Big Bird Saves Public TV

Bypass Him

Public television has been a target of Republicans since the Nixon era, then again in the Reagan and Newt Gingrich eras, and on up to the present. Now it’s happening again:

Republican-sponsored bills that would eliminate government funding for public media are already working their way through Congress. They include the No Propaganda Act, introduced this year by Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana and Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, and the Defund NPR Act, introduced in April by Representative Jim Banks of Indiana.

Mr. Banks introduced his bill weeks after a senior editor at NPR, Uri Berliner, published an essay claiming that the network had a liberal bias. (Mr. Berliner resigned and now works for The Free Press, a digital start-up founded by the former New York Times writer Bari Weiss.)

Somehow, though, public TV always survives. They tout the children they help and rural areas that they alone serve, and bring out their biggest stars to defend themselves. “If you love Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street, write your Congressman!” they say, and it works. Or it has up to now.

Mr. Rogers

Is there anyone who doesn’t love Mr. Rogers? He was a hero. May his memory be a blessing.

Here’s a younger Mr. Rogers testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on May 1, 1969.

“If you’re cutting PBS funding, you must hate Mr. Rogers!” was an effective campaign message.

If we look at the financials of the company that carries on his legacy, though, grants are a small part of the revenue:

5.4%, actually.

Big Bird

Sesame Street is also a favorite Public TV defense. Here’s Time reporting on the first Trump administration’s attempt to cut funding.

“Not only do they hate Mr. Rogers, they hate Big Bird, too!” they say. “Write your Congressman!”

If we look at financials of the non-profit Sesame Workshop, it doesn’t appear that public dollars are even a major part of their revenue:

A Pyrrhic Victory?

Perhaps this time it’s different, and Public TV really will be defunded. Don’t worry, though: Sesame Street and Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood will continue entertaining and teaching your kids, no matter what scare stories the CPB tells you.

But for Republicans: is it worth the casualties? Won’t the left-wing establishment just step up their funding and continue as if nothing had happened?

Ideological Skew

The real conservative complaint about public TV and radio is that they hate conservatives. This is not conspiracy theory; it’s a fact. There is considerable academic research on detecting political bias in Internet sources, and several browser extensions one can install.

The Media Bias Detector from the University of Pennsylvania says this about The PBS News Hour

Left-Center

These media sources have a slight to moderate liberal bias. They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes) to favor liberal causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information, but may require further investigation.

The Ground News Bias Detector also rates them as “leaning left.”

That Laptop: “Not Really Stories”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include NPR’s deliberate suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.

“The biggest reason you haven’t heard much on NPR about the Post story is that the assertions don’t amount to much,” wrote NPR Managing Editor Kelly McBride at the time in 2020.

“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” Terence Samuels, NPR’s managing editor for news, said of NPR’s refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story. “And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event, and we decided to treat it that way.”

In other words: “This will help Trump, so we’re not covering it.”

Redressing the Balance

We know that legacy media is dying, and “new media” (blogs, podcasts, social media, etc.) is replacing them. But let’s learn a lesson from the White House and Pentagon: they’re not kicking the old media OUT; they’re inviting the new media IN.

The White House

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said,

And in keeping with this revolutionary media approach that President Trump deployed during the campaign, the Trump White House will speak to all media outlets and personalities, not just the legacy media who are seated in this room, because apporting --according to recent polling from Gallup, Americans’ trust in mass media has fallen to a record low. Millions of Americans, especially young people, have turned from traditional television outlets and newspapers to consume their news from podcasts, blogs, social media, and other independent outlets. It’s essential to our team that we share President Trump’s message everywhere and adapt this White House to the new media landscape in 2025. To do this, I am excited to announce the following changes will be made to this historic James S. Brady Briefing Room, where Mr. Brady’s legacy will endure….. We’re also opening up this briefing room to new media voices who produce news-related content and whose outlet is not already represented by one of the seats in this room. We welcome independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers, and content creators to apply for credentials…

The Pentagon

The Pentagon is also making room for new media while not removing the old. NBC can still cover the Pentagon; they just don’t get one of those scarce offices there anymore.

President Donald Trump's administration, in an unprecedented move, announced late on Friday it would remove four media organizations including The New York Times from their dedicated office spaces in the Pentagon, citing a desire to make room for others.

The memo on a "New Annual Media Rotation Program" said it would also remove National Public Radio, Comcast Corp-owned NBC News, and Politico, which must vacate their spaces by Feb. 14. In their place, it would give dedicated office space to the New York Post, One America News Network, Breitbart News Network, and HuffPost News.

Let the Market Decide

Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will have the eventual result that their news coverage continues, and as biased as before. Wealthy leftists will see to that. Maybe the CPB will retaliate by dropping some of their popular programs, just so the peasants pay a price for their insolence.

As the CPB likes to warn us, people in rural areas that are only served by one radio station should continue to have their Fresh Air and Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. Those should still be funded.

Instead of fighting a bloody war to finally defund CPB, let’s just direct some of their funds to other media, similar to the way more seats were added to the White House briefing room, and traditional media outlets were rotated out of the Pentagon’s privileged spaces.

Details

The CPB gets about $500 million per year from the federal government. Much of that money is granted to local stations, who then pay license fees back to the CPB, and other fees to various creators like Florentine Films (Ken Burns) and Sesame Workshop.

Those stations, in turn, are 501(c)(3) organization and run interminable pledge drives to support themselves. They also get government, corporate, and foundation grants. There is no single spigot that can be shut off.

Instead of unravelling this birds’ nest

of funds, the CPB’s allocation should be divided, with some of it going to other media outlets. Just as the White House is inviting in the new media, some portion of CPB funds should be awarded to the media outlets that the public has moved to.

PBS and NPR do program some good material that is non-political, although the percentage gets smaller every year. Nature shows now often end with a climate change commercial.

• Abigail Shrier's book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters has been studiously ignored by both PBS and NPR.

• Abby Johnson’s movie Unplanned was covered in this NPR story, which presents only the pro-abortion side.

• The movie Sound of Freedom: the Faces of Human Trafficking was covered by NPR, but the headline was “Christian thriller 'Sound of Freedom' faces criticism for stoking conspiracy theories.”

Rather than railing about this leftward bias, Republicans should simply accept it, and direct some of CPB’s funding to the other half of America. Just as Fox News and Joe Rogan get ratings that dwarf those of the mainstream media, the same thing could happen to PBS’s ratings.