
Sadly, we've lost Sagan and Randi. Sometimes it feels like the world has lost any sort of check against gullibility. To paraphrase from the book, many scientists are particularly not equipped to call these scammers out. Scientists wrestle with nature - nature has laws. Trying to call out the Oz's of the world is hard because they don't play by the rules of reason.
I had the privilege of meeting both Sagan and Randi at different points. Along with Paul Kurtz, also sadly gone now, these were some of the most in influential people in the beginnings of the modern skeptical movement. If you aren't familiar with Prometheus books and CSICOP (now CSI), look them up. You'll find years worth of groundbreaking skeptical reading material.
The stories aren't all that interesting. I met Sagan at a talk about SETI that he gave in, oh, it must have been about 1981, at the MIT Haystack observatory. He did a meet and greet session after the talk, and was very gracious. Randi, I met in 1990 when he gave a talk about skepticism at the University of Rochester. Like Sagan, he had a meet and greet afterward. He was very quirky and funny.
I came to this book too late for the core message to resonate as far as mindset and methods (yeah, yeah, I found this path and walked at least this far on it already, you're preaching to the choir, should have read this when I was like 10 or 12 I guess...) but did make the mistake of dismissing an absolute chorus of warnings about anti-intellectualism from Sagan and a dozen other authors I read as a kid and in my 20s (which warnings, yes, were a significant component of this book)
They were all from roughly the same time period, and I thought their focus on that particular issue was overblown. A relic of the time they'd lived through and their efforts, which efforts had gotten us here, where anti-intellectualism is a curiosity, periodically an annoyance, but not a threat. Sure, we could swing back toward that being a real concern, but it'd take a while. We'd see it.
What's weird is I could also list a bunch of ways that we were swinging back toward it. I think on some level I just didn't believe that these kinds of big shifts backwards could happen, actually and not just in shootin'-the-shit discussions with friends, in my lifetime. Bumps on the road of progress, sure, but going backwards entirely? I even shied away from labeling authoritarian-enabling changes, policies, or actions "fascist", even as I literally protested some of them in the street—well, that's alarmist, surely. It's silly and childish that I was embarrassed of the term.
It's so damn foolish when I look back on it. I had so many of the particulars right, but just couldn't believe in something so big actually happening, I guess. I'd have told you that sure, it could, if you'd asked, even outlined a plausible path from here to there based on recent and current goings-on... but I didn't believe it might happen. Not really.
Probably not. CPB gave funding to rural smaller stations which buy programming from PBS (or NPR).
It will drastically scale back the funding and coverage of public broadcasters, but they should (hopefully) survive.
That said, they effectively cease being public at this point. And ironically enough, they have no reason anymore to pander to wider audiences so if anything they will become more "left leaning" over time.
No. What's really going to end PBS as we grew up with it is streaming. CPB is an vehicle for distributing public funding to PBS stations; only a small fraction of PBS station funding comes from CPB through the government.
No, but I think it's likely that NPR and PBS will change because of this. A lot of people work there because of its explicit mission to serve the public. As with every other federal institution that's being pointlessly kneecapped, lots of good people will look elsewhere.
For the last twenty years PBS proponents have been telling me that PBS and NPR are mostly member supported, and that the Federal funds couldn't corrupt the messaging because there just wasn't enough of it to matter.
So if that's true, I guess not. If it was actually a mouthpiece, I guess so
Yah they also took money from the “Archer Daniels Midland” corporation (not that I’d have anything against organic produce, for example) and the Ford and many other biased endowments —so I think it’d be hard to believe their messaging was unaffected. That or they bit the hand that fed it and the hand didn’t mind getting bitten for some reason.
Commenters in this thread citing NPR as a reason that dollars shouldn't go towards helping kids learn how to count and not be antisocial is the kind of win right wing media could only dream about a decade or so ago.
Absolutely embarrassing for a site like this that claims to value education and democratizing it (and always jumps into threads about childrens education with all of their anecdotally built ideas, of course!) isn't condemning this.
I certainly remember hearing the name many times, on good TV programming, so am surprised that the Wikipedia article doesn't talk much about the CPB's impact.
Good it’s a completely outdated concept. There’s no barrier to producing and distributing content today. That public tax dollars go to a place where partisans distribute it to their favorite projects is a 1960s era concept that needs to die.
Really the 1960s and 70s were such an insane era we should examine all government programs from that era that are still in commission with very suspicious eyes.
When I was a teenager in the 90s an old guy took me aside and told me there'd be a day we get rid of public radio, and a day we'd have our final serving of affordable tuna sushi, and that after that, I'd be living in what he deemed the future.
Of course, if you live in a large metro the local stations will survive due to large numbers of wealthy and middle class benefactors. This is not necessarily so if you live in a typical red state middle size city or less.
Somewhat ironically a lot of the extreme cuts (this included) only serve to reinforce the status of major blue state metros as more desirable, since they have more resources available to fill the gaps left by federal austerity.
> Somewhat ironically a lot of the extreme cuts (this included) only serve to reinforce the status of major blue state metros as more desirable, since they have more resources available to fill the gaps left by federal austerity.
If the people in the red states aren't willing to pay for it, it would seem that they don't think it's desirable. Capitalism is funny that way.
I get that you're trying to say that the pie is smaller overall, but the principle still applies.
We have a capitalist economy, not a capitalist society. The government exists to fill gaps where the market fails. CPB is one example of this. USPS is another. People who look at these organizations like businesses are fools.
> We have a capitalist economy, not a capitalist society.
Last time I checked, "society" is a concept defined entirely by the behaviors and preferences of the people within it. You may want society not to be capitalist, but that's your opinion.
Public television and public radio stations are literally being shut down, now, as per the topic article. Any station meaningfully relying on CPB is done.
I'm sure they will, but public funding for my local NPR and PBS stations amounts to something like 5% of their budget; they aren't going anywhere. NPR and PBS as institutions are more threatened by the Internet than they are by this funding cut.
I don't support the cut, but I get the vibe that many people commenting on this thread don't know what CPB is.
> public funding for my local NPR and PBS stations
Ah, so it's not going anywhere because it's not directly affecting your station. Got it. For many other people it is going away.
This will affect your station though. Lots of stations spent a good bit of their budgets on content from PBS and NPR. While direct federal sources aren't a massive chunk of their income, revenues from member stations is. This will impact the content your local public TV and radio station will get.
I'm sure we're going to lose a lot of hyperlocal news and current event programming in Shreveport or whatever, but those programs have tiny audiences (even relative to their media market). Most of what we think of as PBS and NPR programming is delivered principally over the Internet now, not via local broadcast stations.
The problem is hyperlocal news is what keeps local government accountable. The internet has starved these local newsrooms to the point where NPR was often the only one left.
OK, but iirc you live in a big city (as do I). This is gonna be a serious problem for people in rural areas, and as well as decline in broadcasting operations it will probably mean less quality news coverage of rural issues, and so fewer rural stories on big-city NPR/PBS stations.
Right, but drastically fewer people are consuming linear NPR/PBS content. My guess is that at this point most NPR consumption occurs via podcasts (maybe 60/40? there's still a big drive-time component, but podcasts eat into drive-time too!), and presumably an even sharper shift to the PBS streaming site.
Like, for elderly viewers, availability of linear media still matters (something I've learned tediously through serving on a local commission managing our cable franchise). But... that's basically it?
So, back to: this is not an existential threat to PBS or NPR. I think people think I'm being glib when I say the Internet is a bigger threat to PBS (as an institution called "PBS") than this funding cut. I'm not being glib.
> Right, but drastically fewer people are consuming linear NPR/PBS content. My guess is that at this point most NPR consumption occurs via podcasts (maybe 60/40? there's still a big drive-time component, but podcasts eat into drive-time too!), and presumably an even sharper shift to the PBS streaming site.
Is the source of that 60/40 more substantial than any part of your anatomy?
> Like, for elderly viewers, availability of linear media still matters (something I've learned tediously through serving on a local commission managing our cable franchise). But... that's basically it?
Ok so you hear from elderly viewers that they care about this content and because you don’t hear from anyone else you assume they don’t exist? Are you really satisfied with that conclusion? Is it possible other listeners just have less time to be involved? Have you reached out to get their thoughts? Why are you so willing to dismiss the elderly?
> So, back to: this is not an existential threat to PBS or NPR. I think people think I'm being glib when I say the Internet is a bigger threat to PBS (as an institution called "PBS") than this funding cut. I'm not being glib.
I do think you are being glib. I don’t care about the comparison you’re making and I think it’s incredibly shallow. By your own estimate this will negatively impact 40% of NPR listeners. The existence of a larger threat is no consolation.
Why do PBS and NPR need to compete with anything? This is a public good, not a competitive business. That’s the entire point.
Does this funding cut somehow help NPR and PBS generate non-linear programming or online content? Of course it doesn’t. This is a bad thing for NPR and PBS even if they continue operating in spite of it.
I know you're looking for someone to take the other side of the "these funding cuts are good actually" argument, but miss me with it, OK? Not where I'm coming from.
The people who voted for the politicians implementing this generally live in those areas, so I think everyone is getting what they wanted on the whole?
To be clear, I am not in favor of these cuts, but nothing is preventing state, local or private contributions from keeping these stations on the air.
What's really horrifying here is that, even if the appetite for funding CPB were to come back in 2026, 2028, or whenever, you can't just spin it up again; those people have moved on, those assets are liquidated. You would have to start up again pretty much from scratch.
That's why this careless crusade against governmental institutions is so horrific. Institutions with decades of history are being destroyed, and it would take years to decades to spin up something even close to equivalent, in an insane political environment where every public institution is framed as horrible socialism.
I guess I just don’t find that as horrifying as you do. The market cannot hold public broadcasting accountable, and this is one of the few levers that we have to do so.
Conservatives have wanted to defund public broadcasting for decades. What made it finally possible was that public broadcasting made their bias obvious and undeniable. Over the past 10 years, the stark shift leftward has been undeniable — they became what they’ve been accused of being for a very long time.
With the inevitable cutbacks coming to NPR, I wonder how big a hit classical music will take. NPR delivers 95% of the classical music that airs in America, much of which comes from small market stations which will be the first to die with the end of CPB.
Whenever the question of federal funding for public broadcasting has come up in the past, a small army of commenters would always claim that less then 1% of the funding for public media comes from the government.
Turns out that was perhaps an incomplete argument.
For NPR 1-2% of their budget came directly from the federal government mostly through the CPB. That's where the 1% number some quote comes from.
However, NPR also receives funding from member station fees, and those member stations typically get about 13% of their budgets from the federal government.
Putting it all together about 10% of NPR's budget comes from the federal government.
For PBS about 15% of their budget comes from the federal government. Some local PBS affiliates, especially in rural areas, get up to 60% of their budgets from the federal government.
Certainly an incomplete picture. NPR its self may only get a small percentage of its total pie from CPB, but member stations (that license NPR content and what not) that exist all over the country use various amounts. The result will likely be that many small, local, already underfunded local stations will cease to function in their current capacity.
I identify neither as a liberal nor as a conservative, but outsiders will likely see a left bent in me.
The thing about PBS and NPR: I just don't have any alternatives! Wherever I've lived, all the other radio stations/channels just suck - liberal or not. MSNBC, CNN, Fox News totally suck. ABC, CBS, NBC mostly suck. The half-good radio stations are just way too biased and make NPR/PBS appear like paragons of neutraltity. I can tolerate losing NPR/PBS if I had alternatives. I simply don't.
Conservatives lump NPR/PBS viewers with other liberals. It's generally not true. All my liberal friends declare NPR to be "part of the problem". NPR/PBS viewers are just in another category altogether. They don't have choices.
I'd really like to hear from conservatives: Are there any channels/radio stations they like? Their complaint is continually that NPR/PBS is too left wing (which I can dispute but won't). But do they have a gaping hole in their choices the way people like me are about to have?
I like that NPR/PBS is calm. Most other outlets are based around breaking news, excitement, and often anger. I started watching PBS News Hour on youtube this year. Now I can't stand watching a show like ABC evening news which starts with intense music and urgent words from Muir at the start of every broadcast.
The flagship big-city / large-state stations will very likely continue to function. The real hit for this action will be in rural regions where alternatives to the local NPR translator station are typically religious stations, right-wing talk, and increasingly Spanish-language programming.
If you've access to streaming media, podcasts, or shortwave, you still do have options.
There are several excellent national broadcasters, with the CBC, BBC, and ABC (Australia) operating in English, or a reasonable facsimile. There are often English-language broadcasts from non-anglophone countries, including France (France-24) and Germany (Deutsche-Welle English service), off the top of my head.
Of course, these will get you international news (and occasionally national stories from the broadcaster's home state), but you're straight outta luck for journalism local to your area. OTOH, NPR and PBS have struggled to deliver that (as has commercial news media) for the past decade or two.
If you've always wanted to learn a foreign language but never quite had the inspiration to do so, a further option is to start listening to non-anglophone country's native programming, whether broadcast (shortwave or Internet streaming) or podcast. There are many excellent options. I'm particularly fond of German radio's programming (Deutschlandfunk and its variants, the federated public broadcasting model might offer some lessons and learnings to PBS and NPR going forward), though there are others on top of that.
I round things out with text-based news, typically major newspapers (e.g., NYTimes, Guardian), or newswires (Reuters is pretty good).
But yes, the state of streaming / OTA / linear-programmed news media in the US is absolutely abysmal.
Also, to clarify, my point about non-native sources affording very limited news coverage local to you is salient in that the death of local news services (public, non-profit, or commercial) inevitably leads to opaqueness particularly as to local government, business, and other matters. It's a real loss, and deserves pointing out, however obvious it may be.
I’ll listen to snippets of right wing talk radio but it generally doesn’t take long before the exaggeration (Glenn Beck) or Trump idol worship (Clay Travis) get annoying.
I like hearing perspectives on stories that I won’t hear elsewhere but in general, I don’t need very much political news in my life. I’m happier spending my time on audio books and podcasts.
I’m not sure I’ve ever engaged with NPR beyond seeing conservatives mock some of their silliest propaganda headlines in the past few years.
I’ll listen to snippets of right wing talk radio but it generally doesn’t take long before the exaggeration (Glenn Beck) or Trump idol worship (Clay Travis) get annoying.
I remember being in the gym and catching some coverage of Fox News on Trumps trade war and potential deals. I believe the quote from one of the people talking was something like:
"We don't know the specifics about what's in this deal but we do know that this is a huge win for American businesses and the American people."
> It will regain its trust, but it has a long, uphill battle to get there since, especially since the months leading up to 2016.
Why do you think that? Do you imagine that the individuals and institutions pushing the idea that the media is untrustworthy will suddenly stop pushing their agenda?
I wonder if now, shorn of the need to “bothsides” everything to justify government funding, public radio news will begin to reflect the political affiliations of its donor base more closely.
Unfortunately we've been running a massive and growing budget defect since 2002. The government would need to bring in or cut an extra 1.6 trillion dollars per year to get back to balanced in order for your statement to make sense.
Very simple question, which I've not seen answered anywhere: with all the media options available to consumers today, why should US taxpayers be paying for any entity like the CPB? If they can't compete in the market, go out of business.
Thank you so, so much GOP! Now children won't have the educational programming from PBS and us adults won't have our PBS documentaries and shows. I'm so very disappointed in our government right now.
One has to see the positives. After the isolationist, fiscal conservatives caused their great depression , they turn for one generation into fishes. Any public discussion, mouth opens, brain reminds them of the backlash they will get for what they caused, no sound escapes, mouth closes. Fishes.
I'm pretty certain that if public libraries didn't already exist and someone proposed the idea now it would be labeled "woke" and "socialist" and not get anywhere. We're in a very weird era, but pendulums swing and this too shall pass (in the meantime lots of damage is being done).
> I'm pretty certain that if public libraries didn't already exist and someone proposed the idea now it would be labeled "woke" and "socialist" and not get anywhere.
Public libraries do already exist and they are labeled "woke" and "socialist" and are dealing with both assaults on their funding and on their function.
True. I'm fortunate to live in a community that funds it's public libraries well, but I do know that downstate there are rural communities that have completely defunded theirs. I just don't think the idea of public libraries would get any traction now given how far to the right we've gone.
You don’t think it might have something to do with the Internet and having access to all of the knowledge in the world on your phone?
I’m glad libraries exist but a lack of traction if the idea were introduced today would have more to do with the impracticality of them than any political leanings.
My town spent millions on a small expansion to the library this past year. A project that if it was in the private sector would have cost a couple hundred grand at most. I can’t tell how they managed to spend as much as they did.
Nowadays most library systems offer digital content - ebooks and movies (through services like Kanopy).
Still, it's nice that there are third spaces like libraries in the community where you can go and aren't expected to have to engage in any commercial activity. That requires buildings. Our library hosts all manner of groups & activities. I went to a seminar on seed-saving the other day at our library, for example. I've gone to others on the art of making Japanese tea, candidate debates for local races, local author book fairs, Taiko drumming, etc. All of that requires some kind of physical infrastructure.
Your dumb little phone doesn't contain even the barest shadow of "all of the knowledge in the world" and the people who sincerely believe that are among those who are destroying America right now.
They could have chosen which specific shows they would fund, they weren't required to give out no-strings-attached grants. They once hand-picked Tucker Carlson to host a new PBS show that they would fund.
Again, it's all part of the plan, which is referred to as the butterfly revolution, by Curtis Yarvin. Leaders that have literally invested in this platform are buying into this nonsense. These guys have polarized the two parties to a point all weaknesses are surfacing. It isn't about democrats vs republicans. It's just working class vs the billionaires. You know the ppl sitting behind Trump at his inauguration. Literally, they want to break apart the US and discredit the constitution. Unless we come together and carve a new narrative that works. These guys may succeed and you can kiss your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness goodbye, as well bill of rights.
Peter Theil, JD Vance, Marc Andreesen, Garry Tan, Srinivasan, and many others, wanting to overthrow democracy and dissolve nation states. This effort is to establish Network States with those that worship them, sycophants and cults. They want to transform the US into an Autocracy. The polarization of the media and political parties is on purpose. They want America to fall. It's not a secret, not a conspiracy theory. It's definitely being rolled out by billionaires. It would be wise for others here to really do your research and understand why we are being polarized to hate each other. Enter the butterfly revolution:
1. Reboot (“full-power start”) Suspend or bypass existing constitutional limits; concentrate absolute sovereignty in one new organization—analogous to Allied occupation powers in post-1945 Japan/Germany. Eliminate checks and balances that block rapid change.
2. CEO-Monarch model A single executive (chosen like a corporate CEO) rules; the former president becomes a figurehead “chairman of the board.” Treat the state as a firm run for efficiency, not democratic representation.
3. RAGE strategy “Retire All Government Employees” by mass-firing the civil service and replacing it with loyal appointees. Remove institutional resistance (“the Cathedral”) and ensure obedience.
4. Parallel regime Build a fully staffed shadow government in exile before inauguration; unveil it on Day 1 to take over agencies at once. Prevent the bureaucratic slow-rolling that stymied Trump’s first term.
5. Media & academia clampdown Defund or shutter universities and independent press seen as hostile. Break what Yarvin calls the Cathedral’s cultural dominance.
I appreciate your response and agree with it, but don’t quite get the emphasis on polarization. They don’t want two polarized media sources, they want one completely controlled propaganda source. And I don’t see how it’s playing into their hands or something being “polarized” against billionaires and trump supporters.
Yarvin and Srinivasan have been described as favoring deliberate polarization to destabilizing established narratives. The intent is to surface competing extremes. They view polarizing media as a way of delegitimizing our current framework of government. Yarvin specifically proposes the deconstruction, even abolition, of current democratic institutions, replacing them with a CEO-led or monarchist. Their intent is to accelerate the cycle of systemic breakdown and renewal, so their version of autocracy can emerge in the vacuum.
Oh totally, again 100% with you that they are intentionally (and sadly it seems, successfully) breaking down democracy in the US and elsewhere.
I also believe that there is astroturfing in online comment sections and occasionally embedded agents in opposition movements to push extreme and hostile "wedge" views that would split otherwise potential allies.
But a lot of it is natural resistance to being attacked-
Am I "polarized" against Trump and Trump voters because of a deliberate campaign, or because they are working to make my life unlivable, y'know? That sort of polarization I don't really have a problem with.
I loved many NPR / PBS creations, like “Car Talk”. What a great show.
But I was dismayed to see how NPR turned a blind eye to stories like the Hunter Biden bombshell. NPRs CEO started wearing a Biden hat, and openly criticizing Trump. A former NPR employee wrote a well publicized substack article (irony!) that claimed deep, systemic political bias. It’s hard not to agree.
I hope NPR and PBS take a hard look at themselves and come up with some ways to assure political neutrality. Absent that, I have to agree that tax dollars should not be spent here.
This is a giant thread full of people lamenting the demise of public broadcasting so it seems like someone should write the comment that points out that CPB doesn't do PBS programming. They don't develop content. They're a grantmaking organization that manages the distribution of the congressional PBS appropriation.
The actual PBS and NPR shows you're familiar with are generally developed and produced privately, and then purchased by local PBS stations (streaming access to PBS content runs through "Passport", which is a mechanism for getting people to donate to their local PBS station even while consuming that content on the Internet). This (and other streaming things like it) is how most people actually consume this content in 2025. If your local PBS affiliate vanishes, you as a viewer are not going to lose Masterpiece Theater or Nova, because you almost certainly weren't watching those shows on linear television anyways.
The cuts are bad, I just want to make sure people understand what CPB ceasing operations actually means.
> The actual PBS and NPR shows you're familiar with are generally developed and produced privately
Off the top of my head, two programs I watch that get CPB funding include: Frontline https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/about-us/our-funders/ NOVA https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/funders/
This is one place some sorta "trickle down" economics worked. CPB contributed to developing the content on PBS. Now PBS either has to cut costs by either canceling programs or ordering cheaper content that corporate sponsors like, run more pledge drives, or seek more corporate sponsors. None of those are appealing to me.
Also CPB helps keep rural stations open means all the niche local productions about state history or geology or whatever can happen.
It's a cut to the already strained budget of a wonderful resource. I'd be surprised if there weren't lost jobs and less quality as a result.
Edit to add: Just sentimental but I'll miss hearing "this program was made possible by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions from viewers like you!"
I think the cuts are bad and certainly there will be programming losses. It's just not an existential threat to public media in America, which has over the last 20 years become far less dependent on local stations. GBH, which produces Frontline, gets $177MM in revenue from major donors and viewer subscriptions.
I think I am starting to get paranoid but I wouldn’t be too surprised if they went after these donors next.
I don't know if I'm the only one that finds fault with:
> GBH, which produces Frontline, gets $177MM in revenue from major donors and viewer subscriptions.
Given Frontline is a production for public consumption, for public good, it shouldn't have to be financed by donations, it absolutely should be financed by the federal government.
I find your tone (sorry) offensive, in the sense that you DON'T find it dramatic and just plain terrible that CPB had to cease operations, just because billionaires feel it's a waste of "money that could be in their pocket" and obviously they prefer the greater population to be clueless and ignorant.
Me? I am furious. But what can I do besides the usual? Write my congresscritters, call them, write angry posts on Hackernews, donate?
Frontline is a product, just like all the rest of journalism. The time to have gotten on this high horse was when Craigslist slaughtered local media.
I guess you could blame Craigslist for commoditizing their competitor’s complement, which mattered because newspapers found their lunch being eaten from both ends: first by Craigslist with classified ads (which CL capitalized on with low-ish transparent flat fees for job, rental, real estate, and commercial posts), then by Facebook, which first became a direct source of truth for citizens to find local and regional newsworthy information, and then again when Facebook Marketplace became a competitor with classified ads in newspapers and on Craigslist.
Elon Musk talks about wanting X to be a super app, and I think he’s jealous of Zuck and Meta. Meta is a super app without having to be one, but since the failure of Libra Meta has been trying to get another bite at a similarly large apple, and general purpose AI isn’t a bad one to bob for, and X is trying to swim in those same waters.
Yeah, I think you underestimate the structural dependency.
Xkcd comic is closer to reality. There is a base load to public good and we are about to find out
We'll find out, but I think always the bias on HN is towards whichever interpretation of an event is most dramatic.
It's unfortunate, but as someone who's been on HN since probably 2010, I remember the ethos of this site to news like this used to be a lot more "let's find an opportunity" – maybe I'm looking with rose colored glasses.
People would say "should we setup a donation site" or "how can we build a product that saves local affiliate stations money" etc etc etc. Maybe that's still happening quietly. But I just see a lot more doom nowadays in HN comments. (Just a feeling, obviously no data whatsoever to back it up)
> how can we build a product that saves local affiliate stations money
Let's bring back those supposed good 'ol days!
What are some valid business models that could successfully fund local affiliates? Knowing nothing of the industry, some initial questions come to mind:
- Is there value in cross-affiliate connections and referrals where a broadcasting association could work?
- Direct donations seems like a filled market, but what about donation pooling?
- Does private equity have an interest in these affiliates and why or why not?
- Is there a product in marketing and branding local stations that appeases YouTube and related algorithms? Would this fundamentally work against the mission?
Thanks for humoring me :-)
- Are there potential alternatives for some of the alerting products provided by the rural areas, that is lost in this process?
- Can we also use some of the same tech that's used by influencers, etc to reduce the costs for local affiliates? Like could the shows be produced at home, with cheaper gear, reducing their in-studio costs?
- Program scheduling can be done in the cloud, and maybe the content can be posted on YouTube for more monetization options, however small?
- It could overall lower the costs involved in running a station.
We had 15 years seeing how well "just throw a startup at it" actually pans out
It doesn’t help that many of even those rose-colored startups created 15 years ago have since crossed the rubicon.
It’s solid PR to mumble something about effective altruism being the justification for predatory capitalist behavior.
It just becomes hard to believe after the company was sold and the employees screwed over and the customers screwed over and the founders used their gains to financially support whatever authoritarian fantasies they had all along.
Turns out, people who are good at being ruthless aren’t doing so for a secret ethical reason: they’re just ruthless people.
Yeah... I have no idea why HNers seem more negative these days?
I don't think it's HN-specific; I see the same thing on the other (local) board I spend time on. I think this is just human nature.
I feel like when society has an air of doom you are more likely to see it wherever you are. HN is still fairly international though.
We are now in a timeline where dramatic concerns are legitimate. I would love to be proven wrong on this, but there's plenty of clues to show that I'm not.
Next up in the timeline - when a bad jobs report lands, the person reporting the unwanted data gets fired [0]. Undoubtedly a toadie will be put in their place who will report numbers that make fearless leader look better.
We are now well on our way to George Orwell's 1984 dystopia.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/01/business/trump-job-report-num...
And how will not having semi-reliable data affect Wall St?
Wasn't a significant contributor to the 2008 crash the fact that the ratings agencies were cooking the data?
Obviously different data and utilization, but as economic models require accurate data to forecast accurately, it could be a cascading effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the...
Honestly no one knows but two scenarios could play out:
1. The economy goes bad quickly as actoes realize they cant rely on data to make rational economic decisions.
2. Certain actors pay some quasi-governmental organization (say, "Friends of Mar-a-Lago Book Club") to get access to more accurate data, on the agreement that they make the stock market go brrrr, and they continue to make money.
PBS stations in major markets will likely be able to carry on due to donations and corporate underwriting, but stations in rural areas (the types of places where Internet streaming is less viable due to poor infrastructure) will be heavily affected. Some rural stations get up to half their budgets from the CPB, and these cuts will likely make them have to shut down. In heavily rural states like West Virginia, Alaska, New Mexico, and Montana, the average public media station relies on CPB funding for over 30% of its budget. All of those stations are now at risk. More information: https://current.org/2025/04/heres-how-much-public-media-reli...
I think the idea that people in rural markets are watching PBS OTA linear content is a claim that will need to be supported with evidence. Linear television is dead, pretty much everywhere.
Sure! I'd love to provide you with evidence.
In West Virginia, a state with a population of 1.8 million, West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported 193,687 weekly TV viewers and 85,933 weekly radio listeners in FY 2023. https://wvpublic.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/WVPB-Annual-...
In New Mexico, a state with a population of 1.8 million, New Mexico PBS reported 720,000 weekly TV viewers in 2024. https://www.newmexicopbs.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/NMPB...
In Montana, a state with a population of 1.1 million, Montana PBS estimated around 250,000 weekly TV viewers and Montana Public Radio estimated 70-80 thousand weekly radio listeners as of a couple weeks ago. https://www.krtv.com/news/montana-and-regional-news/montana-...
Only an anecdote, but when we vacationed in southern West Virginia, we relied on public radio. It's the only thing we could regularly get.
I looked only at the New Mexico numbers, and they seem to be dwarfed by their own streaming numbers through Passport. Those OTA viewers are just going to switch to streaming.
If New Mexicans were truly going to turn en masse to PBS Passport streaming, why haven't they done so already?
– Nearly one in five households lacks any fixed home internet connection. Many of those rely on cellular data that’s unreliable or capped, i.e. not viable for high‑quality streaming. [1]
– Over 20% of residents, especially in rural and tribal areas, live in broadband deserts where wired speeds of 25/3 Mbps simply aren’t available. [2]
– Among tribal communities, up to 80% of individuals may lack internet access altogether. [3]
– Even for those who can stream, broadband plans often cost around $69/month, and Passport itself requires a donation of at least $60/year or $5/month. [1][4] That may not sound like a lot to us, but it’s a non-trivial monthly expense for a family living in the 6th-poorest state in the US. [5]
Public broadcasting remains vital for people without digital access, whether due to infrastructure shortages, affordability, or demographic factors like age and tech comfort. Streaming can complement, but cannot replace, over‑the‑air reach in New Mexico. The same is likely true for overlapping reasons in the other states that OP mentioned.
1. Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. Affordable Broadband for Every Household in New Mexico. https://www.benton.org/blog/affordable-broadband-every-house...
2. Viante New Mexico. Broadband Internet in New Mexico. https://viantenm.org/broadband-internet-in-new-mexico
3. Native American Budget and Policy Institute / UNM. Broadband Access on Tribal Lands in New Mexico. https://nabpi.unm.edu/assets/documents/covid-19-research/nab...
4. PBS Digital Support. What is PBS Passport? https://pbsdigital.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/folders/5...
5. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/poorest-sta...
good post, thank you.
this thread so patiently explains to us that these people do not even exist. Oh, but not in significant numbers. Oh, but they have other options. Oh, but they will get broadband in 20 years.
Nobody who MATTERS is impacted. Nothing to see here, move along. /s
The NM report says that there were 900,000 total Passport streams in 2024. Because there are 52 weeks in a year, that's an average of only about 17,300 streams per week.
Have you looked any closer at these numbers? This is something like 90% of the entire New Mexico household audience. Does that sound plausible to you?
If you're accusing them of lying on their report because it disagrees with the off-the-cuff remark you made about OTA TV being dead everywhere, then I'm not sure what I can do. I'm not a journalist. Personally I find it inspiring that New Mexico PBS has managed to become one of the most watched PBS stations in the country (often in the top 10 for prime-time viewership) when it serves the 37th most populous state, and feel that it's a great example of how public broadcasting is able to reach underserved communities.
No, I don't think New Mexico PBS is lying. I think it's much more likely that we don't understand the stat we're arguing about. Uh, I'm just going to come out and say it: even in 1995, at the height of linear television, 80+% of the NM market was not watching PBS. Sorry, this doesn't pencil out.
Streaming is not viable in the vast majority of the country. Just because it's available to the vast majority of the population doesn't mean that the minority who live in rural areas don't count.
A valid point. Plain old tv is the past.
For the small number of people using it, it’s better to spend the money on internet infrastructure to bring them into the current century. Broadcast tv is one step up from old time radio.
I watch OTA television.
I listen to linear NPR. But I know what the statistics are. None of this is going to be here 20 years from now.
the important thing about 20 years from now is that it isn't now
If I was in a place without internet streaming, I'd get Starlink.
This sounds awfully close to "If I were poor, I would simply choose not to be poor."
If you were in a place without internet streaming, consider whether you’d have the economic means to pay for Starlink. Not everyone is earning the median Hacker News contributor’s income.
Starlink: $600 + $120/month
Radio: $20 + $0/month
My Comcast monthly cable bill is more than that.
And how much is your cell phone bill?
$70/month fiber internet. No tv. Streaming would be complicated because of CC rebates, but maybe $40/month net. Then $25/month cell phone.
But I set myself up to have to interact with cable providers, ISPs, and cellular carriers a bare minimum. Because they are just the worst.
Musk gave out free Starlinks during Hurricane Helene.
Pretty much everyone has a cell phone.
500 Starlinks? https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/elon-musk-sta...
As opposed to 95% of US homes that have at least one radio receiver? https://www.insideradio.com/inside-story-radios-in-more-u-s-...
Usable digital cell service still doesn’t reach a good chunk of rural Americans.
I’m not sure why an expensive, technically-complicated solution would be an alternative to a free, simple, widely-deployed one.
> Usable digital cell service still doesn’t reach a good chunk of rural Americans.
What's the percent of that?
And what's the percent of people that leave their radio on 24/7?
"Musk gave out free Starlinks during Hurricane Helene."
Did he?
> As it turns out, the offer wasn’t as generous as it seemed, it’s really more of a new customer promotion.
> The Register pointed out that if anyone goes to sign up for the “free” service, there’re hit with a harsh reality: you have to pay for the equipment.
> But try to sign up for the ostensibly “free” service in an area Starlink has designated as a Helene disaster zone, and surprise: You still have to pay for the terminal (normally $350, but reportedly discounted to $299 for disaster relief, though that’s not reflected in Starlink’s signup page), plus shipping and tax, bringing the grand total to just shy of $400...
> According to the Starlink Helene page, new customers who qualify for free access will be automatically moved to a paid $120-a-month residential subscription tied to the location the terminal was set up for after 30 days.
> Even if you’re a victim that happens to be an existing Starlink customer, if you want those fees waived, you’ll have to file a waiver and then wait for it to be approved. [1]
Not sure why you're taking the world's richest sociopath at his word. And even if he were as charitable as you say (which I obviously don’t stipulate), that would mean... what? We wait for another Hurricane Helene to hit every person without internet access? Then wait even longer for a billionaire to bail them out?
1. https://qz.com/elon-musk-free-spacex-starlink-hurricane-hele...
> if you want those fees waived, you’ll have to file a waiver and then wait for it to be approved.
Oh, the horror! Do you know that to get government services, you also have to file a form and wait for it to be approved?
Nice cherry-picking. Your post framed it like Musk was Father Christmas, handing out gifts to needy kids. It’s more like Columbia House [1] for internet access, and targeting hurricane victims to boot.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_House
FEMA failed, and Musk stepped in to help.
If people didn't like Musk, nobody made them do business with him.
Complaining that someone would have to fill out a form to get free money is not a compelling argument.
So “help” and “buyer beware” are now synonyms. Got it.
> Complaining that someone would have to fill out a form to get free money is not a compelling argument.
Again, A+ effort on the cherry-picking. I call BS on the expectation that hurricane victims will read the fine print about a $120/month rate increase after they’ve just lost their homes. If Musk’s goal is to “help” hurricane victims, maybe he can offer them something better than a bait-and-switch.
> I call BS on the expectation that hurricane victims will read the fine print about a $120/month rate increase after they’ve just lost their homes.
They can simply cancel.
> If Musk’s goal is to “help” hurricane victims, maybe he can offer them something better than a bait-and-switch.
Again, FEMA offered nothing. Musk came in with Starlink. I should look into Starlink. It's cheaper than my cell phone plan plus internet plan.
> and then purchased by local PBS stations
If those stations go off the air, who is buying that content?
It's like arguing it doesn't matter if the stream dries up the plants don't get water from the stream, the plants get the water from the ground. Where did that water in the ground come from? The stream!
You're right, these shows aren't going off the air tomorrow. But this does affect the funding for the shows produced by PBS and NPR.
Don’t worry, they will be able to get plenty of grants for content promoting Trump’s businesses
This would make sense if CPB cuts meant all stations were going off the air, but the major market stations where most of the money comes from are fine.
If 20% of your pretty static set of clients went bankrupt wouldn't that pretty negatively affect your company? Or would it only affect it if all your clients went bankrupt?
> because you almost certainly weren't watching those shows on linear television anyways.
I'm just one person, but I definitely am watching the local PBS over an antenna, and so do several members of my family (living in different households).
The local broadcast is excellent quality, I get a good signal to it, never any glitches, and I enjoy the local news and other programming too.
I've been running a MythTV backend to record OTA content since the early 2000's and PBS is, by far, my most recorded channel.
I don’t watch my local PBS over antenna much anymore, but it is great, just like you describe. Amazing what you can watch for free OTA, when you think about it.
This is useful, though it leaves open the question of what it means in practice that the grant-making organization is disappearing.
CPB doesn't create programming. But they do write grants to the stations that purchase the programming. Isn't that just funding the creation of the programming with several steps in between?
> The actual PBS and NPR shows you're familiar with are generally developed and produced privately, and then purchased by local PBS stations
Purchased using funds from CPB. Most of the grants went to stations, not content producers. But pulling funds from stations will in fact harm the content producers too.
Here's a summary of the changes and the impact: https://democracy.diy/issues/save-pbs-and-npr/
The PBS budget has been cut by 15%, and the NPR budget by 1%. That's not enough to end either one at the national level. However, local stations depend on the CPB funding for 50% or more of their budgets. (Local stations provide local disaster alert systems and local programming.) There will definitely be local station closures and major cutbacks in the stations that survive. Large metropolitan areas will be the least affected. PBS and NPR will continue at the national level, as before.
The funding cuts are the result of an executive order that Trump issued on May 1, ordering the immediate cessation of all federal funding. Similar executive orders have been found to be illegal in federal court. (Congress had already guaranteed funding for CPB from 2025-2027, and only congress can take that money away.)
However, congress supported Trump a short while later (on July 24) by passing the Rescissions Act, which officially (and legally) ended all funding for CPB. And that's the reason for the current crisis: all federal funding for CPB is ending by the end of this year, which is only a few months away.
> PBS and NPR will continue at the national level, as before.
It is not a given that they will continue as they did before, CPB's funding mostly goes to PBS and NPR for content, some programs are funded more than other via the CPB.
It is likely PBS and NPR will continue, but not as before, the cuts will impact programming and their ability to buy content that's produced at smaller stations that rely on CPB funds more.
> Local stations provide local disaster alert systems
These days sending alerts via texting them to phones should be far more effective.
Not reliable, as cell sites can go down in disasters, while the giant secured antennae that broadcast PBS and NPR aren't going anywhere.
I have NEVER tuned into PBS for weather and disaster alerts. Growing up in rural America I've seen this headline multiple times, but I'm 99% sure in my community PBS doesn't actually do any weather coverage during tornadoes or similar. You MIGHT get a required alert tone and a banner, but no radar or anything of real value.
Our local news stations do an amazing job and they don't ask me to donate.
I spent over a week in an area that went without electricity and most utilities after a widespread disaster. By virtue of living through one previously, I had a generator hooked up to the gas line, so I still had power during and after this disaster.
Internet access was down, cable was down, cell service wasn't there or was overloaded 2G that was useless, but I had did have OTA DTV. The local PBS partner station covered pertinent information about what was going on, recovery efforts, when/where to get fuel and other assistance, what kind of disaster relief to expect and when, etc.
I understand my experience is subjective, but I'm actually a bit amazed. Thanks for the info, and I'm glad you had something.
Something similar happened to me like 15 years ago, and I just had a AM radio.
Wasn't service supplied during the Helene hurricane with Starlink?
When I was a kid in Kansas in the 1960s, the tornado warnings were done with a siren. And yes, we got hit by a tornado, but were safe because we heeded the siren.
Given that CBP is only 15% of PBS funding, I’m surprised they don’t start a national fundraising campaign instead.
I’d happily donate some cash to keep PBS’s lights on in red states.
Nothing stops any of us from donating to local stations or PBS/NPR directly. Here's a good reference link:
https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/5000692392-w...
Do you subscribe to your local station and have a Passport account? Consider doing that first.
With a quick search online, here's a list of the donation links for the 21 states that are currently listed as "Red" (based on 270toWin.com). It's kind of a Googlish reply.
Some are a little difficult because they're kind of fractured, like Missouri is a St. Louis link, Texas is an Austin link, Tennessee is a Nashville link, so its challenging to tell if your donation is going to the state in general or just the local town PBS. (May want to check specifically if you're targeting a specific market). Most tend to be statewide portals. However, you seem like you want to support PBS, so here's some links.
Alabama (https://donate.aptv.org/aptv/donate), Alaska (https://alaskapublic.org/support), Arizona (https://azpbs.org/support/), Georgia (https://www.gpb.org/support), Idaho (https://idahoptv.pledgecart.org/home?campaign=1FF20990-A386-...), Kansas (https://donate.kansascitypbs.org/kcpbs/donate), Kentucky (https://ket.secureallegiance.com/ket/WebModule/Donate.aspx?P...), Louisiana (https://lpb.secureallegiance.com/lpb/WebModule/Donate.aspx?P...), Mississippi (https://donate.mpbfoundation.org/mspb/donate), Missouri (https://www.ninepbs.org/support/), Montana (https://donate.montanapbs.org/kusm/donate), Nebraska (https://donate.nebraskapublicmedia.org/alleg/WebModule/Donat...), North Dakota (https://www.prairiepublic.org/support/), Oklahoma (https://www.pbs.org/donation/?station_id=edf8065c-f56a-42f7-...), South Carolina (https://www.pbs.org/donation/?station_id=50ac3de0-09e0-43db-...), South Dakota (https://sdpb.pledgecart.org/donate/home), Tennessee (https://donate.wnpt.org/wnpt/donate), Texas (https://donate.austinpbs.org/austinpbs/donate), Utah (https://donate.nprstations.org/upr/support-upr?gad_source=1&...), West Virginia (https://afg.secureallegiance.com/wvpb/WebModule/Donate.aspx?...), Wyoming (https://donate.wyomingpbs.org/kcwc/donate)
You may be right, but I'm guessing the Administration is not done with NPR and PBS yet. This is just phase I.
One of the biggest viewerships of these programs is the 2,500,000 prisoners in the USA. Most jails and prisons just pump the cheapest broadcast plans around to all the televisions in the facilities. I speak to people in prisons regularly and I'm often asked for schedules for things like NOVA.
PBS doesn’t make PBS content either. They acquire it from people who make it using CPB money, among others. Then the stations that don’t make the content license it from PBS, mainly using CPB money. And they use it to attract members/donors.
You’ve framed this as if the disappearance of CPB and its money is basically a big nothing-burger, which is extremely far from the truth.
Source: I work in the system at a level with visibility into these things.
I don't think it's a nothing-burger. I think there will be programming cuts and layoffs even in the major market stations. But it's clearly not an existential threat to PBS.
not something one gets to say very often, but you're insufficiently cynical, tptacek.
killing this means cutting of swathes of simple, orderly funding. what remains is donations etc, which is far less regular, and requires work to get, and is also easily attackable by presidential fiat.
we already know there's a bunch of actual lunatics in charge of the federal government, with a very wide variety of very stupid hobby horses. they get to ride them now and then, so how about some guesses at future trips:
- IRS starts going after big non-profit donors to public broadcasters, claiming they're in breach of some somewhat arbitrary and subjective rule that's been poorly enforced in the past, I don't know foundation disbursement rate or something, but also nudge nudge wink wink, if you stopped giving to PBS, maybe we'd forget about it
- FEC "clarifies" that promoting non-traditional-sexuality or whatever is political and thus it's illegal for non-profits to fund it, which of course would be an extremely funny turn given how the Right Wing Lunatics Association of America actually couped the country. this could of course be enforced entirely randomly - go after the NPR stations that are loud and annoying, go after the individual donors to them that the regime wants to make an example of.
- Congress passes some law that "clarifies" the purpose of non-profit status or something, to exclude anti-American speech, which is of course a clear abridgment of the 1st amendment, but of course that's fine in 2025 if it targets notional enemies of the regime.
killing this corporation just grants more power to the extremely partisan executive branch and extremely corrupted government and turns ever more of the functioning of the United States in to just expressions of the whims of the supreme leader and his favoured courtiers.
the current deliberate structural destruction of the united states seems underappreciated - every one of these moves turns the country in to more of a Whimocracy and destroys the bedrock of society that let it weather past terrible administrations.
Nixon was a historically horrible president, but the Washington Post fucking took him down. now almost all the big media is owned by Rich Cunts who make a public show of displaying subservience to the Dear Leader.
Maybe you weren't watching them on the TV but your grandma was most likely was.
The more important thing is that this is just another tiny step in the death spiral of the United States. Sad to watch.
Truth. The people who will lose it are the ones still consuming it over the airwaves.
... unfortunately, they're the ones who need it most, but when in America has bad government policy not hit the poor hardest and first?
I mean you kind of made it sound not too bad at all.
According to this page [1] PBS only receives about 15% of its funds from federal funding. The rest is from donations.
1: https://foundation.pbs.org/ways-to-give/gifts-to-the-pbs-end...
So this certainly won't be the death of PBS, as I had feared.
Update 2: For the record (easier to respond in this original post than to each response), I am not defending the decision at all. I grew up listening to NPR, and have been on recurring monthly donations to PBS for years.
I was genuinely curious about what percentage comes from federal funds. So I am just trying to level-set and get ahead of any hysteria about the actual impact.
PBS and NPR do not operate like the commercial networks --
ABC/NBC/CBS/Fox/Etc are big corporations that produce (or commission/license, it gets...weird) shows to be distributed on their affiliates, that, depending on the city you are in, can be owned by the network OR another company that operates it like a franchise. Their affiliate agreement governs how much of the network programming they play -- though there are other agreements for non-network programming -- Jeopardy/Wheel of Fortune, for example, are syndicated and NOT network.
PBS on the other hand is more of a consortium of public TV stations around the country. Shows that you might think of as "PBS Shows" are actually produced by these individual stations and then distributed to other stations that want them. Even PBS Newshour and Washington Week are produced by WETA in DC.
Radio gets even more complicated. Many of the shows I've seen referenced on this thread aren't even necessarily NPR. Marketplace, for example, is American Public Media, which is sort of an outcropping from Minnesota Public Radio.
So funding going to ACTUAL PBS is a tiny part of this. What happens to the money going to various stations? What happens to the grants to produce and run these stations, especially in rural areas?
As others have said, the big guys (WGBH in Boston, WETA in DC, etc) will have minimal impact since they have a large pool of donors.
But the little guys will suffer more. Ultimately, I think we can all agree that we hope the impact won't be catastrophic as far as the number of listeners impacted.
Yep. Public media operations in rural and small-city markets are often as small as one full-time employee and cover large spans of territory. A cut to each of those stations might be as small as $150k but could represent much of their ability to do much more than minimal playback of out-of-market packages (which also degrade since many are published in part or full through CPB grants).
My guess is that things will largely continue as they have been, but we'll get a lot fewer of those cute little stories about a random one-off issue in a town of 300 people or whatever.
Probably not the biggest loss if I'm right, but still a major bummer, and yet another connection between the rural and the urban is severed.
I think people are interested in local news, so the gap will certainly be replaced but by monied interests, e.g. Sinclair [1] or similar. Who will promote their narrative and further polarize the information landscape.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group
ah so like the cathedral vs the bazaar...
PBS themselves[1] state that CPB funding is what kept local stations solvent, so without funding, they will likely close.
They also state that the bulk of CPB funding pays for national NPR and PBS programs, so those will see cuts, too.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/house-gives-final-appr...
Rural stations relied heavily on CPB funding; urban stations get most of their funding from donations or corporate underwriting. So big city public TV and radio will survive, but those in less populated areas might go under unless some other source of funding is found.
Yeah but the shows that the urban stations are running and producing are all bought by the rural stations. So the whole ecosystem needs the rural stations to help fund the productions.
The urban stations raise a lot of money locally (through pledge drives, and by hitting up local companies for underwriting, which is basically advertising). The rural stations don't, too few people. The rural stations get CPB money, and some of that goes back to fund shows that they carry, but mostly it's the cost to operate the stations. The urban stations aren't being propped up by the rural stations, there's too little money, even including the money that they get from CPB.
I agree overall that this is not a good thing for also furthering a knowledge gap between rural and urban areas. But in the age of internet streaming, wouldn't rural areas still have access to stream public radio? Genuinely asking.
I tried looking for sources on station audience sizes, alternatives they might have, etc. But it was difficult to find.
> But in the age of internet streaming, wouldn't rural areas still have access to stream public radio?
Sometimes streaming isn't an option. When Helene hit WNC we lost power, cell, internet, and water all at the same time. The local NPR stations were the only ones broadcasting updates on a regular cadence so we could learn what in the world was going on. And we're not far from downtown Asheville.
Some extremely rural areas only have spotty internet or no internet or cell at all and public radio is the only thing they have.
Local reporting is basically dead outside of metro areas.
Sure, you can stream, but the content will be focused on another locale or won't address local issues.
When I'm not busy worrying about everything else, I worry that there's assuredly an explosion of local corruption, especially outside of cities large enough to still have something resembling actual local news media, that we can't even begin to get a handle on because it's... well, it's invisible now, that's why it's (surely—I mean, we can't possibly think corruption is dropping or even remaining steady, with the death of the small town paper and small-market TV news rooms, right?) happening in the first place.
I think it's, quietly and slowly, the thing that's going to doom our country to decline if something else doesn't get us first (which, there are certainly some things giving this one a run for its money). The Internet killed a pillar of democracy, replaced it with nothing that serves the same role, and we didn't even try to keep it from happening, so here we are, we doomed ourselves by embracing the Internet quickly and not trying to mitigate any harm it causes.
For some your comment might sound even comic but it is damn true. It safens me that the dangerous spiral is not seen by many others.
After all, the milenia old adage "bread and games" silences to many.
It's pretty dead even in metro areas.
My local NPR broadcasts rarely actually cover anything that's happening in like city or county politics. Heck, even talking about state politics is pretty rare.
In the SF bay area, KQED (NPR affiliate) has a lot of coverage of local SF and Bay Area politics. The Pacifica station, KPFA (public radio but not an NPR affiliate) has more.
Yes, all the rural PBS markets will retain streaming access, which, again, is how most people under the age of 60 get access to PBS today.
Public radio and local broadcasting has been gobbled up by right-wing sources, including Sinclair
Watch this clip:
https://youtu.be/xwA4k0E51Oo?feature=shared
As a long time listener of AM radio. Literally nothing has changed from a programming perspective. The only noticeable difference is who supplies the on the hour news.
Well a counter argument would be, how would you know if anything is changed? If you're not part of the editors for a newsrooms how would you know which stories are cut and which make the broadcast?
Are there many rural-only districts?
Having moved around my PBS districts always seemed to be a metro+rural zone.
There are vast open spaces, out of FM radio range of a really big city. Some of the worst-hit public radio stations are on reservations.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5408014-rural-stations-vu...
> Rural stations hit hardest
> Up to 18 percent of about 1,000 member stations would close
> PBS only receives about 15% of its funds from federal funding
I'm a big fan of PBS, but I wonder if this common stat is misleading. Don't a huge portion of PBS funds come from member stations, which get a portion of their funds from federal funding?
Yes it is so obviously misleading and incorrect that only the mainstream media could have perpetuated this unquestioned for decades.
The federal money goes to member stations which then hands it right over to NPR to pay for programming, I believe it’s $500 per hour. It’s 1 layer of indirection but no one seemed to mention this in all of the reporting
> ...hands it right over to NPR to pay for programming, I believe it’s $500 per hour...
So - does that mean a member station could just cut back on their NPR-sourced programming, then fill the air time by playing more Frank Sinatra, and broadcasting local HS football games, and such?
I suspect that many will be forced to close entirely now. Others may not longer be able to afford pay for NPR shows at all (they'd have to pay for both membership and individual shows), while others will have to fill their airtime with things besides news and other NPR programs
$500 per hour for a media production seems like a weird number. It's either fantastically cheap for production costs and an atypical model for licensing costs. From what I understand radio licensing is usually done either per listener per time or per content (which might be only 25 or 50ish minutes a piece to allow for ads). It's quite high if it's the latter and would probably be a significant fraction of the operational costs for many smaller stations, far above their music costs.
My link is from PBS's donation page. Are you saying they're misleading people about their own funds?
I am also really annoyed when people repeat that it's only 15% government funded or whatever. It's a misrepresentation to the point of lying. Which is further reinforced by: if it's only 15%, why are you having to shut down? It's so dumb.
The CPB is closing, not PBS. PBS says it's 15% funding from federal sources. CPB, well they're closing so who knows.
Please check my link again. It's from PBS.
Are you suggesting that PBS is misinforming people about how much of PBS's funds are government funded?
My link is literally from the PBS foundation. I'm very careful about my sources in this age of constant misinformation.
I don't know about the situation at all (non-American here), but hypothetically if a local (say State level or something) organisation, that was 100% funded by the federal government, chose to donate 10% of their revenue to PBS, then PBS would accurately classify that as a donation rather than federal funding, but it would still potentially be affected by federal funding cuts.
I've no idea of that is at all the case with any of PBS' donations, but it seems like a hypothetical that might be true and that could be hidden despite you being diligent in finding out what PBS truthfully reported.
Yes. I think 15% of funds from direct federal funding is totally correct, but I think there's also a portion from indirect federal funding.
Man, sometimes losing 15% is enough to make things unsustainable. It is not like they are an Ivy League university with an endowment bigger than a developing country's GDP.
Totally agree. But there's a much bigger chance to survive with a 15% change, rather than a 30% or 40% change, for example.
The CEO stated repeatedly that many small stations are likely to be forced to shutdown
I think your usage of the word “only” is a mistake. This is an important piece of information but if you are going to imply value like that then you should also explain the consequences of that cut.
Per https://cpb.org/funding, $357m goes to public tv and $119m to public radio.
That's a nice chunk of change, though low enough that a few friendly billionaires could put some pocket change into a trust today and make up for this funding in perpetuity. And there undoubtedly will be a massive surge in donations from small donors in response to this.
As long as the bigger fish are willing to subsidize the smaller rural stations, I don't think there is anything to be afraid of.
The removal of this Sword of Damocles is in my opinion a great thing for PBS and NPR.
A few friendly billionaires could have funded them entirely for the last 60 years. I see no reason to think that they suddenly will now. Many stations will be closed, and people will lose out on valued programing.
Joan Kroc gave NPR its biggest gift ever, $200 million. Alas, that was unusual.
It will be the death of public radio and television in small markets. Not all stations are affected equally.
This is not a fiscal decision. This is a ideology that demonizes the open exchange of ideas and truth.
No I totally understand. I'm not trying to defend the decision or anything.
But I am just trying to set expectations of what people should expect to see. I'm trying to get ahead of the predictable hysteria about the death of public radio/tv.
Honestly, given the news that the Trump administration now has editorial control over all of CBS, it’s probably good that they’re no longer holding NPR’s purse strings anymore.
Maybe the revolution will be televised after all.
> Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country,” Harrison said.
If that was true, losing the CPB would be a travesty. But as a loyal NPR listener for decades, I've found their stuff lately to be unlistenable. It's Fox, but for the Left, and with a bit more of an intellectual spin. What makes it most annoying is their utter blindness to their own bias. The Fox hosts know that they're taking one side of a story. I've never gotten the impression that any of the NPR hosts are even that self-aware.
> It's Fox, but for the Left
There was a distinct shift to the right at NPR when Obama took office, and by the time he took his second term, NPR News' social media was posting clickbait trash instead of real headlines. "The liberal media" is an irrational boogeyman used to whip ownership in line. Everyone who complains about "bias in the media" is arguing in bad faith while they continue to turn a blind eye to the overwhelmingly dominant conservative slant of the 21st century American media.
smithkl42 says that NPR is leftward, and you say that it's rightward. Maybe we're all operating from different baselines.
No. If that's what you took from my post, I've miscommunicated.
NPR has turned rightward. The entertainment shows are, without a doubt, liberal, on the American political spectrum. There are countless discussions and papers about the role empathy plays in successful entertainment.
The editorial content has turned rightward - and the leadership has turned rightward. This has been ongoing for at least two decades, probably longer, but I wasn't paying attention at that level when I was under 20.
NPR was not rightward this past election, for sure. I don’t think NPR missed to report a single Kamala endorsement last fall.
OP is arguing nuances, and you seem to be intent to distill everything to a binary construct. Nuances are what runs the world, not binary groups.
I thought they meant NPR was generally neoliberal left of center, and their coverage has perhaps moved toward the center post-Obama while still being left of it.
Where exactly is the American 'center' as of 2025? Where is the midway point between the modern establishment left and the establishment MAGA right?
Because to me, that midpoint looks to be way to the right of, say, Mitt Romney or George Bush Jr or Reagan.
I think the center in modern American politics has historically been neoliberalism, which explains why the center keeps holding. Neoliberalism is only now having to respond to populism on the left and right, which has caused the balance of power to shift on each side. The neoconservative bloc has attained power on the right with the rise of Trump and the Tea Party before him, and some folks on the left have acquired influence, like Bernie Sanders and AOC. The center is holding less and less as the bureaucracy is being fired and defunded.
I don’t mean to be dismissive, as I think your reading is also accurate. The center of mass is shifting, but I’m not sure the locus of control is as much.
Sanders and AOC are fringe socialists who hold no power in either the press, or the political establishment.
MAGAnuts are now the mainstream face, body, and soul of the political establishment.
Where exactly is the 'center' between the latter and Chuck Schumer? Where is that 'center' going to be in three years, as every month, MAGA picks up the goalposts and moves them a few miles right-wards?
I think AOC is closer to the establishment than even I realized. AOC walked Khalil out from within the security perimeter to meet with family members and waiting press including Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWpRCoQ2wWE
AOC is doing the important work that Congresspeople do. I don’t know if it’s fair to say that she’s fringe. She’s showing up and doing the work that other people don’t show up and do. If it’s fringe work, that is fair to say I guess if you feel that way. I was surprised to see her in this video but at the same time it seems totally in character for her to be there. I think she’s probably going to run for president or vice president at some point in the next few cycles if I had to guess, and these are baby steps to build trust with the Muslim community and get in front of reporters on a national issue.
NPR and especially its editorial content has turned steadily more leftward over the past 9 years (especially since Trump’s election in 2016) and moderately accelerated during COVID/around the talk of the death of one of the hosts. I say this as someone who is left-wing.
I didn’t think there was much debate on this point, it’s rather well documented/easily searchable online. If you genuinely think NPR’s editorial content has turned more right from the left, you are probably operating on a different scale than the general American public. There has also been a lot more scandals with their editorial content and the information accuracy in recent years with the bias being more and more left.
All of NPR's 87 editorial board members are registered Democrats. That should give some indication of where they are on left versus right.
Yeah I've been bummed by how far NPR has swerved leftward, especially since 2016. Even ten years ago I liked tuning in because it was quality journalism that still made an honest effort to cover multiple sides of an issue, even if the topics they chose were primarily "liberal" topics. But yeah, now they seem just as tribal as Fox.
Not every side deserves to be covered for each story. This is the problem with major media today, they give equal opportunity to people that have no idea what they are talking about. It's like one side says 2+2=4, the other 2+2=5, and media gives them equal air time.
Can you point me to a good source that actually gives equal opportunity to multiple sides of a story? Because I rarely see that (regardless of which side), the whole reason why I subscribe to things like ground.news.
Axios does a pretty solid job of covering point and counterpoint on their stories not bias towards "equality" for different perspectives, but actually covering fully the different angles of a story.
See yourself in their article from a couple of weeks ago about the federal funding cut of CPB.
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/18/npr-pbs-funding-senate
> Ahead of Trump's second term, Project 2025 wrote in a detailed memo foreshadowing the president's agenda ways the administration could pull funding for public broadcasters. The Trump administration started taking actions to scrutinize public broadcasters shortly thereafter.
There's no mention of why they want to defund CPB beyond "Trump administration efforts to strip funding." Muh Project 2025 is referenced briefly, but the rationale isn't explored.
They provide quotes from those opposed "unwarranted dismantling of beloved local civic institutions,... gutting" without the For Side saying anything e.g. that this is no longer necessary due to media landscape.
It doesn't consider whether it's necessary and while saying it will be a loss to rural news never looks at the fact it's used less and less there, whether gap will be filled and in part has.
It centers the negative consequences, it has very limited perspective by supporters and centrally frames Project 2025 despite questionable connection. There's clearly a tilt, but it performs neutrality that less critical might accept.
"The choice of what to include and what to leave out, what to emphasize and what to downplay, inevitably reflects a point of view."
lol, I stopped caring about them because they weren’t willing to say anything about Gaza and bent over backwards to excuse what Trump was doing. If center-right NPR is too liberal I shudder to think of your politics
Many major establishment news orgs are similarly guilty of a heavy pro-Israel bias (WSJ and NYT as other examples), but I would argue this is more on the establishment vs independent spectrum, rather than the left vs right spectrum.
Equating a for-profit news corporation's politics with how they handle a singular topic like Gaza would be a bit reductive.
The one that gave up the game for me most re: mainstream liberal media was how often NYT ran the Claudine Gay story (front page ten consecutive days). The entire controversy was completely manufactured as a right wing cancel culture operation and the New York Times laundered it under their ‘liberal’ reputation.
NPR is better than most as their are not owned privately by a billionaire or collectively by billionaire shareholders. But they play the “both sides are reasonable” game annoyingly often with every issue, as if there is some sort of sensible middle ground to be reached somewhere between Obama and Hitler.
Seeing Gaza in particular covered this way - one the most appalling human rights catastrophes of my lifetime aided and funded by my own government - was too much for me to stomach.
I am always confused by this narrative. People extolling the virtues of old media organization as if those people weren't toeing the government line and were cold robots with no bias.
It is the rise of media org like Fox news where these kinds of comments have started surfacing. Because for Fox news is more commentary than facts. And then the narrative trick from Fox and other conservative media outlets have constantly pushed an agenda - "others do it too".
It has led to comments like these and this is fine.
> It's Fox, but for the Left
But then when you start adding stuff like this:
> and with a bit more of an intellectual spin. What makes it most annoying is their utter blindness to their own bias. The Fox hosts know that they're taking one side of a story. I've never gotten the impression that any of the NPR hosts are even that self-aware.
It becomes clear you are regurgitating RW talking points and both side-ism. And because Fox is worse, the only saving argument is that Fox at least knows their bias. God help this country if this is level of intellectual spin people can give to reinforce their points.
And you are clearly regurgitating left-wing talking points etc.....
> If that was true, losing the CPB would be a travesty.
America and many Americans have lost their way, and have always struggled to get perspective on a topic.
As out outsider looking in, let me be clear.
This IS a travesty, and will be a notable mark in the history books when people look back in 50 or 100 years and ask “how did it happen?”
If Fox keeps moving further and further right, even centric stuff starts sounding far left.
Can you cite specific examples of this "bias?"
Here’s Fox reporting on NPR’s bias: https://www.foxnews.com/media/npr-head-asks-critics-show-me-...
As you can see, it’s mostly gotcha quotes and unfair glosses. For example:
> 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.
Of course, it’s a historical fact that many minority neighborhoods were bulldozed to make room for interstate highway development, among them Cincinnati, OH and St. Louis, MO.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-freeways-flattened-black...
But of course this history that actually happened is interpreted as Reuters’ liberal bias. There’s no winning this.
Have you read Robert Caro's The Power Broker? It's a biography of Robert Moses.
Robert Moses did not build the USA highway system.
Robert Moses was racist.
What was done to some communities was messed up.
The highway system isn't racist.
Are you confusing freeways and highways?
Robert Caro details Moses' role wrt highways & suburbia in NYC, nationally, and even internationally.
IMHO, having never Moses, I'd wager he was classist. (Moses allegedly also hated poor and immigrant Jews.) As you know in the USA economy & society, classist ~= racist.
What point are you trying to make? I don't see how you're connecting these things. The highway where I live is certainly designed with racist intent.
As linked elsewhere in this thread, see Uri Berliner on the subject https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...
How about using terms like "pregnant people"? Or the fact that on my local NPR station I can count down from 60 and something like 80% of the time, before I reach 0, they've talked about race or ethnicity at least once.
That's my complaint. Decades ago I enjoyed NPR when I drove to work. It was always left leaning, but at least the programs discussed topics I found interesting or cared about for one reason or another.
These days the only thing they talk about are racial and sexual minorities. I can't express how little this kind of factionalism interests me. I'm not arguing that kind of content shouldn't be produced, but I don't want to pay for it.
> How about using terms like "pregnant people"?
You mean like countless medical journals do?
Look, I hate to say it, but if this is the type of stuff you're complaining about, then you have a weird persecution fetish. This is simply not a real problem. It is made up. It is culture war bullshit. You sound like a cry baby.
> before I reach 0, they've talked about race or ethnicity at least once.
Yeah because race and ethnicity have A LOT to do with crime. Again, you can cover your ears and go "lalala not listening!", but after a certain point we have to call the delusional, delusional, and move on with our lives.
It's not like race wasn't a thing in the past. It's just that nobody talked about it because they were racist. That's how that works. Now, we're not so racist, so when race is a factor in things we don't just fucking ignore it.
That’s not why they talk about race and you know it. And the pregnant people thing is just a dogwhistle. It’s not my fault most of American science has been captured by the far left.
"Babies are not babies until they are born. They’re fetuses." from https://wamu.org/story/19/05/15/guidance-reminder-on-abortio...
I'm not against abortion. In fact, I actually see the legal necessity of it in an overpopulating world. But NPR's bias on the front does not align with my own bias or, I think, with most people.
Everyone has bias and that's perfectly human. The problem is when we don't own up to it. NPR tries to cover theirs with circuitous language and lies-by-omission, https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2019/05/29/7280694.... That double-talk served well in insulating them from criticism, but it ended up costing them the public trust.
> Babies are not babies until they are born. They’re fetuses.
This is a factual statement with accurate medical terminology.
We don’t call them meteorites until they hit the earth, either.
It's verbal sleight of hand in the cultural tug-of-war to emphasize or de-emphasize the future human. The point is that massaged language blunts or sharpens its impact, and an org's political choices therein reflect the bias.
Meteorites don't have that baggage.
It's a style guide; not "verbal sleight-of-hand." It codifies what terms should be used by their reporters, and refers to the AP style guide.
so you're saying if they said babies in their style guide it wouldn't have any impact on perception?
The baggage isn't calling fetuses what they are. The baggage and bias comes in when you lie about what a fetus is, depicting it as a human baby, which it is not. The right does that specifically to emotionally manipulate people and feed a narrative of baby killing.
Who here is doing the verbal slight of hand? The people using factual terms, or the people lying? This should be an easy one to answer.
I hate to have to inform you of this, but "babies" is not a medical term.
He didn't say it was.
Yes he did bro
In medical jargon, sure. In common usage, including among medical professionals, it's extremely common to just say "baby" in many contexts, especially when the baby is wanted and expected to be viable and brought to term. Nobody but a few weirdos or people trying to make some kind of a joke are gonna say to their partner "oh, did they give you any pictures of our fetus from the ultrasound? Oh look at our fetus' tiny little hands!"
(I'm pro-choice but think the "acksually they're fetuses" angle is fucking gross, both on an intellectually-honest debate level because it's semantic bullshit, and because it absolutely reads as a move toward dehumanization, and I hate to provide reasons for those kinds of accusations from pro-lifers to ring true)
> "acksually they're fetuses"
I highly doubt anyone in your actual life has said this to you, or distilled the entire argument down to this point.
> because it's semantic bullshit
Obviously, semantics isn't "bullshit" because there's been a massive decades long debate over semantics, including millions and millions spent by the right to define the semantics.
I can concede that some people hear this debate and think they're under attack in a "culture war", which I'm really not sure what the solution to that is because semantics is important.
You're responding to someone who thinks pointing to a dictionary automatically wins an argument.
Adam Carolla was interviewed by NPR and tried to Gotcha him by saying he said racist comments against Asians, but the comments were from an Asian comedian. NPR canned the interview and never aired it, despite telling him they would air it.
You know Asians can be racist against Asians right?
> Can you cite specific examples of this "bias?"
Read https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru... by NPR veteran that shows how NPR developed a left wing bias over time. Also at https://archive.is/H7QNM
https://washingtonstand.com/news/npr-has-zero-republicans-87...
NPR Has Zero Republicans, 87 Democrats on Editorial Staff
If you are going to reference Uri's interview, you should also reference the response from his former colleagues:
https://steveinskeep.substack.com/p/how-my-npr-colleague-fai...
Why would anyone care about A's criticism of competitor B?
--
FWIW:
"The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC."
eyeroll. Might want to look at the original article by the NPR veteran himself which was the first one posted, but has a paywall. The Washington Stand only elaborated it. Argue based on the facts and merits of the article.
I read Uri's piece ages ago. n=1
I also read the rebuttal from his former colleaques. n=15 (?)
It's just another entertainment industry food foght.
"NPR Has Zero Republicans, 87 Democrats on Editorial Staff"
How many "Republicans" applied?
I guess they expect NPR to have diversity hires to meet republican quotas now?
Of-course, I am sure a government funded 100%-republican news and broadcasting agency with news pieces spouting right-wing talking points trotted out with regularity would be fully accepted as an excellent use of taxpayer money in the public interest by democratic politicians.
Undoubtedly that's the reason for the under-representation of women as Fortune 500 CEO's. They're just not applying.
The difference is that being a republican is an ideology you choose. Republicans can stop being republicans at any time - but they don't, they continue, because they enjoy being republican.
What I mean is, republicans choose to be ideologically opposed to journalism and ideologically opposed to education. Why would they become journalists? They hate journalism, by choice.
Would applying be a personal and professional liability for women, the way doing so at NPR could very well be for a "Republican?"
How many "Republicans" apply for jobs in gay bars?
Nice false-equivalency attempt.
You're not making an actual argument.
You understand there are many gay republicans right?
There is a surprising amount of influence in terms of what stations you listen to, not just due to the local programming but due to their choice of which national programming they air.
I don't agree -- NPR is about as center-right as it's possible to be. Just look at the efforts they've made to normalize Trump, it's way over the top.
And nonetheless it's an important voice to have since it will leave a void in the media landscape to be filled by opportunists.
Oh, I agree, don't get me wrong. I'm just kinda shocked people think it is leftist. It's like they have no idea what the term means (it's not "left of my personal beliefs").
So true, it is so telling that everyone complaining about it is a conservative...
I've seen leftist complaints about NPR - they take corporate sponsorships after all
The right in the US is so far right that centrism looks like communism to some people. NPR and PBS are far more influenced by their corporate donors than they are the political leanings of their audience.
What I said about NPR might apply to some of their listeners as well: "What makes it most annoying is their utter blindness to their own bias."
i dont think they are blind to their own bias, i think they are championing their own values, but that's the problem.
Considering that reporting factual information gets blamed as left wing bullshit... I don't think your post has merit.
See: COVID, vaccines, climate change. You have one side explicitly denying what we can do with the scientific method and decades of peer reviewed research, and then blaming anyone who contradicts them as biased sources.
Comparing to Fox News is even more ridiculous. You say that them knowing they're spouting bullshit is better than the people not spouting bullshit at all?
Cmon now. Take the group that is actually trying to engage in good faith rather than the one that is knowingly producing crap. Maybe this is why people voted for Trump: he told them what he is, and they liked the honesty.
This is one point that has irked me.
The real narrative problem is that relying on "science" as truth.
Science has been weaponized by all sides it is incredivly easy to manipulate research into a narrative. But the left's media empire is by far the most effective at doing this and with heavy left bias in academia it's a corrupt system.
Data has a priority say in everything we do but dropping context and information then calling everyone dumb for not "trusting the science" is propoganda. The response of the left is to simply call everyone who denies today's science as ignorant.
This is how you get climate deniers. Weaponize science and unsuprisingly you get countless people who stop believing ANY politically angled research.
Not sure how much you've spent in academia but modern science is nasty buissness. Incentive structures are completely warped.
Well, congratulations, now there won’t even be that, but Fox will persist.
Is Fox news government funded ?
Must see TV when I was little was Mr. Roger's Neighborhood and Sesame Street. As I grew and my interest in what makes the natural world work became more sophisticated, Nova was something I watched regularly. Every one of these programs was supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I am saddened by this loss.
This Old House taught me mortal fear of water damage, and The Woodwright’s Shop taught me terrible, terrible puns. And some woodworking skills. Roy, you absolute legend.
Sesame Street helped black boys succeed in school, whereas the new regime wants them to literally pick cotton.
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/app.20170300
https://tonicrowewriter.medium.com/did-maga-farmers-believe-...
I listen to NPR every day and, honestly, I think this might be for the best. It's going to hurt for a while, but in the end, I think public broadcasting will be stronger when it stands on its own without interference from politicians.
> I think public broadcasting will be stronger when it stands on its own without interference from politicians.
What does the "public" in "public broadcasting" mean to you?
Ideally, it would be entirely non-commercial, funded by direct donations from the public.
That is not what "public" means in ordinary language. Public is intended to mean "supported by taxes".
Support by donations is always dependent on the largest donor.
See Post, Washington to see what "dependent on the largest donor" is revealed to be.
Not going to argue semantics with you.
The US government was the largest donor until now. No single non-governmental donor will ever have that level of influence again.
I now realize (sorry) that my European mindset has tricked me, most likely. The term is very loaded here towards the meaning I gave it.
You are probably right.
My apologies.
it's not a semantic argument. you misunderstand the term in question.
Until this change, public broadcasting got 85% of its funding from donations, so whatever the term used to mean, that's what it means now.
Honest question: apart from the name ("Public BC"), what makes it "public" in the US if most of its income is private?
It gets direct donations from the public.
But then what is the difference between that and any NGO?
>Public is intended to mean "supported by taxes".
For you, probably, for me it means "from/for the people".
Those are synonyms.
"From the people" = supported by taxes. If it's supported by some small pots of private money, then it's not from "the people", it's from a select few people.
For example, Bezos "donates" (owns) WAPO. Would you classify WAPO as "from the people"? Obviously not. Just doing private money exempts you from being "from the people".
"For the people" = equal access. The only services that have equal access are tax payer funded ones.
Is your private insurance equal access? No, it's tied to your employer.
Now what about roads, parks, sidewalks, the fucking DMV? Are those equal access?
I'm sure someone, somewhere, can find a counter example, but a counter example does not a rule make. 99.99% of the time, "private stuff" = only for some people, "tax payer funded stuff" = everyone at least has an equal opportunity to access it.
Yeah, as in "We the people". As in "Of the people, by the people, for the people" Taxes are how "we the people" pay for public things (libraries, parks, highways, sidewalks, schools, etc.)
See my comment below: in usual terms, in Europe “public” means technically “supported by taxes” -which is why most “public” media is most of the time pro-government (bar inertia).
Then it becomes an organization dominated by those who donate the most -- and there have already been cases where a PBS affiliate self-censored and modified its editorial in an attempt to placate a potential donor[0].
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/27/a-word-from-ou...
What are taxes for, then?
The American public's attitude towards using taxes to support media has shifted over the past few decades. There's a perception (right or wrong) that public media is liberally biased, and it's getting government attention now, and so we're seeing the consequences of that.
Voluntary vs. Compelled is the difference.
Are you saying that non-commercial broadcasting does not count as a public good, or that taxes should be voluntary, or that it does count as a public good but taxes should not be spent on it?
Things that are supported by a durable majority of the population. I wish that included public broadcasting, but it doesn't.
Personally, I'm tired of hearing conservatives whine about public broadcasting. This will at least shut them up for good.
I guess we should just support the post office with donations while we’re at it. That’ll work well!
I suspect the post office is still supported by a durable majority. If it isn’t, then it will probably lose government funding as well.
>I suspect the post office is still supported by a durable majority. If it isn’t, then it will probably lose government funding as well.
To which funding are you referring?
In fact[0]:
"Unlike many government agencies, the United States Postal Service (USPS) does not receive direct taxpayer funding for operating expenses. Government appropriations are limited to specific purposes, such as the Postal Service Health Benefits (PSHB) Program."
And[1]:
"In 2006, Congress passed a law that imposed extraordinary costs on the U.S. Postal Service. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation."
[0] https://govfacts.org/federal/usps/how-usps-stays-afloat-fund...
[1] https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis...
A durable majority doesn't even support funding education, and it is losing federal funding as we speak. Do you think this is a good thing?
I don't think this is correct. The majority of people prefers states to have more influence on school curriculum and federal government to have less. Yes, there are downsides to that, but it generally means that hours on STEM will increase and hours on ideology will decrease.
Removing federal influence in setting agenda while sending federal funding directly to states without federal oversight of programs would not be a bad thing. My 2c.
Banning books and forcing bibles in schools. Right.
No, teaching what the local parents believe is best for their own kids. While there are certainly a few of those who will want bibles, most in my experience put much higher value in the extra STEM unhindered by ideology.
My kids high school recently cancelled advanced math classes because the racial composition of students there was not what the school hoped to see. No, thank you, I want parents to have a much bigger influence on what schools teach.
Which Federal policy was it that led to that class cancelation?
Some equal access policy that it was worried about. Do you have kids? If so, what age(s)?
Are you trying to distract from the fact that you can't actually give any specifics about any of this and sound like you are working from talking points by asking me about my children?
The right is ideologically opposed to education. The belief that they are doing so to.. ugh... "promote stem... unhindered by ideology" is, frankly, delusional.
Same with public schools, public parks, public sidewalks, public libraries, even police and fire departments. We have to give billionaires trillions in tax cuts while watching most Americans backslide into poverty so obviously it'd be fiscally irresponsible for the government to fund public services for the peasant class
You can't shut conservatives up. When you give conservatives what they want, they don't become less extreme - they double down and become more extreme.
What you're referring to is a kind of "respectability politics". Basically, if we're nice and do what conservatives say, then things get better and they ease off.
We have literal hundreds of years of proof that this is not the case, and the opposite happens.
Think about Donald Trump. When we legitimize him and continue to do so, has he gotten less extreme, or more? In 2016 versus now, is he less extreme, or more? Much, much more. But he got what he wanted, right? Yes. And then he wants more, because he feels emboldened. It's an ideology built on Greed.
If you give conservatives an inch, they take a mile. If you ease up a bit on reconstruction, then suddenly you have Jim Crow. If you you give them a teensy little bit of morality legislation, then suddenly you have mass censorship proposals and the Ten Commandments in schools.
As a gay man, I see this time and time again in my own community. I have been told we are too vulgar, too sexual, too gross, and this is why conservatives target us. That if we just acted more normal, more respectable, they would leave us alone, and the world would be happy.
But there was a time when we were respectable, when we hid in the shadows. When we got wives just for show, just to please the conservative narrative. When we only acted like ourselves in our own hidden bars, our own hidden spaces. Out of sight, out of mind. And, well, how were we treated? Was it better? No. It was much, much worse.
This will not shut them up.
> This will at least shut them up for good.
No it won't. The modern GOP is fueled by grievance. It needs an "other" in order to exist. They'll have a new enemy to rail against by this time tomorrow.
Yes, of course, but it won’t be public broadcasting anymore. That’s why this might be a win for public broadcasting in the long run.
This is naive. If conservatives continue to perceive outlets like PBS as a thorn in their political sides, they'll go after their broadcasting licenses or target them with ruinous lawsuits - both actions that have been discussed or taken by conservative politicians already.
Can we call it public broadcasting when it fails to even dimly reflect the diversity of ideas for the areas it serves? Milk toast conservatives like Juan Williams were deemed intolerable a long time ago, so calling it public radio at this point is a misnomer and a sad farce.
I think you mean "milquetoast". The wikipedia link led me to "milk toast", which is interesting in itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_Milquetoast
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_toast
TIL the etymology for the word
Juan Williams wasn't let go because he's conservative; it's because he's a bigot (unless you think being a bigot is a conservative qualification):
"Look, Bill [O'Reilly], I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."
https://www.npr.org/2010/10/21/130712737/npr-ends-williams-c...
"NPR, like any mainstream news outlet, expects its journalists to be thoughtful and measured in everything they say. What Williams said was deeply offensive to Muslims and inflamed, rather than contributing positively, to an important debate about the role of Muslims in America."
https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2010/10/21/1307132...
NPR can also be a bit of a meme sometimes. Maybe it's just circumstance but every time I hear NPR for any period of time longer than about 20 minutes they do a segment on a topic like polyamory, how women are proudly reclaiming the word "bimbo", or people protesting the administration using interpretive dance.
It is certainly not programming with much mass market appeal.
Perhaps not every form of media needs to be engagement-driven?
The beautiful thing about public media is that it can broadcast things that don't have a profit-motive for being broadcast.
Shouldn’t publicly funded media at least be representative of the wide diversity of views and interests that the public holds?
What topics and interests do you think they've never covered?
> The beautiful thing about public media is that it can broadcast things that don't have a profit-motive for being broadcast.
True, so one would expect to have heard much more about Bernie Sanders when he was making runs for president. Unfortunately the only coverage he usually got on likes of NPR was when it was something negative about him.
So much for straying from profit motive.
> when it stands on its own without interference from politicians
Why on earth do you think it will be free of interference? Obviously they will find other ways to pressure and censor them. As they have done in many cases already.
I wonder how the people at NPR feel about all those donations they took from the Koch Foundation over the years...
They feel fine about it. They're run plenty of pieces that run counter to Koch Industries' interests.
(Also, did you mean the Charles Koch Foundation or the David H. Koch Foundation? The Koch Foundation is a different entity with a different mission.)
You obviously know which ones I mean.
Hasn't it been largely free of interference up until now? And would you prefer it suffer from corporate interference like all other media?
It's been a political football for decades. Conservatives use it as an example of liberal spending run amok, so public broadcasting has had to constantly look over its shoulder during that time.
No, I would like to eliminate corporate influence as well, but that might not be possible in a capitalist society.
Take a tax supported public good, remove the public support and then claim to worry about corporate influence? What do you think was holding that corporate influence at bay?
Unfortunately, the necessary level of public support doesn't exist, so relying on government money isn't viable. I hope public broadcasting will get enough money directly from individuals to resist excessive corporate influence, but we'll have to see.
Who do you think the individuals donating will be?
> I think public broadcasting will be stronger when it stands on its own without interference from politicians.
What does the "public" in public broadcasting mean to you?
You prefer interference by corporations?
Most of NPR's news programming has been terrible for many years.
Pay attention to how many segments—even that are sort-of connected to an actual news event, which, many aren't—revolve around political strategy, poll numbers, and (in season, which is now like three years out of four) electoral race polling.
It's, like... a lot of them, outside the human-interest and arts coverage stuff. They consistently divert into talking about political media messaging strategy and poll numbers and crap, and they do it so very much that it's got to be something they're doing on purpose. This isn't news reporting, it's lazy, safe (because you don't have to engage with substantive questions of policy and outcomes, nor even questions of fact) horse-race bullshit. It's a complete waste of the listener's time, if they're there for actual news reporting.
On the flip side, though, I'm not seeing a lot of "sink or swim in the market" US media doing much better, so I wouldn't bet on them shifting to anything better (though shift they might).
It hasn't been interfered with until now, what are you talking about about?
Contrary to the conservative spin over the years, I have found public broadcasting to be one of the least biased sources of headline news and information available. (For their national broadcasts at least - local ... can be hit or miss).
In particular, their kids programming is the absolute best. Nothing flashy or exciting, but it's laser focused on education and has zero agenda. And the PBS kids apps are one of the few things I can hand to my kid worry-free. And the fact that it's money-free and ad-free to access in this modern age is a miracle.
The only people who could support this are not just wrong, they are people out of touch with reality. These are people who think public parks are a waste of space. Or that having nice things to share is elitist.
> one of the least biased sources of headline news and information available
I’m pretty sure that’s the fundamental problem they have with it. They want media whose content they control.
(All of this is about control/power, not making things nice or doing things right.)
Facts have a well known liberal bias
Thats expected. In functioning democracies state media is run for the purpose not profit. It doesnt have the corrupting influence of political money. PBS in the US could be so much better. Just look at what BBC is able to do in the UK.
> PBS in the US could be so much better.
PBS Newshour is pretty much the best/balanced news programming on US TV at this point. They take deeper dives into issues than most of the other shows out there. And then there's Frontline which is excellent and goes even deeper with a documentary format. The rest of PBS - there are a few good parts like Nova, but a lot of what plays on PBS stations these days is UK crime dramas - man, there seems to be a lot of mayhem going on in merry old England these days.
>PBS Newshour
Haven't watched this since I was a kid. Just scrubbed through the latest episode. I was surprised, it's not bad. Left-leaning to my eye, but FAR less so than any other left-leaning mainstream TV media I can think of. And as you point out, more substantial and meaningful coverage than you typically get anywhere else. I would be happy to encourage anyone to watch more PBS Newshour based on that
Is there a specific example of the left-leaning bias you can mention?
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias"
.. Stephen Colbert
The show had six guests on- 2 left, 1 right, 2 neutral(?) and 1 CIA deep state mouthpiece. The show gave mostly balanced coverage of every issue covered, but declined to dig into the Epstein issue beyond "Trump+Epstein", gave the deep-stater seven minutes to defend the CIA without meaningfully pressing into any of the other questions raised by the latest declassifications (such as HRC & DNC involvement in orchestrating Russiagate), flashed a debunked/misleading statistic on screen about Russians influencing the the 2020 election via social media, and gave a one-sided take on redistricting in Texas ignoring the side that says redistricting after a Census is normal and routine.
> such as HRC & DNC involvement in orchestrating Russiagate
I'm not trying to be dismissive of your viewpoint, but why should anyone bother speaking to this? Absolutely nothing new was divulged. It's not the media's responsibility to give airtime over every government press release.
https://www.grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/declassified_d...
These documents don't really contain anything.
All you see are staffers at the Hillary campaign discussing the news of the Russian influence campaigns (which this report reiterates are real) and how they can use it for their campaign.
Nothing in here is novel or even that salacious. How is this newsworthy?
Texas already completed redistricting in 2021 after the most recent census (2020). They are only redrawing the maps again now because Trump is demanding an even more egregious gerrymander.
In that case I wish Newshour had made that detail plainer. I see now they lightly brush over it in the intro of the segment. Thank you for the clarification.
Is there much to say on Epstein besides "Trump+Epstein"?
Epstein was not some Darth Vader or Joker (The Dark Night version) or Commodus (from Gladiator) or Sauron or Voldemort type of villain who was openly villainous and did not have a public good side (either an actual good side or a front to try to hide his villainy).
Epstein was more a Han from Enter the Dragon kind of villain.
Epstein had a fairly extensive public good side (maybe real, maybe just a front, probably a mix of both) appearing as a legitimate businessman and a philanthropist.
A big part of his philanthropy was directed toward supporting scientific research, universities, and the arts. He liked to invite top people from particular fields, like physics and AI, to events on his island where they (the invited people) would discuss major scientific and philosophical issues from their field. Get an invite to one of those, and it was a chance to go spend a few days for free in a resort setting, participate in some pop science level discussions to keep the rich guy happy, and maybe try to talk him into funding your lab.
Because of this most of the time it isn't all that interesting when some famous person shows up in Epstein's documents.
It becomes interesting with Trump because he spent a lot of time using his opponent's Epstein connections against them in ways that made his followers come to believe any association with Epstein is practically proof that you are an active pedophile.
He did this even though he knew he himself had connections to Epstein (including to people who actually were part of Epstein's villain side). And now that's biting him.
> PBS Newshour is pretty much the best/balanced news programming on US TV at this point.
Ah yes, the news show that has a weekly politics round table that brings in a balanced approach to see issues from both sides: The side of an anti-Trump Democrat and the side of an anti-Trump Republican.
Good riddance!
How many pro-Trump Republicans actually want to engage in a fair round-table style debate?
This administration makes a point that they only do interviews with sources favorable to them. They can't opt out of the media and then pretend to be victims.
> How many pro-Trump Republicans actually want to engage in a fair round-table style debate?
There's plenty to pick from. The problem is that having someone effective in that position would anger the one people that PBS actually cares about, their donor class. It doesn't matter that Trump won the popular vote in the most recent election, they'll still go out of their way to ensure that the token conservative voice is against him.
> This administration makes a point that they only do interviews with sources favorable to them. They can't opt out of the media and then pretend to be victims.
This is the most accessible and transparent administration in decades, if not longer. The POTUS has held more interviews, with just about every national media organization, and regularly holds open ended press conferences with pools of reporters.
What you're describing is the previous administration which not only hand selected the reporters, they even gave Biden a cheat sheet of reporters (with pictures!) so he would know exactly who to call on: https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-defends-bidens-cheat-sh...
Is that your paragon of media transparency?
>There's plenty to pick from.
No there's not. Name three.
>This is the most accessible and transparent administration in decades, if not longer. The POTUS has held more interviews, with just about every national media organization, and regularly holds open ended press conferences with pools of reporters.
This is simply an absurd lie with no basis in reality, I really don't know why you even spouted it. It contradicts observable truth. Strange.
>Just at what BBC is able to do in the UK.
This is funny because BBC is a prime example of being a propaganda channel for the government of the day. And that's not new at all just look back at the coverage of the Troubles or the miners strikes in the 70s-80s.
Yes it's not on the level of CGTN or Russia Today but BBC is not neutral at all
https://theconversation.com/hard-evidence-how-biased-is-the-...
A lot of people are unable to see their own political bias; they look at BBC or Fox News and see “unbiased true reporting”.
I highly suggest using Ground News (ground.news) for a week or a month as your sole portal into news stories, and then use their features to analyze bias in your selection of news stories and outlets.
I use it regularly to try to offset my own biases.
I think comparing BBC new to fox news is a piss take.
of _course_ there is bias at the BBC. But to comparing it to Fox is uncharitable at best.
The comparison for something as openly partisan on the left as Fox News, in US media, would be something like Democracy Now! or maybe The Nation.
The thing is, though, there are a few components here: there's level of favorability toward a certain kind of politics, which some barely-popular left-leaning outlets roughly match Fox News on, plus propensity to lie and exaggerate. And there's reach.
Nothing left-partisan in the US that I'm aware of touches Fox on either of those latter fronts—propensity to just make shit up, and (certainly not) reach.
Nobody's putting Democracy Now! on in waiting rooms. Hell IDK maybe at Planned Parenthood, never been, wouldn't know, but not at a dentist's office or at the auto shop or what have you.
There are equivalents to Fox News on the Left (Fox News viewers think it's MSNBC because that's what Fox News and AM radio told them, LMFAO, no) in the US, in terms of level of commitment to supporting partisan causes. There's nothing like it as far as willingness to deviate from reality to do so, nor in reach. Nothing remotely close.
Also the Wikipedia Current Events portal [1]. It’s definitely biased by the Wikipedia editors decisions on what to add there (especially the “Topics in the News” box) but it gives a more or less neutral dump of the daily events.
It’s pretty much the only place I know to find news on all the conflicts that Western media tends to ignore.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Notably when I was checking the Current Events Portal for a while, most coverage of the Israel/Hamas war was sourced from Al Jazeera and it definitely felt biased. Checking it just now, it appears to be more balanced now.
Ground News worries me because now we don't need to use our brains the app just tells me the bias! Ground News could be biased!
Leads to shallow discussion where all news sources are tossed out for bias leaving nothing (or what ground news wants you to listen to). God forbid we critically examine for ourselves the information we consume.
This makes 0 sense
Ground news links all of their sources on a per article basis and you can simply scroll left/right through each news source. And you can add your own sources!
You didn't address the meat of my argument. The sources are irrelevant. They try to tell you the media bias which can itself be biased and gamed and which (I think) leads to readers not critically examining sources for themselves.
If somebody is going to be uncritical I don't see how any of this actually helps, but that's totally on them.
I'm not going to argue with them saying that Fox News is right wing or that MSNBC is more left wing. "Duh".
Maybe we're looking at this from a different angle, or maybe we just use the service in different ways.
The "bias" part that is relevant is showing you the difference in headline and contents between dozens or hundreds or thousands based on historical leanings of the news org, and which ones are even reporting on a particular topic.
It's not saying a particular article leans a particular way, it's saying the source does.
I don’t get the sense that Ground News is trying to influence what news stories I select; I think they are presenting metadata that allow me to look at the story from my preferred frame of reference and from the opposing frame of reference. I find it valuable; you might not.
I think that the media bias ratings on Ground News are slightly biased and the factuality ratings are highly biased, not intentionally but due to flawed methodology of their sources. I have contacted their support to raise that issue.
I still find the site tries really hard to make you aware of your own predilections, and I think it does well as that, and if you find yourself gravitating towards one set of sources you can always sample the “other side”.
I agree that left-right doesn’t capture the richness of American politics but for better or worse they are convenient labels for our two party system.
At your recommendation I took a look at Ground News.
I'm not a fan of the continued reification of "left" and "right". I have heard conservatives lament that MAGA isn't truly conservative. I've heard economic reformers lament that liberal social policies are sucking the oxygen out of the room for real structural reform. In both cases the idea of a single "left" and "right" as a group, or even worse as the two sole options on the menu of how to think, is severely damaging to productive political dialogue.
Framing everything as left-vs-right is like doing PCA and taking only the first principal component - sure it might be contain some signal, but it flattens any nuance. Critically, it also pre-frames any debate into competing camps in a way that harms rather than serves. I would challenge groups like Ground News to offer other framings - why not "owners vs workers"? Why not "rural vs urban"? We should ask why they chose the framing they do. I have my own cynical opinion but I'll refrain from sharing.
It's also showing you Where and IF people are even talking about the issues in their bubbles.
I don't know about your suggested site, but I use foreign news for this. I have switched to "consuming news" [0] almost entirely from a variety of English-language foreign services.
All national media services have their own bias and propaganda, but if you switch them up it becomes obvious very quickly. It also means that I miss out on most of the US political noise [1], which is a benefit to my mental health [2].
[0] Hot/lukewarm take: "consuming news" is a waste of time, and should be minimized. This really hits you like a brick to the head when you see the stuff that foreign countries are obsessing about, and how tiny it feels to you. Guess what: your news media is filled with the same crap.
[1] I still get the foreign opinion on it, obviously, but this is usually pretty mild. Most countries don't care about the US nearly as much as US citizens think they do.
[2] If you think that CPB/NPR don't have bias, I strongly suggest that you try this. You're probably in a bubble, and an "international perspective" is something that most NPR listeners claim to value. Removing US media from my life eliminated a huge source of angst (particularly after 2016), and revealed that all of the major US media sources are various forms of hyper-polarized clownery.
I suspect most people who look at international media and think it's better are using rose-tinted glasses.
Indian media is broadly worse if anything, latin american media is a trip if you have any understanding of the complicated political landscape, Aus is central to the Murdoch news dynasty, and East asian media has lots of famously partisan organizations. Maybe middle eastern media, explicitly funded for soft power political goals or African media, which span the gamut from bloodthirsty factional rags to leftover colonial institutions to tightly controlled extensions of the state apparatus?
They're differently biased, but you can't escape consuming media critically. "Averaging" by listening to a lot of different perspectives is 1) a lot of effort and 2) also something that can (and is) manipulated by making sure there's lots of "both sides" messaging present.
> I suspect most people who look at international media and think it's better are using rose-tinted glasses....They're differently biased, but you can't escape consuming media critically.
I went out of my way to head off this exact criticism, but I guess I didn't put it in blinking, bold, 30 point font.
Again: every national media outlet has bias (indeed, every media outlet has bias). My experience is that it's pretty easy to notice when you switch your sources regularly.
It doesn't take me any effort to do this, and even if I hear a hyper-partisan take, it doesn't melt my brain. I go "oh weird, so that's what the Indian government thinks" -- which is still vastly preferable to hearing what some reporter at NPR or CNN or whatever thinks about what India thinks.
I've been a subscriber for a few months now and it's well worth it.
In fairness to the BBC on the rare occasions they do cross paths with the government this happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry
I'm not sure anyone that is familiar with this has been able to take what they say seriously since because they are so clearly on such a short leash.
To quote David Mitchell - "news is a very small of the BBC...BBC is an organization that is loved around the world for its drama and stories and not just the ruddy news".
How is it not neutral ? I follow some of the news. They've criticized both Conservative and Labour governments. Of course there are problems like the whole Martin Bashir thing but recently I've seen the BBC be more self-critical than other private TV channels. If we're comparing mistakes from the past then in the 90s, Roger Ailes was molesting women behind locked doors. Lewd comments were the norm across several news rooms. Doesn't mean that all private media is bad.
>They've criticized both Conservative and Labour governments
this is really the main problem with the bbc. for example one week they publish a story talking about something horrible israel has done then the next they publish another seemingly taking their side on something. it just ends up annoying and confusing both sides instead of one
The BBC has routinely been called biased by all sides of the spectrum - it is effectively the best we are going to get in terms of neutrality.
It would help a lot if you would offer some points of comparison for which channels you think do a better job in this area.
The BBC is pro-Establishment rather than in favour of the government of the day. I.E. Strongly pro-EU / anti-Brexit. It's also decidedly pro-Woke.
I do think it is pro-establishment but as a remainer I was exasperated by both the outsized presence Mr Farage got on BBC programming and also the uncritical nature of the coverage of the post-Brexit negotations and treatment of dissenting MPs, so I am not convinced at all the BBC had a particularly pro-EU position.
I think you could argue it had a sort of pro-Cameron lean to it for a while simply because he initially positioned himself as quite a boring centrist, but I don't believe there was any policy alignment generally.
Less sure re: the scottish independence vote but I think in that case the BBC was sort of paralysed by what the outcome would mean for it, and that may have made it difficult for it to comprehensively handle.
BBC has unparalleled quality TV programming for both kids and adults, but their news channel has been compromised by conservative influence (namely the director Tim Davie) for a while now.
Channel 4 news is surprisingly now the better news source for actual events.
Channel 4 unfortunately doesn't have the breadth of news coverage (though they definitely have the depth) that the BBC has. They don't have anything like the local/regional news coverage and have to be very selective about what they report on. They're also 1 medium only (TV) whereas the BBC are TV, radio, and what is effectively the UK's biggest online newspaper.
They're also living on borrowed time. Channel 4 is publicly owned but completely self funded, largely through ad revenue. Ad revenue for TV is not what it used to be.
There's been serious consideration given to the idea of merging Channel 4 into the BBC to share admin costs but keep it editorially separate.
> PBS in the US could be so much better.
Do you have a specific grievance? How could it be better?
BBC is not 100% neutral on all issues. No one is. One could argue that it is less bad than the for-profit channels in the UK but no channel is without biase.
BBC is a bad example because they clearly cater to local politics and their monopoly on programming and news for large swaths of their country is not particularly healthy.
State media is inherently going to be pro-establishment and failures to report on their own internal scandals I think should give everyone pause about being all-in on something like the BBC.
Monopoly?
>Just at what BBC is able to do in the UK.
Every household that watches BBC in the UK needs to pay £174.50 ($230) a year. (the wording here has to be done carefully, let's not digress into being exact on who has to pay it)
Federal funding for public media distributed out to $1.54 per person in the US last year.
There's... uh... a bit of a difference in the national funding for the BBC and public media in the US.
Agreed. My argument was that US has a much stronger economy than the UK and clearly bigger state coffers. With proper funding there's no reason why state run media can't put out good quality stories and content. Not just news.
Every household that has a TV, regardless of their use of the BBC. I don't know why people who essentially use a TV as a monitor for games consoles need to pay it.
We don't.
True. I personally do (and I don't currently own a TV!) but I think non-payment is going to become a significant enough issue within the period of this parliament that we will likely see an end to the licence fee shortly after the 2030 election if not sooner.
State media doesn’t have corrupting influence of POLITICAL money? It’s inheriting my political! Government media is the worse possible thing.
> In particular, their kids programming is the absolute best. Nothing flashy or exciting, but it's laser focused on education and has zero agenda.
I dunno, the Odd Squad has almost as much green screen as a Guardians of the Galaxy movie. If that's not flashy, I dunno. And Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman was pretty out there; a space ghost style host ordering kids around the streets of Boston.
Also, the reboot of CyberChase was pretty clearly on the Ag agenda, all about Organic this and that. Maybe that doesn't count as an Agenda because the department of agriculture was funding it.
Also, Sesame street has always been in the pocket of those letter and number sponsors.
FYI, Odd Squad was/is a Canadian kids TV show.
It really surprised me to learn this; it always felt so Ohio to me.
I believe GP was quite firmly tongue in cheek.
I was indeed unaware that the Odd Squad was foreign propaganda, but a lot of the stations broadcasting it were supported by CPB, so I think it's still fair to call it out as flashy, regardless of the location of my tongue with respect to my cheek. I think it's also fair to call out Guardians as Odd Squad for adults :P
You clearly have multiple kids… or a very niche set of entrainment you prefer.
Just one, but you know, I prefer to say a very rich set of entertainment. Although entrainment might be just as accurate. :)
The world of Daniel Tiger is the definition of a welfare state - too socialist for my taste.
Peg + Cat relies on numerology and emphasizes DEI above all else.
Alma’s Way is pro-illegal immigration and unbelievably on the nose about it.
I can keep going. Point is, PBS Kids should have been shutdown a long time ago.
/s
I agree. I swore off of cable news many years ago because they're ALL toxic. They all have to keep people watching so it's stuffed full of breathless journalism making you think something major is happening any moment now. We'd all be better served with NO 24/7 news networks at all. NPR is not breathless, and is very fair.
I hated Fox News because it's so full of lies. I hated CNN because it's making mountains out of molehills and manufactured outrage. MSNBC was less yellow, but it's still full of opinion shows engineered to make you upset. NPR didn't do that, ever. They'd say when democrats screwed up just as much as when republicans did. It was true.
> NPR didn't do that, ever.
Right now I'm drinking out of my NPR mug that I pay $12/month for. I've been a daily listener since college, it's my default radio station in the car, and when I road trip I like searching for the local station. But I disagree with this. There are a number of nationally syndicated shows (at least, in all the markets I've lived in) that I'd put in this category. 1A just off the top of my head. Reveal is another, but that's because their mission is to find things that need to be revealed and they're usually pretty upsetting.
Sorry, to be clear I was referring to programming labeled as news only, not non-news content. There's lots of opinion content, but they don't call it news, unlike cable news networks.
I didn't mean to say there's never incorrect or partisan content.
Conservative here.
I wasn't very happy with the PBS defunding. One of their best shows was Frontline and the amount of just straight down the middle documentaries they did was great. For a lot of the issues that became very politicized, I would regularly turn to them for an unbiased view of what was going on.
I agree on the educational stuff as well. How many generations of kids grew up watching PBS kids shows? My parents donated regularly and supported PBS the whole time.
Hopefully they can continue, I'm sad to see such a pillar of goodness go away.
I’m socially liberal by American standards, but on the subject of government funding for media I feel like a small-c conservative. Government funded media faces constant pressure to become propaganda.
I’m rather looking forward to public radio programming that would strike you as liberally biased, now that public radio productions no longer have to please Republicans in government.
Do you have examples where PBS or NPR were forced by the government to spew maga talking points? You'd think that if public media in the US were busy pleasing Republicans all day and all night they wouldn't have had their funding cut
It's not like "spewing maga talking points" is the only way to show fealty — accepting Republican framing of issues suffices, such as "the national debt is a problem so the only option is to cut entitlements". The joke goes that "NPR stands for Nice Polite Republicans".
I look forward to at least some of public radio going full pinko commie since Republican as a group have spent so much time demonizing them. With the government funding gone, there's no point in trying to stay in Republican good graces when public radio's listeners and donors are elsewhere.
Frontline is one of the best (if not the best) current events/documentary shows on US television. It'd be a tragedy if it went away.
Your parents efforts, like many of the the good efforts to move humanity forward over many decades, have been thrown into the trash. The next generations of Americans will have social/educational gaps that CPB/PBS filled for educational, cultural, historical, and sociological reasons; not because they liked influencing little kids ideologically. And the future will suffer for it, as they say, if you don't learn it at home, society foots the bill to correct it.
Losing PBS Kids will be a tragedy. One of the few high quality sources of kids' programming out there. So much of the commercial options are dreck.
+1. PBS Kids is a goldmine. Time to sails the high seas if you aren’t already :)
The other tragedy is the PBS Kids Games app on iOS and Android. It is chock full of educational games that tie into the various shows.
As a reminder, none of these are going away (yet). So far this only affects smaller member stations and the larger bottom lines of PBS and NPR.
Glad to hear that, thanks for clarifying!
Every parent reading this knows full well how much time their kid has spent watching PBS Kids and playing the many pretty-decent games on the PBS Kids app.
All free.
Donate. Recurring is better.
I'm pretty sure it's because it's unbiased.
Do a mental exercise, if they had joined the MAGA loving trump train, would that have saved them?
Now you have your real answer. They're not going to fund anything unless it's a bunch of lackeys
> but it's laser focused on education and has zero agenda.
I totally support public broadcasting of all stripes, and do not advocate for this POV at all, but ... there are people who claim the opposite. Sesame Street is 'full woke', apparently, because it has talked about skin color and race with muppets.
What many people consider normal... is 'full woke agenda' to others.
> 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.
https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...
Yeah yeah. If you want to find the Republicans in public broadcasting, look at the board members. Same thing happened with newspapers and local TV news after Bush 2 loosened media ownership rules.
Next you're going to tell me the New York Times has a liberal bias, right? Save it.
Is there some written work online that represents your viewpoint on the NYT? I'd genuinely like to read it. I'm a centrist person who can absolutely see that Fox is on the right. But, I can also see that NPR and NYT are on the left. It's hard for me to understand how someone could with any seriousness disagree. But I'm interested in reading more about your viewpoint on this.
“The Left” does not mean to the left of you personally. It’s like how there’s only two types of drivers, insane speeders and insane slowpokes and that’s true no matter how fast you drive :p
The “left” in terms of voters is against the genocide in Gaza and for socialist policies and candidates like Mamdani. Plenty of polls and evidence supports this.
NYT undid their endorsement policy to specifically Not endorse mamdani and is very biased against Palestine. Their opinion columns like David Brooks etc are blowhard conservatives too.
In terms of mainstream news sources, I consider the Guardian US to be a reasonable big tent news source for the center left.
NPR is centrist. They take no sides even if (imo) one is obviously correct.
NYT and WaPo is the ‘reasonable right’ (still report facts but with a right wing spin- see their billionaire owners).
Fox etc. are not news they are ‘entertainment’ and do not report facts and are a vile propaganda engine that must be destroyed
The NYT is not right. WaPo is perhaps a touch more right than the NYT but both are left-leaning and liberal. NPR is centrist but its editorials lean liberal.
You’ve cherry-picked a few stories where the NYT leaned more right, but on the whole the NYT, WaPo, and NPR certainly lean liberal or left of the general American public. The point of labels like right,left, liberal, conservative, etc. are relative valuations to the general American public. Just because the NYT leans less to the left on issues you are more to the left on does not make the NYT right-leaning.
Picking more: they pushed HARD the Claudine Gay story, putting it on the front page ten consecutive days. That story was a manufactured right wing operation to oust her. They also are still very anti-trans.
I am operating on: if they are to the right of mainstream democratic voters, those that won Mamdani the primary and overwhelmingly support Palestine, then they do not get to claim to be left wing.
If I entertain your opinion that they are right of mainstream democratic voters (debatable, but let’s say so). How would you reconcile that with the fact that they are far more to the left than mainstream republican voters?
You’re operating on a fundamentally flawed premise. This is why if you’re using labels you have to compare against the general population. Just because you’re more left than Bob doesn’t make Bob right-leaning.
> The “left” in terms of voters is against the genocide in Gaza and for socialist policies and candidates like Mamdani. Plenty of polls and evidence supports this.
Not only are "left" and "right" vague relative terms used to classify the electorate in the US, they also encompass a whole array of issues an things that aren't binaries that fit on the axis. Someone can be pro-Israel and yet overall of the left; just as someone can be very pro-Palestine and yet overall of the right. In fact on this particular issue this seems more and more common - the real divide is probably generational versus political. I recently heard a segment on the radio from a convervative evangelical bemoaning that their future leaders were increasingly "anti-Israel" and this was a huge problem.
In America, we simply roughly assign Democratic positions - left, Republican position - right. These are both really big tents. "Left" positions include support of candidates like Sanders or Mamdami but also in practice even stronger support for candidates like Clinton and Biden.
Arguing that someone is "on the right" simply because they don't support your candidate of choice is silly; it's sort of like the rightists out there arguing Trump is a liberal RINO because he doesn't support the bedrock conservative principle of free trade.
> Their opinion columns like David Brooks etc are blowhard conservatives too.
NYT does make a show of having a "balanced" opinion panel and David Brooks is one of the token (2 of 11 in the source link) conservatives, but it seems strange to describe such a bland, anodyne person (also anti-Trump, by the way) as a blowhard. IIRC one of the complaints from the opinion editor that got fired for printing pro-Trump letters to the editor was that not one single columnist was pro-Trump and therefore obviously didn't represent any mainstream conservative audience.
edit: this was the nyt article I was thinking of: https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-...
Idk, it feels a lot to me that NYT is taking marching orders from the same people that control the Fox News propaganda machine.
Obviously NYT is rarely explicitly pro-Trump but that's not their point. Instead, they give a liberal’s framing on right wing talking points.
For example, they ran the manufactured Claudine Gay story front page 10 days in a row. They give the “sensible liberal”s take on why trans people should not get healthcare. Article 3 today is pro tariffs.
Yes, the NYT leans liberal. You can have your own political scale and that’s fine.
But the value of pointing to things and saying they’re right or left or conservative or liberal is a relative valuation measured relative to the general American public. And relative to the general American public the NYT is liberal. Just because you are more liberal than the NYT doesn’t make the NYT conservative.
For the record, Uri story is not corroborated and doesn't seem to be in good faith.
https://steveinskeep.substack.com/p/how-my-npr-colleague-fai...
> When I asked Uri, he said he “couldn’t care less” that I am not a Democrat. He said the important thing was the “aggregate”—exactly what his 87-0 misrepresented by leaving out people like me. While it’s widely believed that most mainstream journalists are Democrats, I’ve had colleagues that I was pretty sure were conservative (I don’t ask), and I’ve learned just since Uri’s article that I am one of several NPR hosts of “no party” registration.
To a broader point, viewpoint diversity != unbias. If I staff half a newspaper with Stalinists that doesn't mean the reporting is going to become more factual or the coverage less biased. If it's become a Republican party position to attack mainstream media, we shouldn't expect them to even be applying for these jobs.
Just because conservatives hate kids and don't want to be teachers/educators/work at universities doesn't mean it's biased or bad.
It's like if you wanted a diversity of opinions designing a rocket so you decided to pull in flat earth's as well as new earth creationist. You're not getting a better rocket. Perhaps a better fireworks show, though.
right on! down with DEI!
Yeah, because hiring qualified female, black, and queer people is exactly the same as hiring someone who hates what the job and what it's trying to accomplish.
> because conservatives hate kids
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-trump-bump-the-republican-fer...
> Nothing flashy or exciting, but it's laser focused on education and has zero agenda.
That’s not true. It just matches your agenda which you feel is no agenda. Of course you are against getting rid of instruments of persuasion that agree with your world view.
In the end it’s better for you too. Government shouldn’t support media.
The national stuff was okay to good. The Children’s programming was in general good.
The local stuff though was quite questionable. For example they’d support different causes or efforts by referencing a single poorly supported research paper. Usually those research papers supported some narrative. It could be homelessness, drug treatments, etc., however there was little if any scrutiny of the paper the whole effort or narrative was based on.
They also had annoying presenters like Kai Ryssdahl. He was insufferable but hardly the only one.
Also, despite being a public system, individual comp is high relative to their listeners', I'd say[1]. I'd guess most listeners would not imagine their comp being as high as it is, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Public_Radio
[1] In addition, those at the top enjoy perks like being invited to elite events, and the perks of schmoozing for donations. Those are experiences that are alien to the average listener.
>Contrary to the conservative spin over the years, I have found public broadcasting to be one of the least biased sources
Can we break this down?
You open with a effectively derogatory accusation about conservatives making things up…which I have no opinion on.
That immediately shows your own likely liberal bias and then you say you saw no problem with the programming.
Isn’t that exactly the issue? That you saw no issue and everyone that disagrees is just wrong?
How do you know? How would you know if CBP’s biases weren’t just your own?
Do you know the arguments against the biases of CPB, NPR, PBS from the people that can make their most effective arguments against those orgs, or do you know the lines of the people that already agree with you?
Jon Stewart Mill’s On Liberty has a great part about this… [It is not enough to know the refutations from your own teachers, you must learn them from the people that present them in their truest form].
Your argument is just assuming the (1) previous poster has liberal bias, (2) CPB has liberal bias, (3) previous poster is unable to recognize their own or CPB’s liberal bias.
Maybe these are true, but I don’t see the basis for it here.
> the conservative spin over the years
And this is a liberal site; regardless of how the “intellectuals” like to talk about ACKSHUALLY it’s bla which ends up being San Francisco liberal with more steps.
I consider my estimation to be two points of evidence. Along with the user’s post history of course.
One does not need to hold liberal bias to identify conservative spin.
btw I suggest avoid quotes for intralexual pretension... esp if you don't know how to spell his name. I agree with thy side though
Apologies for the following snark - it's tragic, so this is more of a reaction comment:
> I have found public broadcasting to be one of the least biased sources of headline news and information available
> kids programming is the absolute best
Fixed that for you:
> I USED TO FIND public broadcasting provided the least biased sources of headline news and information available
> kids programming WAS the absolute best
CPB is going away, NPR and PBS are not.
Yet.
I don't want to be "that guy", but I often find myself as the "intolerable lib" in some situations and the "intolerable con" in others, so here we go:
There is a degree of quasi-political messaging in PBS children's shows. I can say this because I've watched more hours than I'd like of several of them, but I'd like to focus on on Molly Of Denali. It's a good children's show about an inuit girl who lives in Alaska and teaches children general good morals and specifics of inuit and Alaskan culture.
When I say it's political, I mean that it makes points without nuance on historical and current issues which range from widely accepted and important ideas (example: They didn't let Native Alaskan People vote in the past, so it's important to exercise the right to vote now), to what I would consider less widely agreed upon and important ideas, such as it being deeply upsetting and disrespectful for a "white" teacher to call a native child "T", because she had trouble pronouncing his native name. Another example is them introducing the importance of "land acknowledgements" in a children's show. A final example is the "clueless white" trope wherein the offensive rude white visitor has to be educated by the wise natives over and over and over.
I'm not trying to say that any of these examples are "right" or "wrong", but they do represent "politics" in the mind of wide sections of the population.
This said I like the show and of course we need to fund public broadcasting, I would just prefer if we did our best to keep the most controversial stuff for when the kids are a bit older to make it a smaller target for outrage (from the right or left).
The most jarring part, to me personally, is the drastic shift in tone and presentation for injustices with wildly different levels of impact. Perhaps rudely, I think to myself in the voice of the Inuit grandfather from the show "The white man took me from my family, did not allow me to speak my language, beat me and did not allow me to vote, and worst of all...... He did not let me smile in photos"
I don't mean any of this as racist or disrespectful and I hope this is a nuanced comment for consideration and not a kneeejerk reaction or evidence of my subconscious biases run wild.
> When I say it's political, I mean that it makes points without nuance on historical and current issues which range from widely accepted and important ideas [...] to what I would consider less widely agreed upon and important ideas
Another example of this: when Mr. Rogers invited an African American neighbor to share his pool. It certainly wasn't widely agreed upon at the time.
I understand and sympathize with the desire to directly equate every current social issue no matter how small with a social issue from the past as part of a larger "chain of social progress" because I think it originates with the desire to correct past injustices and treat everyone with respect and decency.
I disagree that this is a useful or accurate way to engage in discussion about an entirely different and specific subject in an entirely different context. The only way they are related is with this "chain of social progress" framework, and even within that framework, they are not the same issue.
I perceive it to be a dismissive approach which shuts down conversation, and I think it's clear when viewed plainly in the opposite direction: "If you have concerns with any of the political messaging in children's shows, you would not allow a person of a different race into your swimming pool", or in a slightly different way, "If you have concerns about this you are explicitly the "bad guy"".
> The only way they are related is with this "chain of social progress" framework, and even within that framework, they are not the same issue.
The way that they are related is that PBS childrens' shows deliberately address political content, and have done so for many years, and that is both important and good that they do so.
I agree with you generally, but the two points I want to make are that these shows are messaging politically (I know you agree with this, and I appreciate you saying so as many others in this thread do not agree), and that this political messaging is not inherently good in and of itself, and must be evaluated on a case by case basis, both for the "correctness" of the political messaging, and for potential concerns of alienating audiences when a specific case is included in a children's program.
> such as it being deeply upsetting and disrespectful for a "white" teacher to call a native child "T", because she had trouble pronouncing his native name.
Imagine not finding it disrespectful for your teacher to just completely ignore and disrespect your heritage and you're expected to just accept it and be totally OK with it.
IMO kids should be taught to be proud of their names. Apparently, that's a political stance.
I have many coworkers who I have trouble saying their names. I try as best as I can to say their names and be as respectful as possible. I wouldn't just go "I can't say your name, so you're just T now."
I agree that it's generally important to respect other people and other cultures, both ethically because it is a ethical thing to do, and practically because it helps us all "get along".
I find, if we strip this from the colonial context, or remove it from the racial context entirely (this is now a conversation between two Han Chinese people of the same social class, for example) there is some relationship between what I perceive to be an increasing focus on the critical importance of a child being called their exact name and no abbreviation, mispronunciation, standard nickname, or contextually assigned nickname, to be a symptom of an American hyper individualism and "rights culture".
As an aside I have been told by more than one person with a foreign name before even attempting their name that they would prefer I just call them an Americanized abbreviation of their name for convenience. Obviously I want to try to do what they would like, but if they were to insist on a name I struggled with, I would consider them to be a generally annoying person.
Wanting to be called your name and not liking having a person in a superior position arbitrarily rename you as an example of "American hyper individualism". Incredible.
It is literally someone over you stripping you of your own choice of identity.
Even if we removed the idea of teacher/student relationship from this, are you still fine with people just arbitrarily renaming you? That someone respects you so little they won't even respect your own choice in name, that's fine?
I'm absolutely fine with someone who has a name which could be difficult to pronounce in the local language choosing to go with another name. It is their choice. That's the big difference. They're choosing to go by that name in those contexts. It wasn't just arbitrarily chosen for them.
Counterpoint, when these episodes were first aired, these weren't viewed as political issues. Only in response to these ideas have they become politicized.
And since PBS has backed away from making episodes like these.
I might be missing what you mean, but I tried to explain as best as I could how I would understand these things to be "related to "politics" ".
Offensiveness of difficultly in pronouncing native Alaskan name - I believe this would be grouped under the umbrella of something like "linguistic imperialism" by people of particular political bents, which is an issue that at least heavily relates to politics.
Land acknowledgements - As far as I can tell, these have always been politicized because they originated "with indigenous Australian political movements and the arts" at least according to Wikipedia. I don't know much about the subject
Rude clueless white trope - I think this is to some extent a "positive" inversion of the "noble savage" trope, which Wikipedia tells me was historically political.
None of these things are inherently political unless you interpret them to be.
They have several shows that depict interracial marriages, while some people might try to take this as a political statement, most of us would not see it that way.
In a similar vein, I don't see how pronouncing names correctly could be a political issue.
I agree with you in that the question of something being "political" is inherently related to the context, and that some things some people might find political (like the importance of voting from my original comment) are not "political enough" to be something which shouldn't be in a children's show.
I would also agree with you that pronouncing names generally is not (and largely probably should not be) a political topic, but that it necessarily is in this context because of it being included in a show about native Alaskans. If the teacher were inuit, or the student also white, or it was presented a simple misunderstanding along the lines of "can I call you T" "No please don't" "okay sorry I'll do my best" it would not be "political". Because it's in this show in this context and explicitly connected to previous abuses of native people being made to use "white names", my contention is that the creators of the show intend for it to be political .
It's impossible to make self or mind small enough to be safe from regressives.
I appreciate the poetic response and think that the point I believe you're making: "people who are inclined to criticize anything which isn't exactly as they'd like it will never be pleased, so you can't spend all of your time trying to please them." is correct and useful generally.
Where I might disagree with you, if I understand you correctly, is in how applicable your comment is as a response to my mine. At the outset I attempted to communicate that some of the things that the most likely to be outraged people would take issue with (the importance of exercising the right to vote - especially if your ancestors didn't enjoy the right) are pretty universally accepted and even presenting it without nuance inside of a children's show is acceptable because it is done so with a positive focus (be involved in the democratic process).
If I misunderstood you I apologize.
>the importance of exercising the right to vote - especially if your ancestors didn't enjoy the right
So we shouldn't talk about the 19th Amendment[0] because it's no longer an issue because your mom, sister, wife and daughter are now allowed to vote? As such, we should actively stop talking about the fact that there was ~150 years of activism, protest and discussion before half the population was "allowed" to participate in the political life of the US?
Is that your contention? If not, claiming that we should ignore those same issues around the right of indigenous peoples to vote seems more than a little hypocritical.
Your thoughts on this would be appreciated. Thanks!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
No sorry, I was including that example because it's something "political" that is also pretty universally accepted and uncontroversial, and as a consequence could only really upset the most upsetable. I meant it as a contrast to the other more controversial political topics that would require more consideration before putting into a children's show.
The original premise of the first comment I replied to was that PBS kids programming does not include political content, and I wanted to provide examples of two kinds of political content it included.
I don't in any way blame you for misunderstanding what I was trying to say, because I think a lot of people who read my comment did based on the negative point score (?) it ended up with. I think that we (and I include myself in this we) tend to jump past the specific content of a response, and only "hear" the tone of the response and presume intention from it. This isn't necessary an ineffective strategy online where there's a Tsunami of legitimately (from my perspective) evil positions (some of which I previously held and now am ashamed of, shout out God) and the odds are that a person (or bot or person working for an influence campaign) stating anything other than complete excited agreement is probably trying to convince people they should also hold a particular evil view.
The trouble is, this tends to kill nuanced conversation. I get it, I'd be furious if I thought the person I was replying to online was telling me they don't want me to be able to vote, but it's entirely possible that's not what they're saying.
Another example might be "How many Jewish people died in the Holocaust". If you asked me this I would answer, based on my limited knowledge "Somewhere between five and a half and six and a half million, probably closer to six.". I would do better socially if I simply said "like six million what a terrible tragedy", but my goal wouldn't be honesty it'd be social positioning. I understand that most people who don't instantly say "six million what a terrible tragedy" are doing so because they are trying to do an evil thing (Holocaust denial/revisionism), but that's not the only possible reason someone could do it.
I hope this makes sense.
>No sorry, I was including that example because it's something "political" that is also pretty universally accepted and uncontroversial, and as a consequence could only really upset the most upsetable. I meant it as a contrast to the other more controversial political topics that would require more consideration before putting into a children's show.
Fair enough. However, you didn't really (at least IMHO) make that much of a contrast, especially considering the "contrasting" example (a teacher misnaming their student because they can't even be bothered to try pronouncing their name properly). You've significantly clarified that in the comment to which I'm currently replying -- and thank you!
>I think that we (and I include myself in this we) tend to jump past the specific content of a response, and only "hear" the tone of the response and presume intention from it.
That said, the negative reaction to your comment[0] isn't all that surprising, given what appears to be the tone you've taken.
While the HN guidelines clearly state that one should try to see the comments of others in the best possible light (and I tried to do so -- which is why I asked about it), but there's a more universal idea: who you are -- at least as far as others are concerned -- is how you are perceived by those others.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be true to yourself and your principles. Rather the opposite. That said, it might not be a bad idea to try and see how others might perceive you based on what you write.
I am emphatically not telling you what to do here. Rather, I'm just pointing out that others likely don't see the decent, fair-minded person you consider yourself to be -- because all they have to go on is what's right in front of them.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44760432
Q.E.D.
I hear many things on broadcast media that are contrary to my values, and tend to prune those sources from my media diet. When I am obliged by law to support those sources anyway, I get resentful. So I have been wishing for this since Ronald Reagan proposed it.
To me the bright line of "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" is crossed at least in spirit when the state seizes a dollar from a taxpayer and spends it on speech, because that abridges the taxpayer's resources for speech by a dollar. "You have free speech but I can take the money you use to be heard to speak against you" is a big loophole.
While I sympathize with the feeling, it’s a stretch to say “obligated by law”. You pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend. We elect them to speak and choose on our behalf. It isn’t a “loophole” when this runs afoul of an individual’s values. It is simply that we have a representative government that makes decisions by majority votes. I don’t agree with most defense spending, but I acknowledge that a majority of this country wants it. This is the purpose of compromise. If there had been a good-faith proposal to reform CPB [1], we could have made it better. The collateral damage from destroying the good parts (e.g., PBS) due to our failure to compromise should not be celebrated. [1] Such a proposal isn’t hard to imagine. A key purpose of local stations is to give a platform to the voices of local people. Simply shifting funding from national programming to local programming (without changing the total) would have accomplished this “debiasing” and empowered the (tragically endangered) local news.
>While I sympathize with the feeling, it’s a stretch to say “obligated by law”. You pay taxes,
The number of steps that “Pay Taxes” is removed from “Literally At Fucking Gunpoint” is not as many steps as you might think.
you can either pay taxes at gunpoint or you can pay tribute/protection/insurance/ransom/bribes at gunpoint. not sure there are (or have ever been) many places in the world where you don't owe some debt of obligation to a larger organization, be it a government, organized crime, or something else.
I’m not sure if you are intentionally trying to miss the point. The comment was claiming they are obligated by law to support media they don’t agree with. We are all equivalently obligated by law to not steal or commit other crimes. We pay taxes. They are part of the contract of our society. What our representatives decide to spend them on doesn’t change that.
"We are all [...] obligated by law to not steal or commit other crimes" is NOT equivalent to being "obligated by law to support media [one does not] agree with". Not even remotely. Negative obligations != positive obligations.
> While I sympathize with the feeling, it’s a stretch to say “obligated by law”. You pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend.
Without limit? If Trump and the Congressional GOP force a bunch of tax-funded in-your-face right-wing propaganda that would be ok with you because "[y]ou pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend"?
Well they're already doing this and much worse, so no need to appeal to something fake. There's plenty of actual awful things our elected officials are doing which you can point to.
But, the idea is, that we're not out here proposing that we stop paying taxes. We're not the ones committing a Jan 6th, are we?
The solution to Trump isn't assassinating him or whatever, it's legally impeaching him or not voting for him. That's how a democracy works.
So the government should just not say anything? Let’s just get all our news from X, the famously truthful platform!
The government is allowed and required to say things about the current state of the law (i.e., they must publish the law, and they may educate the public about it, and they must enforce it). The government is not required and perhaps should not be allowed to say anything promoting specific political opinions or promoting specific Acts that have not passed yet. By "say" you [I think, and therefore] I mean as in publish with taxpayer money, because naturally elected officials and even appointees should be able to speak with anyone, even interviewers, and publish on their own dime as long as they don't do anything to prevent the opposition also speaking in that way, but publish? as in print or broadcasting? OP here thinks not, and OP has a very good point.
And the current government is so impartial with their news reporting that only right wing outlets get added to the press pool which becomes the de facto voice of the government since anybody else gets sued or defunded
Yes the government should just not say anything but this is not dependent on X existing or not existing.
So the current government will stop talking as well then?
This is a step towards that which is a step in the right direction.
And balanced. Don't forget balanced.
When Congress passed the CPB defunding bill, the Republican sponsors paraded around the most deranged takes to air on NPR in the last few years and asked, why should our tax dollars keep going to this?
And I'll be the first to admit that NPR has completely lost its mind, it's losing its listenership, and it needs to be humbled a bit. But audio is much cheaper than video and NPR's remaining listeners will easily be able to make up the shortfall. Meanwhile we're going to see PBS, whose news coverage mostly avoided the pitfalls NPR fell into and who run a lot more non-news programming, take a huge funding hit and resort to even more pledge drives and reruns, while local affiliates in large swaths of the country have to close entirely.
This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and not even throwing out the bathwater.
Every government program should have an expiration date attached to it when signed into law.
There are plenty of countries where all government services have "expired". Which one would you like to live in?
This. And to make it even better: every law should only be about one thing, just the thing it's meant to deal with, and nothing else.
I would have them split the laws up as separate entities but let them vote on a package of laws under one vote.
I feel the current rules against earmarking has made it so they negotiate less.
Then the obstructionists will just always get what they want.
This is true. We can't view every postwar boomer institution as sacrosanct. These organizations aren't meant to grow in perpetuity.
I just wish Americans saw some of that saved money either in their pocket or public works. But the reality is probably just going to be one more missile shipped to a foreign country.
Including the military. Hell, even the constitution.
Well, looks like that problem has been solved for you!
The expiration date should be 0 seconds after it's signed.
I think the children's programming is a really undiscussed aspect of this. Some investments don't have immediately measurable outcomes. But as someone whose parents worked long hours growing up, I'm really grateful that my exposure to television was PBS rather than cable children's shows.
If your parents couldn't afford cable, then you couldn't get round the clock children's content from Nickelodeon. Your content during day time would have been stuff like the Maury Show, all the Judge shows, soap operas, and day time talk shows. PBS would have been the thing that offered the free children's content.
A good day to make sure you're a member of your local public media station and supporting them directly.
Woah! This stuff is unwinding faster than my priors. I'm going to have to re-evaluate everything I thought true about the US. I just always assumed "strong institutions" meant something here. That it was all a house built on sand is disconcerting.
Before you think this is happening quickly, do note that public institutions have been under attack from the right for generations, including publicly funded education, public broadcasters, public health and social programs.
These attacks are not unique to the United States; there is a coordinated effort across many countries by public policy groups and private interests. The United States are highly visible due to their ownership of global media, but the Republican party has been pursuing these objectives publicly and clearly for more than 30 years, and has made incremental progress to the point where they were able to re-engineer the Supreme Court and lower courts, as well as elect far right politicians who would tear up the rules to make it happen.
This is the sharp upwards curve of increase in velocity that is the result of sustained accelleration over the last few decades. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and not just in the United States.
This has been a project under way since the friggin' John Birchers and the postwar "think-tank" boom. They've (this specific set of interests, not conservatism in general) been successfully ratcheting things toward authoritarianism since their Chicago school pals got the right people in the right places to radically change how we enforced anti-trust in the '70s (that is, they made it impossible for us to enforce in all but the most egregious cases, period) and have been winning one boring but effective battle after another ever since (plus the occasional headline-grabbing one).
Often these victories have contributed to further momentum—concentration of wealth means more money for the cause; death of the "fairness doctrine" opens up the possibility of wholly partisan media for propagandizing, which was instantly capitalized on with a boom in right wing AM radio; Citizens United decision de facto ending campaign finance regulation, well that's sure convenient; all kinds of things.
This has been more than a half-century in the making.
Yup.
The books Democracy in Chains, Lobbying America, and Dark Money are three (of many, many) good intros to the conservative reaction to the The New Deal.
The dissolution and dismantling of US gov institutions that we are witnessing is unprecedented in modern times. Hell, a few of the agencies being attacked were created with bipartisan support.
I would say it isn't that our institutions were built on sand, more that its hard to stop a madman who broke into your house with a chainsaw (a la Musk) from knocking down a few load-bearing walls.
It is easier to destroy almost anything than it is to create it in the first place.
> Hell, a few of the agencies being attacked were created with bipartisan support.
It's worse than that. PEPFAR was a signature initiative of the previous Republican president.
Why must everything be viewed as Democrat vs. Republican? Trump is best viewed as a case of outsider vs. entrenched bureaucracy / deep state. Party is irrelevant.
Because he is being backed to the hilt by the Congressional GOP, and most of the GOP-leaning states, a fact which I feel sure has not escaped your attention until now.
I'm guessing you only started to pay attention to the right in 2014.
Everything really changed with the bailouts then the tea party movement. The republicans went from big business, lower taxes, exclusively to populism.
The dems are going through a similar bend currently and probably would have happened sooner if they hadn't undermined their voters nomination of Bernie in 2015.
The republicans (love um or hate them) didn't change the rules to scuttle Trump. One party is listening to their base the other is trying to control them (and imo is imploding because of it). I'm honestly a bit of a neo con so there isn't a place for me in a populist republican party. I'll just keep throwing votes at Chase Oliver / similar outsiders until we have a return to sanity.
Your guess is wrong by about 20 years. In any case, I was not opining on the causes but only on the fact that Trump has almost unanimous backing from Republicans in the legislative branch.
> I would say it isn't that our institutions were built on sand, more that its hard to stop a madman who broke into your house with a chainsaw (a la Musk) from knocking down a few load-bearing walls.
This isn't due to one man (Musk) or a rogue government agency, or even the executive branch.
This is Congress, which tells you how bad things have gotten.
> This is Congress, which tells you how bad things have gotten.
Ok, but to be clear, Congress gets to. Congress has done about-faces like this before, yet the Republic is still here.
> Ok, but to be clear, Congress gets to.
Obviously - there's no implication of processes not being followed.
My point, which mirrors yours, is that this isn't the result of a rogue actor. It's a result of collective action.
It isn't Congress writ large, is the Republican caucus in Congress. And the Republican caucus in the SCOTUS.
True, but the point being it's a large percentage of the government, representing a significant percentage of the population.
actually it's the voters.
>more that its hard to stop a madman who broke into your house with a chainsaw
I think it's very fitting that you'd use this metaphor, because the people you oppose wouldn't even find that slightly challenging.
The institutions that are not being dismantled are the ones required by the constitution. The ones being dismantled, being statutory in nature, are fair game, and if anything this shows that the constitutional institutions are in fact able to rule over the statutory ones, thus the constitutional institutions come out of this stronger, not weaker. The constitutional institutions are:
CPB and the like are statutory institutions. Those can come and they can go. Sometimes they go. They can come back you know. The next time the Democrats are in power they can bring all those institutions back and then some, and they can tear down any institutions that Trump creates or takes over. The critical thing is that it be possible for the Democrats to win again in the future, and then that Republicans be able to win again in the future, and so on.This isn't Musk's fault; he's just the asshole scapegoat. This is directly from the Conservative Think Tanks who finally got a President willing to strip everything down in government while increasing insane spends elsewhere (e.g., $200MM ballroom for the White House while cutting revenue) based on the will of 44% of the voting population of the country.
If anything, government should have been cut AND revenues increased; but, that's not how either party works. (disgusting oversimplification: Republicans reduce revenue and reduce spend while Democrats increase revenue and increase spend).
This is it. It always was a house of cards. A house of cards that everyone tacitly agreed to protect and preserve through norms. Then, the Conservative Think Tanks found someone who was willing to dispense with all of those norms. They gambled that people and Congress wouldn't really care (in the short term, anyway). And they were right.
What else could it be? Elected institutions are made up of people who agree to a laws, rules, and norms that everyone else agrees on. It's all a farce built up on agreements to keep things running smoothly.
There is no system you could structure rigidly enough that it would not be vulnerable to bad actors. You can insulate yourself by distributing authority as we have, but if those authorities stop playing following the laws, rules, and norms well you end up where we are at, devolving into facisim.
>based on the will of 44% of the voting population of the country.
Actually, it was more like 25% but who's counting?
i guess they should have been more trustworthy. once its lost, trust is hard to earn back.
Large groups voting for "tear it all down, we don't trust institutions" wasn't a sign for you back in 2016? what were your priors before this year?
My point here is that "strong institutions" were supposed to stem this tide. Of course, I should have thought through who made up these institutions. In some ways institutions kind of held up pretty well 2016-2020. Which is why I was a little less worried. But looks like that was a dry run. The efficiency with which this is happening now is shocking. Honestly, I'm kind of impressed. If we applied this much efficiency constructively in the US, we'd probably see post-war prosperity levels. I imagine even NASA would approach the 1960s productivity.
You gotta hand it to the project 2025 people, they really organized and got their own planners in the right positions to execute on that.
It's not like we abused people's trust, and then they stopped trusting us. No, a cabal of evil tricksters tricked them into not trusting us anymore. We're totally trustworthy.
My "holy shit, we're in for... interesting times, and like, soon" moment was when Trump suggested his supporters might shoot Hillary if she won ("If she wins, I can't do anything about it. But the 'Second Amendment people'...."), and didn't see a huge hit to his popularity, and supporters in his own camp distancing themselves, immediately.
Norms are dead, you can just suggest assassination of your opponent and still win a Presidential election now, the batshit crazy stuff's not just for races in rural Montana or whatever. Like, IDK how this reads to younger folks, but I assure them that things are now happening practically daily that would have been unthinkable 15 years ago, let alone farther back. Things got visibly weirder fast.
I'm in my mid 30s and have definitely noticed a gap in perception between people in their early 20s who haven't experienced much of pre-2016 politics and the older folks. The younger folks are much less alarmed because they weren't familiar with the "normal political discourse" that occurred when they were children.
It makes it hard to be optimistic that there is any plausible roadmap back to some form of normalcy in the medium term.
What you want to look at is how countries navigate back to normalcy after coups or assassinations. It's not usually a smooth process, you have to do amnesties or hash out disagreements somehow...
That's what worries me. young kids today have no idea how fucked up things are right now because this is all they've ever known.
Just this week Trump posted on his social media that Obama should be indicted for treason, aka, executed and not a blip from the supposed left-wing media
The institutions WERE strong. It’s taken decades to unwind them. But yes, we’ve definitely crossed a big acceleration lately.
Capturing the Supreme Court so completely was the turning point, in terms of ability to enact their agenda quickly. It's been conservative my entire not short any more life, but it's strongly packed with disingenuous, ideologically-motivated jurists vetted and guided by the "correct" organizations, now.
I wish anyone with even a little power were talking about ditching the position of "Supreme Court Justice" and just drawing for the role by lot from the "lower" federal courts each term. That could be done with a law, not an amendment-there has to be a Supreme Court, and federal judgeships are "during good behavior" (de facto "for life") but Supreme Court Justice per se doesn't have to be a permanent role. The closest I hear anyone talking about is court expansion, but that's a less-effective fix, and one more likely to draw strong push-back and to be unpopular, I think.
The problem with the Supreme Court is the handshake-agreement to limit the court's size in combination with lifetime appointments and the Senate majority leader's pocket veto. Going back to 1992 (eight Presidential terms, three served by Republicans and five by Democrats), Republican presidents have successfully nominated six justices while Democrats only five (including a no-vote for Merrick Garland).
The better thing to do, in my mind, is to limit the term length of a justice and eliminate the pocket veto, but I can't think of any way in which the elimination of a pocket veto also can't be exploited in some way (eg: with a 6-3 court, if a Republican-aligned justice stepped down, a Republican president can knowingly put forward a candidate they know won't get approved to keep the margin 5-3 vs. 5-4).
Europeans seem to understand this better than Americans, because the US has never really devolved from democracy into authoritarianism, but several European countries have. That's why e.g. in Germany it's possible to ban political parties that have as their goal the overflow of the democratic order.
It's only been a couple hundred years or so for us so I guess this is just our turn then.
I feel like there's been talk about dismantling the CPB for a long time. I recall talk about it on Rush Limbaugh's radio show in the 90's.
Freedom means you're allowed to own enough rope to hang yourself with. We've always been one or two elections away from our own destruction.
NPR in particular has been an insane parody of leftism for at least a decade at this point. The fact that it took this long to lose funding is a testament to how strong it was as an institution.
This has been an attack on democracy over 40 years in the making. Conservatives have been openly saying what they've wanted to do all the time, but most people thought there'd never be a moment where they'd actually have enough power to pull it off. Meanwhile, liberal politicians have and still are operating under the delusion that they don't have to pass laws when they gain power, they can merely cast feelings and hope that the courts will back that up.
Institutions are only as strong as their defenders and supporters - and like countless Empires before it, the USA has bled its institutions dry of credibility and/or resources over the past several decades in a futile attempt to satiate a handful of wealthy extremists.
This was entirely expected and predicted once neoliberalism took hold in the Democratic and Republican parties and began rotting out the central pillars of American Democracy and Empire.
Yep, billionaires-as-termites on the public infrastructure is an apt analogy
To be a little less glib or inflammatory:
A lot of people are learning that institutions aren’t these bulwarks against hostile actors, but in actuality are collections of people aligned on a given mission. For decades, Americans have neglected these people, cut funding to the helpful institutions, and granted far too much funding to negative ones. This culminated in the vilifying of these pillars and their members by a cadre of politicians backed by wealthy donors seeking change preferable to their personal agendas at the expense of the people, and it takes decades of continuous chipping away to get to the situation of today.
None of this is sudden, new, or shocking to those of us who have been staying informed, consuming legitimate news sources, and doing proper research with high-quality reference material. To the average person who merely consumes Cable News or mass media, this may all feel very sudden or surprising and therefore reversible.
It’s not.
As with many things, I wonder if we should start unbundling services the federal government provides. If many states like public broadcasting, what if a pool of states were to opt-in to continuing to fund it (and decide whether to limit it to supporting stations in those states)?
Some things (defense, diplomacy) perhaps can only be done through the federal government. But so many things (national weather service operations, HUD housing assistance, grants for local PBS stations, SNAP benefits) have a largely local or regional benefit. Rather than disassembling these things entirely, why not allow them each to be run by and for a coalition of states (or even cities?) which opt to participate?
> But so many things (national weather service operations, HUD housing assistance, grants for local PBS stations, SNAP benefits) have a largely local or regional benefit.
You should look up which states/regions/counties provide the funding and which states/regions/counties receive the benefits, it's disproportional. Unironically, unbundling HUD, SNAP, and NWS would probably cause famine in Mississippi.
Oh I'm acutely aware that my taxes have been subsidizing people in red states that call me a slur.
But it's pretty messed up that presently the places that _were_ willing to pay for these things are deprived of the benefits. If instead we kept things alive on an optional basis, the participating states might get _better_ services and outcomes for a while because some poor red state communities would not be a sink for funds. But also, if the political pendulum swings the other way in a future election cycle, and more places opt-in, then having kept these programs alive in a reduced form would put them in a better position to resume activity.
the disproportionately black american mississippi?
From Claude -> Notable Programs They Fund: Public television shows like Sesame Street, NOVA, PBS NewsHour, and Masterpiece, as well as NPR programming like Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
I like all of those. NPR: $300m budget / 42m listeners = $7.14/yr. Sounds like if I donate $5/mo to KQED and $5/mo to KCSM, I'm supporting them to cover myself and couple other citizens?
I don't get what I can do to support PBS - when I press donate on PBS site, it sort of wants to direct me to KQED/KCSM donations again.
Anyone here with a little more time to understand/explain it?
Basically, you donate to a PBS member station, and the station uses at least some portion your money to pay PBS dues.
I recall NPR throwing a fit over getting a "state media" label on Twitter.
Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World" was so prescient. So sad to see its worst predictions come true.
I am quite literally in the middle of reading this now [0]. This would be great required reading for high school students. Anyone that runs across this comment should put it at the top of their reading list.
Most frustratingly, many people know how to be properly skeptical. To use Sagan's example, it comes out in full-force any time someone buys a used car. Never trust the dealer. Everybody knows that.
I really appreciate that Sagan refrains from looking down on anyone. It's all too easy to do and I am guilty of it at times. It also leads to a much more useful conversation. Sagan provides hope that we can educate better. Compared to say, Dawkins, who I think has ultimately hurt the cause. Nobody will listen when they feel insulted.
> So sad to see its worst predictions come true.
The most recent bit of the book I read involved James Randi. I was curious about the guy so I did some other reading. Randi gave out an annual "award" called the "Pigasus Award" to fraudsters and similar. Mehmet Oz received the award [1] three times. Now Oz runs Medicaid!
Sadly, we've lost Sagan and Randi. Sometimes it feels like the world has lost any sort of check against gullibility. To paraphrase from the book, many scientists are particularly not equipped to call these scammers out. Scientists wrestle with nature - nature has laws. Trying to call out the Oz's of the world is hard because they don't play by the rules of reason.
---
[0] https://archive.org/details/B-001-001-709
[1] https://www.latimes.com/health/la-xpm-2011-apr-01-la-heb-dr-...
> Sadly, we've lost Sagan and Randi.
I had the privilege of meeting both Sagan and Randi at different points. Along with Paul Kurtz, also sadly gone now, these were some of the most in influential people in the beginnings of the modern skeptical movement. If you aren't familiar with Prometheus books and CSICOP (now CSI), look them up. You'll find years worth of groundbreaking skeptical reading material.
> I had the privilege of meeting both Sagan and Randi
If the story is even remotely interesting and something you'd be willing to share I would really appreciate the read.
Will definitely look into those books. Thanks for the recs.
The stories aren't all that interesting. I met Sagan at a talk about SETI that he gave in, oh, it must have been about 1981, at the MIT Haystack observatory. He did a meet and greet session after the talk, and was very gracious. Randi, I met in 1990 when he gave a talk about skepticism at the University of Rochester. Like Sagan, he had a meet and greet afterward. He was very quirky and funny.
I came to this book too late for the core message to resonate as far as mindset and methods (yeah, yeah, I found this path and walked at least this far on it already, you're preaching to the choir, should have read this when I was like 10 or 12 I guess...) but did make the mistake of dismissing an absolute chorus of warnings about anti-intellectualism from Sagan and a dozen other authors I read as a kid and in my 20s (which warnings, yes, were a significant component of this book)
They were all from roughly the same time period, and I thought their focus on that particular issue was overblown. A relic of the time they'd lived through and their efforts, which efforts had gotten us here, where anti-intellectualism is a curiosity, periodically an annoyance, but not a threat. Sure, we could swing back toward that being a real concern, but it'd take a while. We'd see it.
What's weird is I could also list a bunch of ways that we were swinging back toward it. I think on some level I just didn't believe that these kinds of big shifts backwards could happen, actually and not just in shootin'-the-shit discussions with friends, in my lifetime. Bumps on the road of progress, sure, but going backwards entirely? I even shied away from labeling authoritarian-enabling changes, policies, or actions "fascist", even as I literally protested some of them in the street—well, that's alarmist, surely. It's silly and childish that I was embarrassed of the term.
It's so damn foolish when I look back on it. I had so many of the particulars right, but just couldn't believe in something so big actually happening, I guess. I'd have told you that sure, it could, if you'd asked, even outlined a plausible path from here to there based on recent and current goings-on... but I didn't believe it might happen. Not really.
Does this mean the end of PBS?
Probably not. CPB gave funding to rural smaller stations which buy programming from PBS (or NPR).
It will drastically scale back the funding and coverage of public broadcasters, but they should (hopefully) survive.
That said, they effectively cease being public at this point. And ironically enough, they have no reason anymore to pander to wider audiences so if anything they will become more "left leaning" over time.
“Reality has a well known liberal bias”, as they say.
Nowadays they say, "Reality is a social construct."
No. What's really going to end PBS as we grew up with it is streaming. CPB is an vehicle for distributing public funding to PBS stations; only a small fraction of PBS station funding comes from CPB through the government.
It does for smaller stations that depended on federal funding to operate.
No, but I think it's likely that NPR and PBS will change because of this. A lot of people work there because of its explicit mission to serve the public. As with every other federal institution that's being pointlessly kneecapped, lots of good people will look elsewhere.
No, but it means the end of financial support for many programs on PBS and NPR.
No idea. Anyone have a good source of how much of PBS's funding comes from CPB?
Update: Just confirmed, no. Federal funds only makes up 15% of PBS's funding. [1]
1: https://foundation.pbs.org/ways-to-give/gifts-to-the-pbs-end...
For the last twenty years PBS proponents have been telling me that PBS and NPR are mostly member supported, and that the Federal funds couldn't corrupt the messaging because there just wasn't enough of it to matter.
So if that's true, I guess not. If it was actually a mouthpiece, I guess so
Yah they also took money from the “Archer Daniels Midland” corporation (not that I’d have anything against organic produce, for example) and the Ford and many other biased endowments —so I think it’d be hard to believe their messaging was unaffected. That or they bit the hand that fed it and the hand didn’t mind getting bitten for some reason.
Commenters in this thread citing NPR as a reason that dollars shouldn't go towards helping kids learn how to count and not be antisocial is the kind of win right wing media could only dream about a decade or so ago.
Absolutely embarrassing for a site like this that claims to value education and democratizing it (and always jumps into threads about childrens education with all of their anecdotally built ideas, of course!) isn't condemning this.
I certainly remember hearing the name many times, on good TV programming, so am surprised that the Wikipedia article doesn't talk much about the CPB's impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadca...
The Wikipedia page looks almost entirely about politics and funding.
Good it’s a completely outdated concept. There’s no barrier to producing and distributing content today. That public tax dollars go to a place where partisans distribute it to their favorite projects is a 1960s era concept that needs to die.
Really the 1960s and 70s were such an insane era we should examine all government programs from that era that are still in commission with very suspicious eyes.
Superficially this is 'just' partisan politics, but I wonder if it's actually much more of a death knell for traditional media.
When I was a teenager in the 90s an old guy took me aside and told me there'd be a day we get rid of public radio, and a day we'd have our final serving of affordable tuna sushi, and that after that, I'd be living in what he deemed the future.
One down.
Idk where you're living, but where I am, fresh tuna has gone from $16.00 a # to $25.00 a # in only the last couple years.
Public television and public radio isn't going anywhere, at least not anywhere any of the rest of linear media isn't already going.
Of course, if you live in a large metro the local stations will survive due to large numbers of wealthy and middle class benefactors. This is not necessarily so if you live in a typical red state middle size city or less.
Somewhat ironically a lot of the extreme cuts (this included) only serve to reinforce the status of major blue state metros as more desirable, since they have more resources available to fill the gaps left by federal austerity.
People in red states mostly watch PBS online. Linear media is obsolete and has been for a long time.
> Somewhat ironically a lot of the extreme cuts (this included) only serve to reinforce the status of major blue state metros as more desirable, since they have more resources available to fill the gaps left by federal austerity.
If the people in the red states aren't willing to pay for it, it would seem that they don't think it's desirable. Capitalism is funny that way.
I get that you're trying to say that the pie is smaller overall, but the principle still applies.
It's not that they aren't willing to pay for it. When you actually ask them, they often do support paying for these things.
> When you actually ask them, they often do support paying for these things.
Great! It isn't a problem, then. Again, capitalism is funny that way.
We have a capitalist economy, not a capitalist society. The government exists to fill gaps where the market fails. CPB is one example of this. USPS is another. People who look at these organizations like businesses are fools.
> We have a capitalist economy, not a capitalist society.
Last time I checked, "society" is a concept defined entirely by the behaviors and preferences of the people within it. You may want society not to be capitalist, but that's your opinion.
A society defined by the opinions of it's populace is called democracy.
Public television and public radio stations are literally being shut down, now, as per the topic article. Any station meaningfully relying on CPB is done.
I'm sure they will, but public funding for my local NPR and PBS stations amounts to something like 5% of their budget; they aren't going anywhere. NPR and PBS as institutions are more threatened by the Internet than they are by this funding cut.
I don't support the cut, but I get the vibe that many people commenting on this thread don't know what CPB is.
> public funding for my local NPR and PBS stations
Ah, so it's not going anywhere because it's not directly affecting your station. Got it. For many other people it is going away.
This will affect your station though. Lots of stations spent a good bit of their budgets on content from PBS and NPR. While direct federal sources aren't a massive chunk of their income, revenues from member stations is. This will impact the content your local public TV and radio station will get.
Is there any way to find out which stations will be affected, and by how much (e.g. proportion of budget)?
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/01/cpb-npr-pbs-corporation-pub...
Some stations will lose 2%, others 98%.
I'm sure we're going to lose a lot of hyperlocal news and current event programming in Shreveport or whatever, but those programs have tiny audiences (even relative to their media market). Most of what we think of as PBS and NPR programming is delivered principally over the Internet now, not via local broadcast stations.
The problem is hyperlocal news is what keeps local government accountable. The internet has starved these local newsrooms to the point where NPR was often the only one left.
Local news is a much bigger and grimmer phenomenon than PBS.
OK, but iirc you live in a big city (as do I). This is gonna be a serious problem for people in rural areas, and as well as decline in broadcasting operations it will probably mean less quality news coverage of rural issues, and so fewer rural stories on big-city NPR/PBS stations.
Right, but drastically fewer people are consuming linear NPR/PBS content. My guess is that at this point most NPR consumption occurs via podcasts (maybe 60/40? there's still a big drive-time component, but podcasts eat into drive-time too!), and presumably an even sharper shift to the PBS streaming site.
Like, for elderly viewers, availability of linear media still matters (something I've learned tediously through serving on a local commission managing our cable franchise). But... that's basically it?
So, back to: this is not an existential threat to PBS or NPR. I think people think I'm being glib when I say the Internet is a bigger threat to PBS (as an institution called "PBS") than this funding cut. I'm not being glib.
> Right, but drastically fewer people are consuming linear NPR/PBS content. My guess is that at this point most NPR consumption occurs via podcasts (maybe 60/40? there's still a big drive-time component, but podcasts eat into drive-time too!), and presumably an even sharper shift to the PBS streaming site.
Is the source of that 60/40 more substantial than any part of your anatomy?
> Like, for elderly viewers, availability of linear media still matters (something I've learned tediously through serving on a local commission managing our cable franchise). But... that's basically it?
Ok so you hear from elderly viewers that they care about this content and because you don’t hear from anyone else you assume they don’t exist? Are you really satisfied with that conclusion? Is it possible other listeners just have less time to be involved? Have you reached out to get their thoughts? Why are you so willing to dismiss the elderly?
> So, back to: this is not an existential threat to PBS or NPR. I think people think I'm being glib when I say the Internet is a bigger threat to PBS (as an institution called "PBS") than this funding cut. I'm not being glib.
I do think you are being glib. I don’t care about the comparison you’re making and I think it’s incredibly shallow. By your own estimate this will negatively impact 40% of NPR listeners. The existence of a larger threat is no consolation.
Why do PBS and NPR need to compete with anything? This is a public good, not a competitive business. That’s the entire point.
Does this funding cut somehow help NPR and PBS generate non-linear programming or online content? Of course it doesn’t. This is a bad thing for NPR and PBS even if they continue operating in spite of it.
I know you're looking for someone to take the other side of the "these funding cuts are good actually" argument, but miss me with it, OK? Not where I'm coming from.
The people who voted for the politicians implementing this generally live in those areas, so I think everyone is getting what they wanted on the whole?
To be clear, I am not in favor of these cuts, but nothing is preventing state, local or private contributions from keeping these stations on the air.
Hate to say it, but... username checks out, I guess
I was curious about that as well.
Tuna, at least bluefin, is definitely not too far behind.
What's happening to tuna sushi?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38913649
Overfishing? 15% Tariffs?
What's really horrifying here is that, even if the appetite for funding CPB were to come back in 2026, 2028, or whenever, you can't just spin it up again; those people have moved on, those assets are liquidated. You would have to start up again pretty much from scratch.
That's why this careless crusade against governmental institutions is so horrific. Institutions with decades of history are being destroyed, and it would take years to decades to spin up something even close to equivalent, in an insane political environment where every public institution is framed as horrible socialism.
I guess I just don’t find that as horrifying as you do. The market cannot hold public broadcasting accountable, and this is one of the few levers that we have to do so.
Conservatives have wanted to defund public broadcasting for decades. What made it finally possible was that public broadcasting made their bias obvious and undeniable. Over the past 10 years, the stark shift leftward has been undeniable — they became what they’ve been accused of being for a very long time.
Could you be more specific? What are some examples of the leftward shift? I hear this bandied about often but with little specificity.
With the inevitable cutbacks coming to NPR, I wonder how big a hit classical music will take. NPR delivers 95% of the classical music that airs in America, much of which comes from small market stations which will be the first to die with the end of CPB.
Whenever the question of federal funding for public broadcasting has come up in the past, a small army of commenters would always claim that less then 1% of the funding for public media comes from the government.
Turns out that was perhaps an incomplete argument.
For NPR 1-2% of their budget came directly from the federal government mostly through the CPB. That's where the 1% number some quote comes from.
However, NPR also receives funding from member station fees, and those member stations typically get about 13% of their budgets from the federal government.
Putting it all together about 10% of NPR's budget comes from the federal government.
For PBS about 15% of their budget comes from the federal government. Some local PBS affiliates, especially in rural areas, get up to 60% of their budgets from the federal government.
Certainly an incomplete picture. NPR its self may only get a small percentage of its total pie from CPB, but member stations (that license NPR content and what not) that exist all over the country use various amounts. The result will likely be that many small, local, already underfunded local stations will cease to function in their current capacity.
It's 15% for PBS, and CPB != PBS and CPB != NPR.
I identify neither as a liberal nor as a conservative, but outsiders will likely see a left bent in me.
The thing about PBS and NPR: I just don't have any alternatives! Wherever I've lived, all the other radio stations/channels just suck - liberal or not. MSNBC, CNN, Fox News totally suck. ABC, CBS, NBC mostly suck. The half-good radio stations are just way too biased and make NPR/PBS appear like paragons of neutraltity. I can tolerate losing NPR/PBS if I had alternatives. I simply don't.
Conservatives lump NPR/PBS viewers with other liberals. It's generally not true. All my liberal friends declare NPR to be "part of the problem". NPR/PBS viewers are just in another category altogether. They don't have choices.
I'd really like to hear from conservatives: Are there any channels/radio stations they like? Their complaint is continually that NPR/PBS is too left wing (which I can dispute but won't). But do they have a gaping hole in their choices the way people like me are about to have?
I like that NPR/PBS is calm. Most other outlets are based around breaking news, excitement, and often anger. I started watching PBS News Hour on youtube this year. Now I can't stand watching a show like ABC evening news which starts with intense music and urgent words from Muir at the start of every broadcast.
The flagship big-city / large-state stations will very likely continue to function. The real hit for this action will be in rural regions where alternatives to the local NPR translator station are typically religious stations, right-wing talk, and increasingly Spanish-language programming.
If you've access to streaming media, podcasts, or shortwave, you still do have options.
There are several excellent national broadcasters, with the CBC, BBC, and ABC (Australia) operating in English, or a reasonable facsimile. There are often English-language broadcasts from non-anglophone countries, including France (France-24) and Germany (Deutsche-Welle English service), off the top of my head.
Of course, these will get you international news (and occasionally national stories from the broadcaster's home state), but you're straight outta luck for journalism local to your area. OTOH, NPR and PBS have struggled to deliver that (as has commercial news media) for the past decade or two.
If you've always wanted to learn a foreign language but never quite had the inspiration to do so, a further option is to start listening to non-anglophone country's native programming, whether broadcast (shortwave or Internet streaming) or podcast. There are many excellent options. I'm particularly fond of German radio's programming (Deutschlandfunk and its variants, the federated public broadcasting model might offer some lessons and learnings to PBS and NPR going forward), though there are others on top of that.
I round things out with text-based news, typically major newspapers (e.g., NYTimes, Guardian), or newswires (Reuters is pretty good).
But yes, the state of streaming / OTA / linear-programmed news media in the US is absolutely abysmal.
That's nice, but I'm not looking for news - I already get that from better sources than NPR. I'm looking for good, thoughtful, engaging content.
Much of what I'm describing is in fact non-news content, which I find far more durable information than expiring-on-contact news.
Philosophy, history, issues and ideas, language instruction, narrative, amongst others.
Again, podcasts and streaming expand your universe markedly.
That said, terrestrial radio still has its place, which is depicted well in WNYC's "Divided Dial" series:
<https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial>
Also, to clarify, my point about non-native sources affording very limited news coverage local to you is salient in that the death of local news services (public, non-profit, or commercial) inevitably leads to opaqueness particularly as to local government, business, and other matters. It's a real loss, and deserves pointing out, however obvious it may be.
I’ll listen to snippets of right wing talk radio but it generally doesn’t take long before the exaggeration (Glenn Beck) or Trump idol worship (Clay Travis) get annoying.
I like hearing perspectives on stories that I won’t hear elsewhere but in general, I don’t need very much political news in my life. I’m happier spending my time on audio books and podcasts.
I’m not sure I’ve ever engaged with NPR beyond seeing conservatives mock some of their silliest propaganda headlines in the past few years.
> I’m not sure I’ve ever engaged with NPR beyond seeing conservatives mock some of their silliest propaganda headlines in the past few years.
What about all the nonpolitical shows on NPR/PBS? Snap Judgement, This American Life, Prairie Home Companion, Nature, NOVA, etc.
Lots of people watch PBS/NPR not for politics, but for the entertainment/educational content.
Prairie Home Companion died almost 8 years ago man don't remind me.
I’ve never watched any of them. Maybe Nova a few times when I was a kid.
PBS/NPR will be fine. Their business model might have to change but that might ultimately be a good thing.
I’ll listen to snippets of right wing talk radio but it generally doesn’t take long before the exaggeration (Glenn Beck) or Trump idol worship (Clay Travis) get annoying.
I remember being in the gym and catching some coverage of Fox News on Trumps trade war and potential deals. I believe the quote from one of the people talking was something like:
"We don't know the specifics about what's in this deal but we do know that this is a huge win for American businesses and the American people."
Fox News. Supposedly they love the thing, although it gets a bit left-wing radical at times.
It's a terrible time to be convincing the American public that the media is trustworthy.
It will regain its trust, but it has a long, uphill battle to get there since, especially since the months leading up to 2016.
> It will regain its trust, but it has a long, uphill battle to get there since, especially since the months leading up to 2016.
Why do you think that? Do you imagine that the individuals and institutions pushing the idea that the media is untrustworthy will suddenly stop pushing their agenda?
I wonder if now, shorn of the need to “bothsides” everything to justify government funding, public radio news will begin to reflect the political affiliations of its donor base more closely.
Coming soon to a Tiny Desk Concert near you: Ticketmaster!
This is sad but the US is too diverse to have a single source of public broadcasting. It was always destined to end like this.
They also raised $100 billion from tariffs. No clue where all this money is being diverted to. Obviously not PBS.
Unfortunately we've been running a massive and growing budget defect since 2002. The government would need to bring in or cut an extra 1.6 trillion dollars per year to get back to balanced in order for your statement to make sense.
I'm sure the elimination of free, educational content will be great for the working class.
Very simple question, which I've not seen answered anywhere: with all the media options available to consumers today, why should US taxpayers be paying for any entity like the CPB? If they can't compete in the market, go out of business.
The Taliban used to destroy their history too:
https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/south-asia/afghanista-tal...
Don't worry, this will help us consume the new truth easier.
Thank you so, so much GOP! Now children won't have the educational programming from PBS and us adults won't have our PBS documentaries and shows. I'm so very disappointed in our government right now.
I can't fucking stand these Republican fucks
Turns out elections have consequences.
Unbelievable!
One has to see the positives. After the isolationist, fiscal conservatives caused their great depression , they turn for one generation into fishes. Any public discussion, mouth opens, brain reminds them of the backlash they will get for what they caused, no sound escapes, mouth closes. Fishes.
Am I mistaking that repeatedly CBP claimed that they were only minority government funded?
You might be mistaking CBP for PBS or NPR.
The amount of damage trump and musk have done this is country is absolutely criminal.
I'm pretty certain that if public libraries didn't already exist and someone proposed the idea now it would be labeled "woke" and "socialist" and not get anywhere. We're in a very weird era, but pendulums swing and this too shall pass (in the meantime lots of damage is being done).
There's a reason public libraries are under attack, and it's this.
> I'm pretty certain that if public libraries didn't already exist and someone proposed the idea now it would be labeled "woke" and "socialist" and not get anywhere.
Public libraries do already exist and they are labeled "woke" and "socialist" and are dealing with both assaults on their funding and on their function.
True. I'm fortunate to live in a community that funds it's public libraries well, but I do know that downstate there are rural communities that have completely defunded theirs. I just don't think the idea of public libraries would get any traction now given how far to the right we've gone.
You don’t think it might have something to do with the Internet and having access to all of the knowledge in the world on your phone?
I’m glad libraries exist but a lack of traction if the idea were introduced today would have more to do with the impracticality of them than any political leanings.
My town spent millions on a small expansion to the library this past year. A project that if it was in the private sector would have cost a couple hundred grand at most. I can’t tell how they managed to spend as much as they did.
Nowadays most library systems offer digital content - ebooks and movies (through services like Kanopy).
Still, it's nice that there are third spaces like libraries in the community where you can go and aren't expected to have to engage in any commercial activity. That requires buildings. Our library hosts all manner of groups & activities. I went to a seminar on seed-saving the other day at our library, for example. I've gone to others on the art of making Japanese tea, candidate debates for local races, local author book fairs, Taiko drumming, etc. All of that requires some kind of physical infrastructure.
Your dumb little phone doesn't contain even the barest shadow of "all of the knowledge in the world" and the people who sincerely believe that are among those who are destroying America right now.
I guess we’re both fans of using hyperbole.
This is a better outcome than Trump minions taking over CPB
What would they have been able to do? CPB mostly just funnels money to stations. They don't produce content.
They could have chosen which specific shows they would fund, they weren't required to give out no-strings-attached grants. They once hand-picked Tucker Carlson to host a new PBS show that they would fund.
OK, but now they're funding zero shows.
I understand, just answering your question about what they would have been able to do.
Put conditions on said funneled money?
"If you want CPB money, you'll have to make/broadcast a Trump PSA" seems totally within the realm of possibility.
Which might still happen if rural PBS stations now need to take sketchy sources of money
Exhibit 39 on the List of American Institutions That Have Been Killed
shake my head
Disgraceful.
Trump sucks
Again, it's all part of the plan, which is referred to as the butterfly revolution, by Curtis Yarvin. Leaders that have literally invested in this platform are buying into this nonsense. These guys have polarized the two parties to a point all weaknesses are surfacing. It isn't about democrats vs republicans. It's just working class vs the billionaires. You know the ppl sitting behind Trump at his inauguration. Literally, they want to break apart the US and discredit the constitution. Unless we come together and carve a new narrative that works. These guys may succeed and you can kiss your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness goodbye, as well bill of rights.
Peter Theil, JD Vance, Marc Andreesen, Garry Tan, Srinivasan, and many others, wanting to overthrow democracy and dissolve nation states. This effort is to establish Network States with those that worship them, sycophants and cults. They want to transform the US into an Autocracy. The polarization of the media and political parties is on purpose. They want America to fall. It's not a secret, not a conspiracy theory. It's definitely being rolled out by billionaires. It would be wise for others here to really do your research and understand why we are being polarized to hate each other. Enter the butterfly revolution:
1. Reboot (“full-power start”) Suspend or bypass existing constitutional limits; concentrate absolute sovereignty in one new organization—analogous to Allied occupation powers in post-1945 Japan/Germany. Eliminate checks and balances that block rapid change.
2. CEO-Monarch model A single executive (chosen like a corporate CEO) rules; the former president becomes a figurehead “chairman of the board.” Treat the state as a firm run for efficiency, not democratic representation.
3. RAGE strategy “Retire All Government Employees” by mass-firing the civil service and replacing it with loyal appointees. Remove institutional resistance (“the Cathedral”) and ensure obedience.
4. Parallel regime Build a fully staffed shadow government in exile before inauguration; unveil it on Day 1 to take over agencies at once. Prevent the bureaucratic slow-rolling that stymied Trump’s first term.
5. Media & academia clampdown Defund or shutter universities and independent press seen as hostile. Break what Yarvin calls the Cathedral’s cultural dominance.
Resources:
"The Straussian Moment", https://www.hoover.org/research/peter-thiel-straussian-momen...
Freedom Cities in Trumps presser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJA_GBhCGgE
Billionaire example: https://www.praxisnation.com
Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tec, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqHueZNEzig
A.I., Mars and Immortality: Are We Dreaming Big Enough? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV7YgnPUxcU&t=404s
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-in...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-p...
I appreciate your response and agree with it, but don’t quite get the emphasis on polarization. They don’t want two polarized media sources, they want one completely controlled propaganda source. And I don’t see how it’s playing into their hands or something being “polarized” against billionaires and trump supporters.
Yarvin and Srinivasan have been described as favoring deliberate polarization to destabilizing established narratives. The intent is to surface competing extremes. They view polarizing media as a way of delegitimizing our current framework of government. Yarvin specifically proposes the deconstruction, even abolition, of current democratic institutions, replacing them with a CEO-led or monarchist. Their intent is to accelerate the cycle of systemic breakdown and renewal, so their version of autocracy can emerge in the vacuum.
Oh totally, again 100% with you that they are intentionally (and sadly it seems, successfully) breaking down democracy in the US and elsewhere.
I also believe that there is astroturfing in online comment sections and occasionally embedded agents in opposition movements to push extreme and hostile "wedge" views that would split otherwise potential allies.
But a lot of it is natural resistance to being attacked- Am I "polarized" against Trump and Trump voters because of a deliberate campaign, or because they are working to make my life unlivable, y'know? That sort of polarization I don't really have a problem with.
It’s all so horrible and obvious.
a corrupt government would have appropriated it for propaganda. instead an old and out of use tax payer forced program is being finally put to rest.
I loved many NPR / PBS creations, like “Car Talk”. What a great show.
But I was dismayed to see how NPR turned a blind eye to stories like the Hunter Biden bombshell. NPRs CEO started wearing a Biden hat, and openly criticizing Trump. A former NPR employee wrote a well publicized substack article (irony!) that claimed deep, systemic political bias. It’s hard not to agree.
I hope NPR and PBS take a hard look at themselves and come up with some ways to assure political neutrality. Absent that, I have to agree that tax dollars should not be spent here.