Saunders: So what if cuts to public radio, TV were small potatoes?

By Debra J. Saunders / Las Vegas Review-Journal

One of the things Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought likes about working for President Trump is that there’s no item that’s “too small” to rate the president’s attention.

It was an important point to make in a town that scoffs at conservatives’ calls for cuts to programs that are too progressive or too woke; and besides won’t balance a federal budget projected to spend $1.9 trillion more than it takes in this year.

Vought happily went through a list of obvious targets during a breakfast with D.C. journalists hosted by the Christian Science Monitor on Thursday.

Yes, Vought supported the rescission bill that had just passed in the Senate. The bill claws back $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that funds NPR, PBS and member stations.

Say goodbye to the facile argument that you don’t cut funding for public broadcasting because it won’t fix the giant federal deficit.

For years, Vought noted, conservatives talked about defunding NPR. But they never got it done, not even close, not even during the glory days when Newt Gingrich was House speaker.

Yet now, in the first half of the first year of Trump’s second term, Team Trump and Republican lawmakers are cutting CPB funding. Vought called what is happening a paradigm change.

I should mention that I watch PBS and listen to NPR because of its quality news programming. And I like to mix up my news consumption.

And because I watch, I agreed with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt when she said during Thursday’s press briefing that the taxpayer-funded public news outlets have a “partisan left-wing agenda.”

Leavitt mentioned the networks’ failure to run with the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 and — like other Big Media — missing the story of former President Joe Biden’s apparent cognitive decline when he was in office.

According to NPR, the organization receives about 1% of its funding directly from the federal government, while PBS and its stations receive some 15 percent of their revenue from Uncle Sam.

In 2024, former NPR reporter Uri Berliner wrote a piece for The Free Press under the headline, “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.”

The most damning information in it: Berliner checked the voter registration records of NPR’s D.C. newsroom and found 87 registered Democrats and — wait for it — zero Republicans.

Please note that the haloed public broadcasting leadership knew critics resented the bias and didn’t even bother to make a token hire.

Wednesday, Public Broadcasting Service CEO Paula Kerger told CNN that when it comes to bias, critics “often struggle to come up with examples.”

This is why it is impossible for some of us not to see a due comeuppance for the public media establishment as it has to forfeit money from taxpayers it does not recognize or even feign to represent.

As The Free Press explained Berliner’s argument, “the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.”