Another day, another “What color is the sky in their world?” moment from an American leftist. We are being inundated with them on an hourly basis, but I never stop being fascinated by just how out of touch they are. It’s an ideological circus freak show at this point, and I seem to have purchased an annual pass.
Hey, better to be bemused and/or intrigued by all of the nonsense than irritated by it, especially when one is professionally obligated to pay attention to it.
We have finally gotten a president who is trying to do something that conservatives have long had on our bucket lists: defund National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). This is yet another thing that Republican politicians have been giving lip service to for years while doing absolutely nothing that would make it happen. President Donald Trump has the will to keep trying to make Republicans in Congress do things that would differentiate them from the Democrats. It’s not an easy task — the Uniparty bond is a strong one.
He’s getting there, though.
Now that it might become a reality, the defenders of publicly funding leftist propaganda are lashing out with all kinds of horror stories about a dystopian world where “All Things Considered” might have to learn how to earn a buck.
NPR CEO Katherine Maher was given an opportunity by ostensible for-profit network CNN to explain just why she wants her employer to keep sucking at the government teat, and one of the reasons is a real whopper:
NPR CEO Katherine Maher argues rural America often has no other possible source of news or connection to the outside world EXCEPT through PBS and NPR: “Large rural communities, large tribal communities” don’t have “a lot of other options. Broadband service is not universal, and… pic.twitter.com/OFWuQTCa2E
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 16, 2025
As my good friend and Townhall colleague Larry O’Connor pointed out in his retweet of the above post, no actual rural Americans were interviewed during this segment. My guess is it’s because none of the Coastal Media Bubble™ denizens have the slightest clue where rural America is. If they do, they probably lament the fact that they wouldn’t know what to wear should they ever visit it.
Just a couple of notes in reply to that.
The first is this: NPR and PBS are liberal fetishes more than anything else. I am not saying that people over here on our side of the aisle haven’t ever been fans of certain public broadcast offerings. Heck, when I first started going on the road doing stand-up and had to drive to all the gigs (opening and middle acts couldn’t afford plane tickets), I listened to NPR quite often. Like almost everything in old school media, though, the increasingly leftist bent over the years became off-putting. Last August, I led off one Morning Briefing highlighting posts that Stephen the Younger, Victoria, and Scott had written that week about just how awful that leftist bent is.
The notion that Americans in rural flyover country are glued to NPR is so patently absurd that it may be a sign that Maher is in the throes of psychotic disconnect.
Relevant: It’s OK to Call Your Political Opponents Insane If They’re, You Know, Insane
The second is in reply to what the Dems and everyone at NPR and PBS have been telling us for years. In the past, whenever we would talk about defunding NPR and PBS, the Left would respond en masse and insist that neither received a significant portion of its funding from the taxpayers. Both organizations quit Twitter at one time because they were labeled “government-funded media,” which my RedState colleague Bonchie reminded us about:
So they do rely on government funding to operate?
Weird. So what was this freak-out all about? pic.twitter.com/3JkJrhL18H
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) July 16, 2025
Taking them at their word for the last couple of decades, one has to wonder why they’re fretting about the possibility of losing the coerced taxpayer contributions. Surely, these wildly popular platforms could quickly make up the difference. Nothing is preventing them from doing so. In fact, PBS has successfully monetized its “Masterpiece” offerings with a stand-alone streaming service. The “Masterpiece” programming is mostly British fare, by the way. They’re shows that don’t beat viewers over the head with shoehorned American leftist talking points and plot lines — something that I wrote about in a VIP column earlier this year.
There’s a revenue-generating hint that Ms. Maher and her colleagues might want to take.
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