Jay Weber Show transcript 3-27-25
I said yesterday: conservatives have been talking about canceling govt funding to NPR and PBS for the entire 35 years I’ve been in the media- and it never gets done.
I also said: because it’s Donald Trump and Elon Musk who are talking about it -this time- this is the best chance -ever- to actually ‘get it done’. Finally cut the funding.
And still-that’s a decision that congress is going to have to make. They control the purse strings and the funding-and the reason that this has been talked about for decades and never been done-is because there aren’t enough fiscally conservative republicans in congress to follow thru on the matter.
Every time it has come up in the past- ‘some number’ of republican squishes go soft and protect the funding.
Which is about half a billion dollars every year, now. This is not a small budget item.
And so-here we go again- and this time-I hope to see the angst and debate -end- with an end to this taxpayer funding.
Because the truth is: neither NPR nor PBS need it. They run big budgets that have grown immensely over the years with major donations and ads that they won’t call ads, and profits from sesame street and their other successful shows. If NPR really has such a great product on the radio they could choose to ‘podcast it’ and pbs could start their own app...like Disney plus or Hulu....and charge a few bucks a month for their content.
There’s no reason that some of their funding needs to come from the federal government.
Moreover-this isn’t a ‘growing nation’ whose people need a ‘govt funded voice in the wilderness’ to tune into for information.
Nor is it a ‘war nation’ that needs some sort of government-run vehicle for war communications or to boost national pride.
Any ‘model’ that NPR and PBS might have fit in the past-us outdated by 70 years, at least.They compete with private sector radio and tv stations on the same playing field every day-and have for decades. They don’t need federal funding to make their business model work.
Nor should they have it- now that they have morphed into another arm of the far-left accomplice media.
Republicans held a Doge hearing yesterday to ask the CEOs of these stations to explain why they should continue to get federal funding-
And let’s just say- they did not acquit themselves well. Marjorie Taylor green is the chairwoman of this subcommittee- and ‘she crazy’- and so, there was no doubt about what the topic was.
Why should taxpayers keep funding them to the tune of 535-million dollars a year? -was the question for the CEOs.
‘To a person’ these three CEOs insisted that their news outlets weren’t biased- but they ended up looking ridiculous as republicans on the panel relentlessly pointed out their personal-and professional biases.
I have a snippet here from what was a 3 minute grilling...of NPR’s CEO- Karoline Maher...by congressmen Brandon Gill.... who simply asked her to defend her own texts- on social media over the years.
REP. BRANDON GILL: Do you believe that America is addicted to white supremacy?
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: I believe that I tweeted that, and as I’ve said earlier, I believe much of my thinking has evolved over the last half decade. It has evolved.
REP. BRANDON GILL: Why did you tweet that?
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: I don’t recall the exact context, sir, so I wouldn’t be able to say.
REP. BRANDON GILL: OK. Do you believe that America believes in "black plunder and white democracy"?
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: I don’t believe that.
REP. BRANDON GILL: You tweeted that you were reading at the time, apparently, The Case for Reparations.
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: I don’t think I’ve ever read that book, sir.
REP. BRANDON GILL: You tweeted about it. You said you took a day off to fully read The Case for Reparations. You put that on Twitter in January of 2020.
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: I apologize, I don’t recall that I did. I have no doubt that your tweet there is correct, but I don’t recall that.
REP. BRANDON GILL: OK. Do you believe that white people inherently feel superior to other races?
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: I do not.
REP. BRANDON GILL: You don’t? You tweeted something to that effect. You said, "I grew up feeling superior—ha, how white of me." Why did you tweet that?
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: I think I was probably on what it was to be—to grow up in an environment where I had lots of advantages.
REP. BRANDON GILL: It sounds like you’re saying that white people feel superior.
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: I don’t believe that anybody feels that way, sir. I was just reflecting on my own experiences.
REP. BRANDON GILL: You think that people should pay reparations?
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: I have never said that, sir.
REP. BRANDON GILL: Yes, you did. You said it in January of 2020. You tweeted—yes, the North, yes, all of us, yes, America, yes, our original collective sin and unpaid debt, yes, reparations, yes, on this day.
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: I don’t believe that was a reference to fiscal reparations, sir.
REP. BRANDON GILL: What kind of reparations was it a reference to?
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: I think it was just a reference to the idea that we all owe much to the people who came before us.
REP. BRANDON GILL: That’s a bizarre way to frame what you tweeted. OK, how—how much reparations have you personally paid?
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: Sir, I don’t believe that I’ve ever paid reparations.
REP. BRANDON GILL: OK, just for everybody else.
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: I’m not asking what you’re suggesting.
REP. BRANDON GILL: Do you believe that looting is morally wrong?
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: I believe that looting is illegal, and I refer to it as counterproductive. I think it should be prosecuted.
REP. BRANDON GILL: Do you believe it’s morally wrong though?
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: Of course, of course.
REP. BRANDON GILL: Then why did you refer to it as counterproductive? It’s a very different—very different way to describe it. It is both morally wrong and counterproductive, as well as—you tweeted it’s hard to be mad about protests, in reference to the BLM protests, not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression. You didn’t condemn the looting. You said that it was counterproductive.
REP. BRANDON GILL: NPR also promoted a book called In Defense of Looting. Do you think that that’s an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars?
KAROLINE MAHER, NPR: I’m unfamiliar with that book, sir, and I don’t believe that was at my time that you read that book, but I don’t believe that I did read that.
Gill’s grilling went on for over three minutes. I didn’t want to bore you with all of it-but the point is- just with a quick look at Maher’s social media- gill found dozens of -radically left wing-
-radically left wing- sentiments expressed.
Maher denied some of them and tried to explain away some of them. But ultimately had to admit. She. Personally. Is a radical left winger.
Then came the news that NPR has 87 members of their editorial board. 87.
How many do you think are republicans?
Zero.Folks- Maher had to admit that- on an 87 member editorial board! There were 87 registered democrats and not a single republican.
That right there should end any debate-over whether taxpayer dollars should continue to fund national public radio.
As Marjorie Taylor Green said: they can hate us on their own dime.
This move to strip the NPR and PBS of federal funding and make them ‘sink or swim’ on their own is long, long overdue. And it’s not even really a partisan issue.
It’s not. There are all sorts of ‘good government’ democrats and left-wing advocates of ethical journalism who have also argued over the years that public broadcasting should be defunding.
For example- C-span is a non-profit public affairs network. They broadcast a lot of govt meetings and dc events. You’d think C-span would be government funded.
No. It’s not. In fact- the founder of c-span, Brian Lamb, found it important -not to- accept taxpayer support and just recently called funding NPR and PBS a bad idea.
Liberal constitutional professor Jonathan Turley- who has appeared on PBS public affairs shows for years- has always said: we should break off this govt funding. We, in America. In a ‘free speech society’. Should not have any government funded news organizations.
And he’s right. This isn’t Russia or Cuba. We don’t need an official govt radio and tv station because all other ‘voices’ are either discouraged or squashed.
It’s not as if we have a lack of news outlets or media options- as we did when NPR originated to reach very rural Americans in an age before mass media.
It’s time. It’s simply time to cut this funding stream. And everyone in dc seems to know it. But no one wants to do it.
They feel like something is being ‘lost’ here, and it’s not. NPR and PBS -can-and will be successful on their own. They offer ‘quality’ and ‘alternative’ programming that some section of society finds entertaining and wants to see or hear.
So- sell a few more ads- like the rest of us ‘free’ tv and radio stations do.
Or create an app-and supplement your revenue with streaming services that people pay a few bucks for. Every other national outlet seems to have them.
But- it was embarrassing- to watch these CEOs squirm under questioning, yesterday, and try to pretend as if they aren’t just running propaganda machines for the left.
The NPR CEO-this Karoline Maher-quote ‘admitted’ that it was a mistake to refuse to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story.
This is how ‘this’ was reported.... she quotes. Admitted...it was a ‘mistake’...not to cover the hunter story.
No, no. It wasn’t a ‘mistake’.
Don’t let her off that easily. Her newsroom’s -bleeping- infuriating refusal! - to cover the laptop story was intentional. It was a highly calculated move by NPR’s newsrooms and hosts to protect the democrats and the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign...
And she shouldn’t be allowed to claim it was a mistake now.
Republicans should reject the characterization completely. She-herself-was exposed as a stone-cold leftist, yesterday. She herself runs a stone-cold leftist propaganda operation. Let’s not pretend that she and her team were making ‘tough journalistic calls’ here.
That’s crap.
It also came up that NPR refused to report on the true origins of covid- and by God-dug in on the ‘wet market’ theory, because that’s the one that Fauci and dc health officials wanted to promote.
NPR-over and over again, dismissed the notion that the deadly virus- gee- came from that lab that experiments with dangerous viruses that were right up the road.
These weren’t editorial mistakes made by a group of journalists.
They were agreements to cave to what the dc insiders and American leftists wanted them to report.
NPR should be funded now.
And apparently, these CEOs know how bad they looked yesterday, in this hearing, because Jonathan Turley says- they quickly resorted to sending their lobbyists scurrying around the capitol to find enough republican squishes to save their funding.
photo credit: Getty Images
audio version of the segment here > Time to kill off funding for NPR and PBS