this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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Hmm. And all of the neolibs have been saying for years that “barely any NPR/PBS funding comes from the government anyway!” But now they’re shutting down without it? Always knew they were full of shit.
Fuck’em. They’ve been manufacturing consent for atrocities since their inception. Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent exposed the whole game back in the 80’s, and they went into overdrive after 9/11.
I used to listen to NPR on my commute, but finally called it when they rehashed a CIA press release verbatim without even a hint of scrutiny. They were running covert ads as stories, they fired their ombudsman for finally calling them out on the degrading coverage, they helped bury the Bernie campaign in bad coverage (while giving Clinton softball praise), continually pushed Islamophobic narratives, etc. While their coverage always had propaganda spread throughout, there was at least some kernel of truth in their stories for a while. But they completely squandered any amount of trust they’d built. Now there’s too few people left to defend them. I have no sympathy.
I'm with you on what I like to call the well-to-do liberal tilt of public broadcasting (NPR in particular). Reminds me a lot of the New York Times and their blatant biases. But my understanding is that the CPB is just a source of funding for PBS/NPR and is not directly linked to their operations. That said, they apparently provide quite a lot of the funding to those stations, so their odds of survival are looking quite grim.