The Repression will not be Televised
What a performance! Marjorie Trailer-Greene put on quite the show today in her DOGE committee hearing. Dragging the CEOs of PBS, NPR in front of her kangaroo court, she also brought in Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez, the author of Project 2025’s chapter demanding the elimination of public broadcasting in its entirety.
Incidentally Mike, you write like a Ketamine-addled circus freak who’s landed on his head too often. You should go back to your illiterate home schooler and learn to string coherent thoughts together. Just a suggestion.
Consistent with the Trump administration’s determination to stamp out criticism and dissent, the low-hanging fruit in their gunsights is public broadcasting. Given the pubcasters’ reliance on funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), it’s going to be easy for them to lay waste to that independent agency. Just like USAID, FTC and others. Ignoring existing law is their specialty.
But cutting the funding is only the beginning. Project 2025 devotes an entire section to their plan to eliminate public broadcasting because of their alleged “liberal bias.” This plan is summarized in three pages devoted to throttling the First Amendment (“Free Speech for Me, but Not for Thee”). It outlines a plan to achieve two of their major goals: to crush any semblance of dissent and freeing up broadcast spectrum space to hand out to their billionaire buddies.
CPB’s funding makes sure that everyone, no matter where people live or how much money they have, can access quality programming. Denouncing NPR as “Democrat Propaganda” is ludicrous beyond any semblance of rationality. The Gadfly would respect more if they were honest (I know, honesty is asking way too much). Like this: “we don’t like your criticism, we aim to stamp out dissent and control the information flow to the public.”
“Casting them (NPR & PBS) as propaganda machines undeserving of taxpayer support is a dangerous mischaracterization that threatens to rob Americans of the vital reporting they need to make decisions about their lives,”
Jodie Ginsberg – Committee to Protect Journalists
The plan accuses these outlets of having political bias without providing any evidence beyond “I don’t like what you report.” And “I can’t control it”. These accusations are a tactic to discredit and weaken public broadcasting. It’s not a genuine concern backed up by evidence. It’s crucial to remember that public media has always strived to provide factual content, and these allegations threaten to undermine that commitment.
You can take this to the bank: they aim to distribute broadcast frequencies to their patrons at Sinclair, News Corp., and maybe a few reserved for right-wing religious broadcasters.
NPR and PBS aren’t just media outlets. They are lifelines. They offer content that you won’t find anywhere else, serving underserved audiences. Project 2025 threatens to widen the gap between those who can afford access to information and those who can’t, creating serious disparities, which is exactly the point.
Consistent with another goal of this administration is the proposal to strip public broadcasting stations of their educational status and broadcast licenses. This move would effectively dismantle the very foundation of public media, which is built on the principle of providing educational and cultural content to the public. Without their educational status, stations like NPR, PBS and Pacifica Radio lose access to the resources and privileges that enable them to operate effectively. Furthermore, revoking their broadcast licenses would severely limit their ability to reach audiences, potentially silencing these vital voices altogether. Again, exactly the point.
This assault is not confined to the broadcasters themselves. The Trump administration is waging war on educational institutions as well, asserting control over staffing and hiring decisions and curriculum content. They are threatening anyone who runs afoul of their ideological purity with ejection from the federal student loan program, withdrawal of federal education funds, revocation of accreditation and increased ICE enforcement on college campuses.
“Free speech is not about whatever it is you want somebody to say. The idea that you want to shut down everybody that is not Fox News is bull****. You don’t want to hear the opinions of anybody else.”
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX)
Why is this relevant? Because hundreds of colleges and universities hold public broadcasting licenses. The repression will not be televised.
So Marjorie spent the morning spewing so many lies they can’t be detailed here. Let me tackle just a couple.
One, the drag queen she paraded around did not appear on PBS. It was a digital media project that was produced by a local station in conjunction with their local department of education.
Two, let me engage in the pointless exercise of enlightening you Marjorie: there was collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russians. It is exhaustively detailed in the Mueller report and numerous subsequent books. Several people were convicted of lying about it to the FBI and Congress. So you can continue to call it a hoax and the uninformed (you know, non-public broadcasting listeners and viewers) will continue to believe you. You are still telling lies about it.
Georgia Public Broadcasting is one of the premier services in the system and I’m sure you just hate them. But think of it this way: I once had an old blues man tell me “Ain’t nothing in Georgia but red mud and hard times.”
At least your public broadcasting service presents your state as a little more civilized than that.
So don’t blame pubcasters for failing to reinforce your lies, distortions and just plain idiocy. Or maybe you don’t like them because they didn’t teach someone in your family tree that inbreeding can lead to brain damage.
Is Elmo now or has he ever been a member of the Communist Party?
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA)
