NPR and PBS have jilted taxpayers for too long

As a child, I was a big fan of the Cookie Monster.

As a new dad in my 30s, my love has turned more to the cookies themselves, and my waistline has kept me from hiding this fact. Now, lawmakers are on the verge of cutting federal funding to “Sesame Street” and all of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) along with it.

As a former member of the Cookie Monster fan club, I understand the nostalgia for certain programming, but it’s time to cut the cord, especially since PBS and NPR will almost certainly keep operating their standard programming, just without the taxpayer subsidies. How could I be so heartless to my furry childhood friend?

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First, let’s consider that PBS, once the source of some of America’s favorite “Sesame Street” characters, is now a cringeworthy collection of irrelevant kids shows buoyed by the nostalgia of aging lawmakers. With the explosion of streaming services, social media, and endless entertainment options, kids are more addicted to screens than ever. But screens aren’t good for kids. I covered this in a previous podcast, and it’s backed by plenty of research. In our time of overabundance in digital content, do we really need to subsidize entertainment more?

If parents really want to keep kids on the screens for some kind of intangible educational benefit, there are plenty of paid and free alternatives. A YouTube account will leave you swimming in more ABCs and 123s in a high-pitched voice — puppets and all — than you can stand.

On top of that, PBS shows are peppered with liberal bias.

Some parts of federally funded broadcasting are not nearly as cute — and therefore much easier to cut — than Cookie Monster’s Christmas bonus. 

For instance, PBS produced a documentary called “Growing Up Trans,” which features children undergoing life-changing medical decisions. Of course, that content is then pumped out to impressionable kids around the country.

Earlier this year, the White House published a list of examples like this, from a PBS documentary making the case for reparations to an NPR segment about doorway sizes and “fatphobia.”

One of the most disturbing examples featured a drag queen named “Lil Miss Hot Mess” who read a children’s book to kids titled, The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish.

How long before my sweet, blue cookie-consuming friend is donning drag? Lord, help us.

Now let’s consider NPR. The stuffy newsroom at NPR is staffed almost entirely by far-left liberals. That might be understandable for New York magazine, or The Washington Post editorial board, but you’d think taxpayer-funded “news” would be different. 

You’d be wrong.

Don’t take it from me. Hear it from Uri Berliner, a longtime NPR senior editor who was suspended from NPR and later resigned after he published an essay about the far-left bias of his own newsroom. Berliner surveyed his coworkers and found registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans 87 to zero.

“There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed,” he wrote in the essay. “It’s frictionless — one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”

Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR, has a history of tweets that reveal the mindset of leadership, and likely staff, at the leftist outlet. In fact, she called Trump a racist in 2018. She can be seen photographed wearing a Biden campaign hat in the 2020 election. But who am I to judge? Maybe both are a prerequisite for employment at NPR. 

Maher infamously gave a TED talk where she said that when it comes to difficult issues, seeking the truth may not be the right place to start — curious for someone committed to the news business. She added that, “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”

A look at NPR headlines and shows finds the organization toes the line of woke ideology, framing many political conversations around the familiar and nauseating racial lines. White people are racist, even if they are unaware of it. Kamala Harris is a victim of this racism. Fatphobia is common and racist, etc. Maybe most damning is what NPR does not report on: general criticism of Democrats but specifically the Hunter Biden laptop story in the 2020 election. It’s not an exaggeration to say that federally-funded news content helped sway the election in favor of one political party.

The litany of examples goes on and is too long to list in full here, from PBS’ 2017 “Stay Woke!” white privilege panel to NPR’s 2015 segment on “furries” or this piece of work from NPR: “What ‘Queer Ducks’ can teach teenagers about sexuality in the animal kingdom.”

Besides the long list of embarrassing posts, cringe-worthy episodes, and general leftist bias, the premise of both PBS and NPR is flawed.

The role of educating kids and the public writ large does not belong to the federal government. If any government help is needed, we have local school boards and districts to make education decisions. We have independent media to hold officials accountable. If the government wants to make sure schools meet a standard or offer help with funding, then that is the state’s role. The federal government should not be able to spend taxpayer dollars to push an agenda on those they govern.

America’s excellence is predicated on a dying idea: federalism. Federalism essentially means that states should be responsible for all governance unless something is specifically delegated to the federal government, like national defense.

Nostalgia and weak claims of educational benefits do not merit millions of dollars in federal funding, especially when the education it funds is often peppered with the worst parts of the LGBT agenda and racially divisive messaging.

If NPR and PBS want to try to indoctrinate the nation, we can’t stop them.

But I’m done paying for it.

Originally published at The Washington Stand.