NPR CEO’s Disastrous Congressional Testimony Proves Why We Need to Defund NPR

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Maher took a whole day off to read a book about reparations but can’t remember a thing about it. Curious. I’m guessing this is how the Left is going to have a great deal of amnesia about the Great Awokening in coming years.

What, defund the police? I don’t recall that. That’s a Republican idea! Tear down statues of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington? No way, tearing down statues and erasing the past is a relic of 20th-century totalitarians. Who would do such a thing?

Maher spent years virtue signaling woke platitudes and now apparently wants to pretend that didn’t happen. She’s also said before taking the gig at NPR that the First Amendment is a huge barrier to combating “disinformation and misinformation.” That’s quite a take from someone now running a government-funded media company. 

When asked why there was not a single registered Republican on the 87-membr NPR editorial board, Maher had no answers but insisted they were committed to unbiased reporting.

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The whole hearing was a disaster for NPR. It was highly reminiscent of when college presidents were brought before Congress to answer for the rise in antisemitism on college campuses. It’s obvious that the people who run America’s elite institutions, whether in academia or in media, have been living in a cloistered, self-selecting bubble.

When asked to answer for themselves, they’re revealed to be not only out-of-touch but also incompetent. America’s “elites” have turned out to be a contemptible pseudo-elite, capable of regurgitating the right, socially selected, politically correct talking points and little else.

NPR is undeniably a part of that bubble.

Now, if NPR was a fully private company operating independently this would be fine. If it wants to be just another left-wing media company, that would be entirely its business. But much like the higher education system, NPR is a left-wing media, increasingly activist operation that’s abandoned any pretense to balance or objectivity and yet relies on public money to continue operations.

The issue at stake is whether NPR and PBS deserve to continue receiving taxpayer dollars to fund their programming. For more than half a century, Congress has dumped millions and hundreds of millions of dollars a year into the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which owns and operates NPR and PBS.

The reasoning back in the day was that high-quality content geared toward education was essentially missing from the airwaves. In an era in which there were only a handful of television stations, this argument had a certain logic to it.

Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez spoke at the hearing spoke about how NPR and PBS are well past their due date.

Now NPR and PBS can’t even maintain the bare minimum mirage that they are there to serve the American people, all the American people. And with the explosion of so many other independent media and educational programs in the age of the internet, the NPR model is looking more and more like a defunct relic from a bygone era.

Wednesday’s hearing is all the evidence needed to demonstrate that this publicly funded media scam needs to end. It’s time for Congress to defund NPR, no more excuses.

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” 

Syndicated with permission from The Daily Signal.