Permit me a serious question, one that if answered honestly lays bare the rot at the heart of our so-called public discourse:
If Democrats were given a choice between eliminating NPR and PBS entirely, or preserving and even expanding them on the single condition that half of their on-air personalities, editors, writers, and producers be conservatives, what do you suppose they would choose?
I think they’ve already answered that. They’d torch the buildings, salt the earth, and declare themselves victims. They would rather see these institutions destroyed than allow Republicans a genuine or even token seat at the table. Not seats for trolls or talk-radio bomb-throwers, mind you, but for articulate competent conservatives. That, for the modern left, is not merely unthinkable, it’s anathema.
And there you have the real problem. The real reason public broadcasting just saw its funding cut isn’t that Republicans hate public broadcasting, but that Democrats hate Republican voices.
Do you honestly believe Republicans would be cutting funding for these outlets if we were allowed to use them to get their message out?
For decades Republicans threatened to cut funding for NPR and PBS not because the GOP had suddenly rediscovered fiscal prudence (I think we all know that’s not the case!), but because both organizations had become little more than taxpayer funded versions of MSNBC. We didn’t want these institutions destroyed. We wanted a piece of them. We would have preferred to see these platforms restored to something resembling ideological balance.
Do you think we want to go unheard?
After all, what do we have? Fox News. The Wall Street Journal editorial page. Maybe the occasional Substack. Meanwhile, Democrats have The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, PBS, and nearly every major newspaper and news magazine in the country. In the most recent presidential election, 90 percent of those papers endorsed Kamala Harris, even though the country as a whole endorsed Donald Trump. We’d love another outlet, especially one with an audience we’d like to reach.
But did PBS or NPR make any effort, in the face of those funding threats, to become politically neutral? To assuage those concerns? To make even a perfunctory effort to include conservative voices?
Of course not.
Instead of pursuing balance or even modest inclusion, they offered something worse than rejection: denial. Laughable, insulting denial. They insisted, against all evidence and common sense, that NPR and PBS harbor no ideological bias. That their worldview is just the truth. That their values are simply what smart people think.
What a farce.
At NPR, the ideological homogeneity is not merely anecdotal it’s quantifiable. According to public FEC records reviewed by The Free Beacon, 87 NPR employees made political donations between 2019 and 2023. Every single one of them 100 percent donated to Democrats or left-wing causes. Not a single donation to a Republican or a conservative organization. What kind of newsroom, in a nation evenly divided, manages that kind of ideological purity? Only one that cultivates it.
And PBS is no different. An analysis of its executives and board members shows a consistent pattern: campaign contributions to Democrats outnumber those to Republicans by ratios of 10 to 1 or greater. These are the people who oversee hiring, programming, and funding decisions and they’ve made their political allegiances clear. These are not public servants. They are Democratic operatives with taxpayer funded business cards.
This is the media version of a Potemkin village, a facade of neutrality stretched over an empire of progressive dogma.
So let’s stop pretending.
The left doesn’t want public broadcasting. It wants state sponsored confirmation bias and Republican voices silenced. It wants its worldview piped into your living room at your expense, with the added satisfaction of pretending it’s a civic virtue. It’s not. It’s an ideological monopoly dressed up as a charity.
And this is why I say, if forced to choose between sharing these platforms and losing them, the left would rather see them burned to the ground. They are like children who would rather break the toy than let anyone else play with it.
And the Republican response to cut the funding is not out of cruelty or ignorance. It is born of the sober recognition that it is pointless to argue with a locked door.
If NPR and PBS truly wanted public funding, then they should have reflected the public, all of it. If Democrats cannot tolerate that, then they are the ones who do not deserve these institutions.
Republicans don’t hate public broadcasting. We just hate paying for a sermon that calls us stupid. And Democrats, for all their talk of inclusion, would rather there be silence than share the mic.
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