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Elon vs. Elmo: New York Times Pits Republicans Against Sesame Street Again
One of the reasons Republicans have never mustered the gumption to defund public broadcasting is because it upsets the entire leftist media, and its budget is so relatively tiny for the political pain. On Saturday, The New York Times took seriously Elon Musk’s determination to cut the taxpayer-funded tilt.
The headline was “NPR and PBS Stations Brace for Funding Battle Under Trump.” Reporters Benjamin Mullin and Kate Conger pitched it as “Elon vs. Elmo,” as John Sexton put it:
Elon Musk is gunning for public media.
In his new role advising President-elect Donald J. Trump, Mr. Musk has floated sweeping cuts to the federal government, including the elimination of entire departments and the firing of agency leaders.
One of the most concrete proposals on his list is eliminating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding that the government funnels to PBS and NPR stations, home to cultural touchstones like Elmo, Big Bird and Fresh Air.
For decades, NPR and PBS have overcome similar threats. But this year, “the attention and intensity” of the calls to defund public media seem greater, said Michael Isip, the president and chief executive of KQED, which operates NPR and PBS stations in the San Francisco Bay Area.
NPR and PBS stations are bracing for the fight. After the election, leaders of NPR’s biggest member stations circulated a report that warned “it would be unwise to assume that events will play out as they have in the past,” with regard to their federal funding. PBS received an update on the situation from political consultants at a board meeting in early December. And station directors in some states are already making their case to legislators.
This is another reason why NPR and PBS keeps their half-billion dollars a year. While the Media Research Centers of the world don’t have unlimited money for lobbying, they use millions to keep their government millions. It’s a lopsided fight.
Let's remind everyone that Big Bird and Elmo became the property of HBO back in 2015, so they're no longer endangered by PBS defunding. PBS runs second-hand reruns of the HBO shows. Although Warner Brothers Discovery just announced in December they're ending this partnership, airing their last new episodes of Sesame Street this month.
Conservatives object to “public” media because the government shouldn’t fund state-affiliated media, and so it inevitably tends to engage in egregious liberal/Democrat bias. The Times spends most of its time with NPR and PBS sources, and delays the obvious topic of leftist bias until paragraph 23. It’s alleged, of course:
Mr. [Jim] Banks introduced his bill weeks after a senior editor at NPR, Uri Berliner, published an essay claiming that the network had a liberal bias…
Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said in an interview that it was wrong to require conservatives to fund an outlet dismissive of their perspectives. Mr. Gonzalez contributed to Project 2025, a policy playbook to overhaul the federal government, writing that the government should defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
“This will be one of those things that will make America better,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “Not to coerce them into paying something for a media outlet that mocks their views.”
The Times can't waste a paragraph in underlining Berliner's exhibits of bias. They were too busy repeating claims that "public" stations are needed for emergency broadcasting, like private stations can't possibly accomplish that.
Expecting local NPR and PBS stations to fulfill their obligations to inform and educate Americans across the country without public funding is unreasonable, Mr. Nuzum, the former NPR executive, said.
“It’s the equivalent of bringing a public radio tote bag to a gunfight,” he said.
Isn't it a little weird that opponents of "public" broadcasting are "gunning" for it, or bringing a "gunfight"?
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