The Corporation for Public Broadcasting Died This Week — By Suicide
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced Monday that its board has formally voted to dissolve it.
The vote actually took place about a month ago. Like a bunch of Grinches, the CPB people withheld their joyous announcement and spoiled Christmas.
The CPB is now, like Eastern Airlines, the German Democratic Republic, and Blockbuster Video, defunct.
“For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans — regardless of geography, income, or background — had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling,” CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison announced in characteristically propagandistic fashion. “When the Administration and Congress rescinded federal funding, our Board faced a profound responsibility: CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks.” (RELATED: Congress Moves to End the Perpetual PBS Pledge Drive on Capitol Hill)
Public broadcasting never aimed its signal at all Americans. It grabbed the tax dollars of all Americans.
Public broadcasting never aimed its signal at all Americans. It grabbed the tax dollars of all Americans.
With that money, PBS and NPR catered to a narrow group, i.e., white, aging liberals, that essentially mirrored the people working for it. Eventually, the audience naturally reflected that group, too. (RELATED: Corporation for Propaganda Broadcasting)
Consider American Masters, a well-done program that in the beginning profiled such sui generis figures as Harold Lloyd and Georgia O’Keeffe. Over the years, it increasingly fixated on political animals: Lillian Hellman, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Dalton Trumbo, Anthony Fauci, and Jerry Brown. Not until Season 38 did it get around to profiling a figure of import to the American conservative movement, and then its feature on William F. Buckley Jr. saw him through the lens of what (McCarthyism, the Ku Klux Klan, the Vietnam War, and even January 6) animated not the right that celebrated him but the left that vilified him.
Harrison’s invocation of “trusted news” deserved laugh-track accompaniment.
“The survey finds that 23 percent of Republicans said they trust PBS, while 26 percent distrust PBS,” the Associated Press reported about a 2025 Pew survey. “Democrats trust PBS by a 59 percent to 4 percent margin.” (RELATED: Uncle Sam Just Conducted Its Final April 15th Pledge Drive for PBS and NPR)
The public’s reaction to National Public Radio (NPR) further illustrated not just the partisan but ideologized nature of the “news” presented by the broadcasters.
“Pew finds that more than twice as many Republicans distrust NPR than trust it,” the AP explained, “while Democrats trust NPR by a 47 percent to 3 percent margin.”
Why did Democrats overwhelmingly trust NPR and Republicans distrust it?
Uri Berliner, an NPR editor for a quarter century, offered a compelling explanation in his analysis of the partisan affiliations of those employed in NPR’s Washington newsroom in editorial positions. That newsroom housed 87 Democrats and zero Republicans.
One guesses that Izvestiya boasted more diversity of thought than does NPR.
NPR suppressed true stories on COVID and the Hunter Biden laptop.
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories,” NPR managing editor Terence Samuel told the outfit’s public editor regarding the laptop, “and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
But NPR frequently wastes its time on stories that are not really stories.
“At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff,” Berliner pointed out in his famous article that precipitated his departure from NPR. “Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia.”
By turning their platform into propaganda, rigid and inflexible PBS and NPR honchos ensured the demise of public broadcasting. (RELATED: Defunding NPR: No Such Thing as Too Small)
Plenty of outlets present slanted information. NPR and PBS did this on the taxpayers’ dime. This can work so long as the party benefiting from state media’s coverage controls the national purse. And that was the case for the first half of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s existence. Once one-party control of Congress ended in the 1990s, so, too, did the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — the fall just took a while.
And even laymen’s eyes can see “suicide” as the cause of death, with perhaps arrogance as the comorbidity, after the autopsy.
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