I would add that PBS has this to say about public media funding:
> The U.S. is almost literally off the chart for how little we allocate towards our public media. At the federal level, it comes out to a little over $1.50 per person per year. Compare that to the Brits, who spend roughly $100 per person per year for the BBC. Northern European countries spend well over $100 per person per year.
> And it really shows in the health of their of their public broadcasting systems. They tend to view those systems as essential democratic infrastructure. And, indeed, data show that there is a positive correlation between the health of a public broadcasting system and the health of a democratic governance.
This part of the EO is peculiar: “The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall determine whether “the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio (or any successor organization)” are complying with the statutory mandate that “no person shall be subjected to discrimination in employment . . . on the grounds of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex.” 47 U.S.C. 397(15), 398(b). In the event of a finding of noncompliance, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall take appropriate corrective action.”
Why is the Secretary of Health and Human Services the one responsible for this?
Because RFK Jr is considered sufficiently loyal that they are willing to follow Trump's directives without question. This is the only qualification that truly matters to Trump.
This qualification is particularly important for a role you want to use to arbitrarily punish people who aren't loyal enough.
Isn't it crazy that the supposed 'biased media' directly targets PBS who I know from watching children's shows as well as NOVA (it's been going for 51 seasons). These shows don't scream biased to me, they scream educational.
Education to the uneducated (or those who would prefer we remain uneducated in the face of power) can easily cast any education as "biased" against their purposes. Most people see through that for what it is, but an increasing population of Americans don't.
The republicans are intent on gutting education. Having an electorate fluent in science, the ability to test if statements are true or false, etc., are all in direct opposition to their agenda.
They don't know what bias is or they wouldn't watch Fox News and they don't know anything about the orgs they pile on. For example- I read New Yorker (a liberal "rag" I'm told) yet I've read lovely profiles of Amy Coney Barrett and John Thune.
You must understand, the culture war types are so absurdly radical that BEN SHAPIRO's adult cartoon was considered "woke" because it had a gay character who was the butt of every joke, and that was not harsh enough to satisfy them.
They do not want LGBTQ people to be acknowledged in any way, or be allowed to exist.
They would ban the Golden Girls if they could. They WILL try.
One thing I've noticed is this administration is very online and this is likely a response to conservatives crying that NPR and CPB are biased, which they are to an extent (just listen to the NPR politics podcast for example).
The obvious problem is they are conflating one or two programs with _the entire organization_. I grew up on PBS watching Arthur and Clifford and I'm sure they put out tons of quality content to this day. It's just when Trump thinks of that org he just thinks of the politically biased parts (ie a couple of shows and podcasts that cover Washington politics) and not the massive other parts that provide quality content.
To these people educational is a synonym for biased. They depend on uneducated people and they have a chip on their shoulder from being between somewhat and extremely dumb themselves.
As a German, we are forced to pay much more than that, about 220 euro annually. Only a small percentage actually goes into news and such, most are entertainment programs. I don't know anyone who is younger/my age that is in favor of it or consumes it. It is basically the boomers forcing us to subsidize their shitty crime shows.
Annually they collect about 9 billion euro, no surprise the author of that piece creams their pants at the prospect of being able to fuck the population over like that. I mean how much money can you reasonably expect for reporting news?
People who can't afford food and clothes are forced to contribute to the insane salaries of the moderators of some of the shows. They're also not unbiased at all, they skew heavily left. The system is pretty rotten, can't wait for there to be a reform of it.
Everybody loves communism except those who've actually experienced it.
My wife and I were visiting a Western European country and watching the street from our balcony. Outside there was a parade of communists rallying for an upcoming vote. Well, my wife is from an actually communist country, and wanted to warn all those people that they would not have been allowed to parade or demonstrate in the country she's from. And would probably be a lot hungrier.
$100 per person per year is an insane amount of spending on an information outlet controlled by the government.
The value of public broadcasting to me is 0, but I do occasionally get exposed to NPR thru other people listening to it and it appears extremely biased to me. My favorite example was when a woman who is quite "woke" politically turned off some NPR program about the perils of patriarchy that i was involuntarily listening to. I asked why and it was too cringe even for her.
Back here in reality the BBC is trusted by only about 40-44% of the British population, and actively distrusted by around a quarter. The true number who trust it is probably lower, as those polls suffer volunteering bias and other problems that push responses to the left when there's no ground truth to weight to.
There's a profound moral problem with forcing people to pay money for media they actively distrust or despise. There's certainly no link between "health" of a democracy and the funding level of state-funded media, unless you're the sort of person who defines a healthy society as one where everyone believes the government all the time.
Good lord. So now there's no objective truth, yes? Just which media is trusted by whom? So the government no longer has the remit to report, and to insure reportage of objective truth? My point is that while BBC may only be trusted by 45% of the population, that doesn't matter: They are doing their best to report objectively. So is PBS and NPR. You can make whatever accusations you want about trust, or bias, but can you point to a news article where PBS or NPR was objectively false? I can turn on Fox news and instantly hear lies at any moment, or at best, failure to report facts. Did you know that Fox didn't even report the stock market drop after liberation day? They just pretended it wasn't happening! Welcome to 1984. Orwell was a few decades off.
In the US the 'press' / media is supposed to be a quasi 4th branch of government (society by the people, for the people).
Such organizations are important for the voting public to remain informed and thus elect with an informed choice.
... It would also not surprise me if ~25-35% of the US population 'did not trust PBS / NPR' because they didn't like what they heard and thus preferred to disbelieve the sources.
What profound moral problem are you talking about? If you take your point even further, you could argue there’s a moral problem with forcing people who are distrusting of or despise the government to pay taxes at all, but it’s generally agreed that the health of a country in part does depend on revenues generated by taxes (since you need money to pay for things that benefit many people, like roads, public transit, etc.).
People aren't forced to pay for the BBC though. Public funding is through a TV licence rather than tax, with the licence being "required" only if you watch live TV or use the BBC streaming service.
Given the other streaming services available it's very easy to watch TV without it. I've never paid.
Not really sure why skewing left would improve trust ratings either, unless you're suggesting that people on the right don't trust any media, or only trust media that is right wing coded. The BBC is definitely not a left wing outlet by the standards of the UK.
Decades of the Republicans chipping away at public broadcast funding resulting in public broadcasting having to ground itself firmly in outside charitable donation. Of all the ostensibly-federal organisms, they (and the Post Office, thanks Amazon) are best-situated to be outside direct monetary government influence.
But outside donations do also have potential strings. Think how much strings mozilla has been having with the money google gives them. Of course, there's no strings attached from a legal perspective. But i dont think anyone is kidding themselves that it's not strings attached money.
Hopefully, the public broadcasting donations are from various small amounts from many viewers, and collectively they are less corrupting. But this isn't guaranteed, and during economic recessions, these sorts of sources tend to dry up (and get replaced with big money sources, and thus their agendas).
>>The U.S. is almost literally off the chart for how little we allocate towards our public media.
So? This is no justification for spending any particular amount of money on public media.
We also rank near the bottom on spending for Bigfoot observational studies and head-regrowth technology.
Perhaps the burden should be on folks to justify why we would want politicians to spend any money at all on public media.
I love Sesame St and Mr Rogers as much as anybody - I grew up on that stuff. It was great. But certainly folks can see how this could gradually move into more politicized topics where it's better for the government to stay entirely out of it. And frankly, any form of "news" is on the wrong side of that line. Of course, it's theoretically possible to provide entirely factual news - but I would in no way trust any government (or entities funded thereby) to deliver it. Far to risky.
At this point it's probably best to zero out all the funding, and then come back later and see if there is a genuine need for some form of public broadcasting.
Not paying for them with public money is neutral with me; however yet again, this is illegal, only Congress can change funding for these organizations and yet Congress lets another act of tyranny go through unanswered and democracy ends not with a bang and not even with a whimper...
When I first moved to the US (Bay Area) and discovered NPR in my first week there I almost couldn’t believe that there was such a source of high quality and thoughtful programming.
The value destruction of the last few months has been astonishing.
The only truly worrying part of the EO for me is the "The heads of all agencies shall identify and terminate, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, any direct or indirect funding of NPR and PBS."
Some of the most interesting work we've done has been almost completely funded by the Department of Education.
The station I work for has many sources of revenue but I suspect this will harm some smaller stations.
The largest item on their revenue chart seems to be "corporate sponsorships." You know, the companies in all those totally-not-commercials you hear on your local non-commercial stations.
Earlier today, I mentioned what you commented in another forum, and wise person pointed out to me that that it's the rural stations that will be affected most by this.
When you consider the rural media options, this will be a huge shift in those markets if the funding is not replaced.
This is simply not true, at all, and NPR themselves deliberately try to obfuscate the truth.
"NPR's two largest revenue sources are corporate sponsorships and fees paid by NPR Member organizations"
NPR member organizations are government funded, and then that government funding rolls back up to NPR. So, they're mostly funded by ads and the government. Source in other comment.
Local radio stations are so good. I've been listening to them more in my car because they talk about local news, not the shit you read online. I haven't had a TV in ages, so this is my main way of staying in touch with what's going on around here.
There are also plenty that make their programming available online and which is of general interest. It's quite fun, engaging and informative to dip into stations in places you've never been or places you remember fondly. One of my kids recently got a globe and that led to us trying to find Antarctica's ICE 104.5 FM AFAN online last night -- without success, sadly.
The elephant in the room is that these stations must be supported. I've been donating to a few stations for many years and have recently donated to others and will continue to do so as long as I'm able. If I somehow wind up with an estate worth anything, I'd also love to be able to will something to one or more stations.
NPR will be fine without public funding. They will have to tighten their belt of course and can always use a donation, but they'll be okay. This is all an issue because they won't straight lie about Trump to the public like fox news does on a regular basis
If he actually cared about unbiased media, he would reinstate the Fairness Doctrine which he won't do because that would kill Fox, Newsmax, and the rest of the Republican propaganda outlets.
They are trying to reinstate it or create something sort of equivalent...but only for media they consider to be liberal.
The FCC for example has been threatening to revoke broadcast licenses of media it says are biased. No conservative media have received these threats.
They consider bias any reporting, no matter how factual, that contradicts anything the administration has said, now matter how objectively wrong it is.
That is my point. They do not care about bias in media just like they don't care about government inefficiency or illegal immigration. There are easy wins you could make towards fixing all of these things if you wanted to but they choose not to because they don't care. They want fear, authority, and control.
Agreed. This is the root of the rise of evil in our country. I'm mostly pissed that Democrats were so short sighted to not reinstate it during Clinton or Obama. Now it is too late.
all benefitted, dem aligned media benefitted even more in crusading against Trump as it brought headlines and attention to opinion pieces. Ironically this reinforced Trump and allowed him to present himself as a victim of a witch hunt
You don't need to define fair because that is not what the Fairness Doctrine is about. The Fairness Doctrine says on some topics, you must give or allow someone else to give the opposing view as well.
I watch/listen to a variety of news sources - CNN, Fox News, NPR, NYTimes, WSj, as well as a number of smaller podcasts and substacks.
There are no longer "unbiased" news sources, all sources have moved to either the left or right.
I used to have respect for NPR, today it is, to me, the Fox News of the left, and no different than other sources. I do not have a problem with that, it is what it is. But it should not be funded with taxpayer money.
Try listening to the president of NPR at the congressional hearing and then her interview on NPR done shortly after that hearing. For the former, she was unable/unwilling to express any opinions, nor was she able to recall anything she personally said/posted for the past two years. For the latter, she was fed a series of flattering softball questions clearly made to make her and NPR look good. That is not news or reporting, it was NPR doing PR for NPR.
When I watch Fox News it's usually pretty easy to spot several things that are simply made-up per day. Including entire stories.
You hear much of that on NPR?
[EDIT] FWIW I think NPR news is god-awful, because they focus way too much on horse-race politics crap and Monday-morning quarterbacking campaigns, I suppose because they're so scared shitless by accusations of bias that they prefer to fill time with topics that are neutral and don't deal with actual issues at all, because we've been in a place for decades now where dealing with real issues in a serious way makes appearing "biased" against Republicans totally unavoidable.
The things is that when "news" is compared, the divisions tend to be much smaller (but still definitely there).
But people don't think of NPR news and Fox News news. They think of (and what they actually pay attention to) are the opinion shows that dominate the ratings. That is where the gulf is huge and things are totally out of control.
It's much more tame in the 10 minute segments of running down headlines for the day, but people don't engage much with that anymore. Not as exciting as being told how right you are.
The obvious take away is that the left needs an actual Fox News. A friend of mine actually pitched this idea a few years ago, but I was of the opinion that the left is above that and nobody would read/watch/follow it. Now I'm not so sure anymore, I think people are ready for it just for the kicks and it would actually have a big effect on balancing things out.
During the campaign for the 2016 Republican nomination for President they actually dropped several negative stories that their reporters assigned to the Trump campaign submitted, because their reporters assigned to the Cruz, Rubio, etc. campaigns were submitting a much lower percentage of negative stories and they assume the difference must be due to some flaw in their reporting.
I will give you that, sometimes fox news is like a ChatGPT hallucination. And the ads are unbearable - my pillow and vegetable pills.
This is more than made for by the interviews - Trump, Vance, Harris, Zelensky, the doge team, etc.
Speaking of unbearable, NPR's "soft stories" are invariably about someone's sob story. Ok, I get it, there are a lot of hard luck stories out there, but they
seem to relish in misery.
All in all, neither are great, but none of the mainstream media are. I do like "All in" podcasts :-)
When I asked around in mixed political spaces which news sources were trustworthy, NPR was the only answer people on both sides of the political divide ever gave.
After reading it for several years after, its reporting it somewhat reminds me of the BBC. I think its relative bi-partisanship is something that should be cherished instead of trying to crowbar it into a particular bias.
I agree that NPR is "trustworthy" in the sense that what they directly say is usually reliable, what I have a huge problem with is what they leave out or how they redirect.
A perfect example of this is in my previous post. I was listening to their "interview" with their CEO, and the interview was put into context of her recent senate hearing (which I knew nothing about). She sounded like a reasonably well informed CEO with good intentions, doing what is best for the public.
I decided to listen to her senate hearing (which I would not have even thought of doing because I did not even know she did this), and came out with the opposite impression - someone who obfuscates, lies, and should not be responsible for the public good.
Was there anything said in the NPR issue that was incorrect or a lie ? No. They are a lot smarter than that. They are clever people who think they are smarter than everyone else, but are not to be trusted.
> There are no longer "unbiased" news sources, all sources have moved to either the left or right.
> Try listening to the president of NPR at the congressional hearing and then her interview on NPR done shortly after that hearing. For the former, she was unable/unwilling to express any opinions, nor was she able to recall anything she personally said/posted for the past two years. For the latter, she was fed a series of flattering softball questions clearly made to make her and NPR look good. That is not news or reporting, it was NPR doing PR for NPR.
These two statements don't go hand in hand. It makes it sound like previously media people were robots without opinions. They only had "unbiased" coverage on their minds. And now, because the head of a company like the president of NPR has opinions, we should write off the whole org. They can no longer be considered "unbiased".
Lets be real. There was always a bias in media. Sometimes it was used by the government to spread an agenda. This isn't a recent trend. You don't need to find an NPR PR interview for that.
What is new though is people engaging in false balance and bothsideism. Sure, NPR President might have some leftist view. And sure, they might have a leftist lean to their reporting. The question is whether it is "Fox News of the left". Objectively, no. There is no proof for example, that the company knowingly spread lies and when in court admitted to it and paid a $787 million dollar settlement. You can still dislike their coverage but lets not pretend there is equivalency here.
I agree there was always bias in the media. I think that back in the day, when things were not as polarized and not everything was corrupted by politics, the biases were not as large or as important - there was a lot more common ground.
Today, there is extreme polarization, and it is probably impossible to provide a single news source that is "objective" or "unbiased".
I am not making an ethnic or political judgement here. And, yes, I know there will be those who say you have to make a judgment because there is only one viewpoint today that is correct, that the other side is just lying and distorting. And which direction this goes depends on who you speak with.
For me, the only way to maximize what little understanding I have of the world is to go to various news sources. And I am not talking about understanding in the sense of listening to different viewpoints (which is part of it), but actually getting all the "facts", and by "facts" I mean actual events/stories. What people leave out is as important as what they put in.
I am well aware of Fox's issues. And NPR seems like the "nice guys". And I learn things from both that I could not get from one alone. And maybe Fox has more sinister lies and misrepresentations than NPR, and it is my job to sort through that. But for me, I feel Fox is pretty far to the right for me, and NPR is very far to the left for me in their viewpoints and in what they choose to present. So, for me, they are similar, for others, maybe not.
I don't care if the CEO is left leaning or right leaning. But both Fox and NPR conveniently leave out a lot of the story that does not align with their views.
And I do not believe either should get government funding. When we had a society with more homogeneous views, maybe it was ok for the government to fund news sources that provided something that fit within the views of the majority of the population. That is no longer possible.
How can the left remain unbiased to truth when the right is constantly making things up? If the right is constantly lying about their agenda, is it responsible reporting to constantly report the unobjective lie? Is it unresponsible to lean out of direct regurgitation, acknowledge the pattern of hypocrisy, bring objective analysis of it, and continue to monitor it?
Under oath, with only offhand recollection of maybe facts, many people would prefer to say as little as possible. That seems only natural given the potential for accidentally lying if something remembered offhand turns out to be untrue or taken incorrectly.
Contrast with a lower stakes interview, likely prepared for at least in general if not with vetted and researched questions?
Well, she had plenty of time to reflect on what she did not remember and had a perfect opportunity in the NPR interview to address that.
Watch the Senate hearing. This was not a person that did not want to make an offhand statement. This was a person who clearly did not feel comfortable with what she knew she said to "her audience" but not comfortable when it came to a public audience. Many, many times. She sounded like someone repeatedly pleading the fifth.
If you're seriously equating NPR and the corporation that paid $800M to settle with Dominion Voting Systems, perhaps your own bias is more of a problem than theirs.
I am simply comparing them on a political spectrum of progressive, left, right, etc.
This is independent of lawsuits. There are a number of news outlets that have settled lawsuits - ABC, CNN, CBS (imminent), Newsmax, to name a few. Yes, Dominion was a large one. None of these change where these news outlets sit on the political spectrum.
The original discussion has to do with political bias and whether the government should be funding politically biased news organizations. NPR is a politically biased news organization. So is FOX. So are all of these organizations. Only NPR gets government funding.
You have a President who is ordering the defunding of tons of groups (universities, media, aid, institutes) while not clearly having that authority and often doing so for what he views as ideological crimes.
Also arresting and trying to deport people for things that are not clearly crimes (newspaper op-eds, etc) and without due process.
Very strange times.
Right now I have some faith the courts in the US will stand up to this and get the US back on track but I worry that dam may not hold forever.
Saving grace is that his is not widely popular, although that is more for his tariff moves than for the others.
The Attorney General went out of her way to assure Cabinet members that the US Marshals would not be arresting them. So, well, that's great.
Congress needs to transition the US Marshals to the judiciary or expressly codify that the AG has no authority to direct their actions. Won't happen, but it's what Congress needs to do.
I think the guardrails were designed to hold someone like Trump once; and then afterwards he was supposed to be convicted of his crimes, or at least never elected again. The guardrails are fundamentally held in place by hundreds of thousands of individuals making individual decisions. People who are asked to break the law can expect that in a few years they'll be vindicated, or at least fear that in a few years they would be punished for going along with the illegal orders.
I'm much more worried about the guardrails when people like that get re-elected: suddenly going along with the illegal action is by far the safest thing to do.
Indeed. There are dozens of other moments through the past ten years of Trumpism that the supposed guardrails were to prevent and did not, and in the wake of each one the custodians of those guardrails shrugged and went "oh well... I guess that's Trump."
Emoluments, tax returns, the porn star, lying under oath, J6, "fake news", losers and suckers, bone spurs, snubbing Carter, crowd size bullshit, grab em by the pussy, obvious nepotism, lock her up, separating families at the border, "very fine people on both sides", "stand back and stand by", sparring with Fauci, now jailing judges, deporting people off street corners, letting Musk gut government agencies, etc etc.
And that's just off the top of my head; I'm such others have catalogued many, many more of these that I'm forgetting, but yeah... good luck to anyone who can look at a list of these things and be like "ah yes but that was all in the comfortable past, surely the guardrails that failed on every one of those previous instances will somehow hold now. Hooray!"
Not just one person, congress and a lot of the judicial system. This isn't a one person problem. Not even close. Same way Nazis werent just a "one person" problem.
I say this as a firm conservative. The courts have so far been outstanding, despite all the inappropriate pressure. I have no doubt they will continue to be. I'm also quite impressed with conservative voters who are speaking out to their conservative representatives.
Ultimately though, despite many many calls not to do so, Congress has goven the executive branch unheard of powers. Executive power needs to be reigned in tightly and then Congressional power needs to reigned in as well. We need to push for Federalism.
The funny thing is, that the GOP is not "conservative," in any way, whatsoever. They are extreme.
The definition of "conservative" means "not-extreme." It is not just "not-liberal." It means being thoughtful, cautious, sticking with the mainstream, learning from the past, not discarding learned wisdom, etc.
Things like anti-abortion, hate-brown-people, put-women-back-in-the-kitchen-or-the-bedroom etc. stuff is often described as "conservative," because so much old culture had it, but these days, they are no longer "mainstream" principles.
I tend to be somewhat "centrist." Some of my own personal values could be construed as "conservative" (like personal Discipline and Integrity, insisting on writing very good-Quality code, or not spending money that I don't have), but I also have values that lean left (like an expansive worldview, not insisting on taking away the Agency of others, etc.).
The wrecking ball that DOGE is running through our government, right now, is not "conservative," at all.
Hey, you're not allowed to send those people on the plane! The plane already left even though I told you not to send it? Well, you gotta get them back! You're not sending them back? I'll just keep telling you that you have to do it, that'll really show you!
Oh, pretty please, would you return that man you illegally sent to that torture prison? No? Oh, ok, well would you at least just talk to me about it in daily reports? No? Oh, ok. I guess he'll just die there. Oh well.
> Congress has goven the executive branch unheard of powers. Executive power needs to be reigned in tightly and then Congressional power needs to reigned in as well. We need to push for Federalism.
Sensible people will realize that separation of powers means nothing when the same party holds both powers. R House + R senate + R SCOTUS + R executive => unlimited executive power.
I would argue that Trump only exists as President because Congress has abdicated its lawmaking powers for the past twenty years (give or take). With a functional legislative branch it's not nearly as problematic to have an extremely liberal or conservative president, or textualist Supreme Court justices. We need a refresh of rules governing congress (age & term limits, better pay, disallowing equity trading, elimination of gerrymandering at the state level, and perhaps nationwide adoption of ranked choice voting, which would open the door to viable third parties & ruling by coalition).
> You have a President who is ordering the defunding of tons of groups (universities, media, aid, institutes) while not clearly having that authority
You have to read into this line from the article:
> Congress directly authorized and funded CPB
He may not have the authority, but his influence over certain congress people and CPB board members can get the process moving.
Also, I have always wondered why CPB cannot just cut federal ties and become a sponsored non-profit?
During all shows you always hear or see that they are sponsored or have grants from major Fortune 500s, private families, and other institutions.
Also, whenever this defund topic comes up, CPB always says, "we receive very little from the fed, so our funding is not much and can be ignored." Well now is the time to put up and split from the US federal government officially.
It's happened before, both recently (since 2001), but Executive Order 9066 happened over 80 years ago, in the 19th century the US literally passed a Habeas Corpus Suspension Act.
America puts too much faith in its courts and constitution.
The weirdness started in 90s. First it was cultural (TV in 90s, Jerry Springer et al). Then it was electoral (hanging Chads anyone?). Then it was constitutional (Patriot Act). Then it was psychological (all those spooks running various "alt" Q etc.). And now it is lobotomy time. Took almost 3 decades but here we are.
I think this is mostly just an artifact of when you starting paying attention in your life, discounting what happened before, you are likely around 50 years old.
Remember there was the Vietnam war casus belli that was faked, the student protests and shootings, and Nixon spying on his opponents and before that there was the red scare, the Hollywood black list and segregation in the South.
I think weaving together complex set of events like this is too much like the mistake people make in a lot of "evolutionary just so" stories. The degrees of freedom are too large and it is hard to establish true causality in a realm of potentially infinite causal links just by conjecture.
I think it is easier and more productive frankly to see what levers and pressures one had right now on the government and then try to influence those.
I think government is always in tension between opposing forces and you'll align with some and against others depending on your background, disposition, position in society and your particular perspective of kinship.
There was a move to make Business about numbers over People, per my Grandpa's "Back In My Day" speeches he used to give me. He blamed the MBA (no offense to MBAs) for encouraging money-over-people thinking.
This then leads to GOP appearing to value winning political power for itself over building a healthy society, in my view.
> Right now I have some faith the courts in the US will stand up to this and get the US back on track
You should not. The courts are doing a reasonable approximation of their job, but have no independent enforcement power against the executive and the executive is not being particularly fastidious about compliance with court orders, and there seems to be no willingness either for lower executive officers to comply regardless of direction from above or for Congress to force accountability.
The current administration is politically powerful in one sense, they're also not particularly adept, making them increasingly unpopular and hardening others against them.
For example, they if they were reliable negotiators they could be leveraging power to get historic wins over how Universities are structured. But because they're not reliable negotiators, these universities have to fight like cornered animals.
Similarly, deporting people with the Alien Enemies Act might have snuck by a conservative supreme court. But the administration seems completely unwilling to show that there is room for remediating mistakes. They've annoyed even conservative Supreme Court members who don't seem eager to support the power grab.
If they were smart they'd also be doing things that made the economy strong, not intentionally harming people and creating a fairly universal thing to bitch and moan about - tariffs/high prices.
On the one sense GOP has had a strong negotiating position historically, as they're the party willing to burn it all down. But eventually you get to a point of unreliability as negotiating partner, that there's no appeasement to be had, and you have to go all in on opposing them.
It's hard for people to accept it because it raises new questions about the reaction to adopt.
If it's true then you know you should resist or you're complicit. A lot ot of 20/30/40 something Americans are going to have very difficult conversations with the new generations in 30+ years.
That's exactly right. The problem with the public broadcasters is not that they are regime media, it's that they are not. Put another way, the problem is that they tell the truth. Fox News, on the other hand, is very much regime media, and constantly peddles lies. Therefore, Trump is not attacking them.
This particular move is part of the broader campaign to destroy the independent media, which as you pointed out, is textbook fascism.
All the while, I don't think I've ever loved our country as much as now because I think this is a time where our system of checks and balances can come to shine.
I do hope this experience will lead to people re-evaluating their love of FDR. You can like what he stood for, but he was an equal if not (much) greater abuser of the executive office.
FDR's major lasting accomplishments that people praise him for were through legislation. Even things like the threat to pack the court would have happened through legislation.
There are some highly visible examples of direct executive action that I hope everyone today sees as authoritarian (japanese internment being the really big one). But FDR's expansion of the executive is the opposite of what Trump is doing. Trump is acting in opposition to the legislation that directs the executive to have its finger in more pies.
I feel this way as well. It's a great test to see if the founding fathers got the constitution right and more importantly to see if the people are willing to assert their right to a democracy with the powers spelled out in our constitution.
>You can like what he stood for, but he was an equal if not (much) greater abuser of the executive office.
Absolute horseshit.
The majority of the New Deal was done through congress, with broad support of a SIGNIFICANT amount of the legislative body, which had just seen massive Democrat wins in the 1932 election specifically to do so. The American people gave his administration this power because Americans were tired of watching people die in ditches, watching their parents suffer through old age with zero support.
1 out of every 5 Americans were unemployed. That's a conservative estimate.
They were tired of this being the case in a country with literal "Robber barons".
There is absolutely no parallel to the current administration, who barely won election, who does not have such a commanding control of the legislative (though they do control it), and who personally appointed a significant quantity of the current supreme court.
There is no vast economic harm that Trump was elected to fix. He is openly defying and ignoring court orders, which FDR did not do.
You are spouting lies. Where did you ever get such an incorrect view of history?
The stalwarts have died and moved on. The weaklings are promoted. And they are buttering the president with accolades to keep him from screaming. In psych, we call this “fawning”. It is a sister to fight or flight response. But once you stop fawning, you get fired or killed.
But it really isn't. It is odd compared to living memory, but across the centuries this sort of things has happened many times. We had similar discussions after 9/11 (deportations/torture/limitations on rights). A little further back there was the red panic of the cold war. All the nixon-watergate-vietnam stuff. Before that, all the nasty things done to various peoples during WWII. Today seems shocking but is actually rather normal historically. The US moves in and out of authoritarianism regularly. And every time, everyone thinks "this time is different" when it really isn't.
What happens? This. This happens, the things we're seeing.
He's already defying multiple court orders and the Congress is not impeaching him. Oh, some of the politicians are introducing articles of impeachment, but you can see quite clearly that this won't go anywhere.
At some point, liberals need to remember that violence intrinsically underpins all political power, and if you're unable or unwilling to engage in it in any circumstances whatsoever, all the power that you think you have will be taken away from you.
Ramping-up authoritarianism. Since he had a whole party who was shielding him from every single law he broke, even up to corrupting the supreme court. He's now completely unfettered. As far as I'm concerned, his actions frequently have no legitimacy, and he's too shortsighted that he wouldn't expect the same treatment when he leaves office if democrats grew spines.
The 2026 midterms will be essential in checking his power.
The vastly provided rationale for all shutdowns is combatting anti-semitism, not any vague "ideological crime." However, the definition of anti-semitism has now expanded so much that even advocating for food for the hungry, DEI, anything, is all somehow anti-semitic
Even judge Xinis [kilmar garcia] was talking a big game, but then folded after promising 'expedited discovery' and the consideration of contempt. She delays week after week and grants the executive the right to hide under the shadows under seal so the public can't know what's happening, even though prior she bragged about forcing them to file these updates with the public.
The court folds and folds when they realize they can't actually impose what they ordered. I am taking note. The executive definitely is taking note -- Marc Rubio on live TV angrily taunted the judge.
The design of the system is such that there are several dams so any particular one doesn’t need to hold forever. It’ll hold for a few years, but not a few decades, and hopefully the flood will recede.
I find that many of us, somewhat passively, including myself, have been using the term "strange" to describe the American poltitical situation. I think this is to avoid using more charged political terms that are actaully more accurate like fascist, authoritarian, dictator... These are dictionary words which are increasingly apropos.
> I think this is to avoid using more charged political terms that are actaully more accurate like fascist, authoritarian, dictator
Because those words have been overused to the point of no one caring anymore. For those too young to remember, George W. Bush was _also_ called “literally Hitler”, a fascist, dumbest man alive, you name it. The left’s go-to of labeling every single Republican “Nazi” for decades is partially to blame here.
The term is "checks and balances." They never function in ideal fashion, but they have failed us badly enough in the past to spill a million gallons of our own blood. I am nowhere near prepared to say they have finally failed us now; for any American so to assume is defeatism, and so to behave is culpable cowardice.
> Right now I have some faith the courts in the US will stand up to this and get the US back on track
I don't mean to sound hysterical but I don't share your faith for two main reasons:
- my faith in the Supreme Court diminishes with every year. It is clear a majority are far more motivated by ideology than a straightforward reading of the law
- Trump can just ignore the courts. We're not there yet but all signs show we're going in that direction. The end point of that trajectory is the involvement of the police and/or the military. I really, really hope we don't go there.
The Courts have no enforcement power. If the Executive proves unwilling to accede to court orders, the Courts don't have the legal ability to use violence to compel the Executive.
At that point, it comes down to whether Congress will impeach and remove. If Congress will not impeach and remove, the Courts are defanged and we functionally have (at least) four years of Executive rule with no legal check on that authority. If Congress will impeach and remove, it comes down to whether the Executive complies.
If the Executive does not comply...
... the point is, a lot in the American system actually hinges on the Executive's consent. And the man in the chair right now has no incentive to consent (he knows the moment the chair is no longer his, the weight of the American legal system will come down on his head and he'll at least spend the rest of his life in court cases if not incarcerated. Multiple states want his ass on a platter for crimes in their jurisdictions outside of his function as President).
It's a very dangerous time for the American Experiment, existentially.
The structural problems that got us here, like our system of elections, a Supreme Court that's got at least a couple members that are obviously being bought and seeing no consequences for it, the courts cutting off the possibility of curtailing or even tracking private cash in elections, and right-wing radicalization pipelines via engagement-focused feed "algorithms", are none of them likely to be addressed even in the most optimistic scenarios.
I think when Trump suggested at a rally that his supporters could shoot his opponent if she won, and that didn't immediately end his political career, we were in new and extremely dangerous territory to a degree that most failed to appreciate. Nothing short of fixing the structural problems above will get us out of it. If Trump doesn't manage a fascist takeover, we're just buying time for the next person who tries. Under the current culture and legal circumstances, one can clearly run and govern as a fascist and still see significant support.
The executive branch has ignored the courts a few times, basically saying "What are you going to do about it?".
I feel like it has to lead to a standoff of some group with guns saying they're following the courts/defending the constitution against another group with guns saying they're following the orders of the president (just like those Nazis who were "just following orders"). I need to print t-shirts with "Is it a coup d'etat yet?" to sell to the onlookers when this happens (in theory I could start selling these now).
One of the first orders of business was asserting the executive branch (really the white house) was the final authority for the executive branch on what a court order or court ruling ‘means’.
He just has to say ‘nuh uh’, and as long as people want their jobs, that’s it.
Too many judges have the same Federalist Society/Heritage Foundation ideology around expanding federal power. We've also seen the Trump admin drag its feet around complying with or outright ignore court orders.
You think the US is weird? Wait until you hear about what Lincoln did in his time, ha! Even weirder than that thing about committing high treason to create a kingless country with a sovereign elected by the gentile masses of all people! And all that just for "unjust" taxes for wars made and won in their own territories, tsk. There's a good reason why they call it the American "experiment"; because experiments are weird.
> You have a President who is ordering the defunding of tons of groups (universities, media, aid, institutes) while not clearly having that authority and often doing so for what he views as ideological crimes.
> Also arresting and trying to deport people for things that are not clearly crimes (newspaper op-eds, etc) and without due process.
But in all seriousness, I don't see how the end of funding is weirder than the end of it, especially given the history of the the country. I don't see how the status quo is somehow more legitimate. The President is the only elected official of the government. Congress passes laws, and the judiciary can only issue judgements and have no power over the purse nor the sword. The president has the authority to decide where the money goes and how it is attributed and how the laws are executed. The same goes for the non-citizens who reside in the US under the privilege of a visa or other executive permissions; the legal precedents about this are quite clear that the President has broad authority to decide who gets to stay or not. "Due process" defers to the question to which process is due, in the case of illegal aliens there is none except what the executive decide what is due, except for the determination of the illegal alien status in itself.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
> You have a President who is ordering the defunding of tons of groups (universities, media, aid, institutes) while not clearly having that authority and often doing so for what he views as ideological crimes.
It’s important to remember that while the President issues the orders, there are other actors behind the scenes writing them for him. They have goals that go beyond a single man considering ideological crimes.
I'm not sure how important that is to remember. The president is issuing the orders. The president is chief executive of the country.
The president can't pawn off responsibility to some White House staffer or think tank. An executive order is the president's order.
Is it useful to look at the people who wrote or lobbied for the order? Perhaps if you want to want to understand the context of an order. But none of that context mitigates the president's responsibility for any order. At the end of the day, it is a single person exercising their sole authority to issue executive orders.
I'm pretty sure with Trump this time around it is much less the case. In his first admin there are endless stories of the "Adults" in the room keeping him in check.
This time around he was sure to only fill his cabinet with yes men, so no one could keep him reigned in.
I've seen many people draw a comparison between Trump and Hitler (because of course - people compare everybody to Hitler).
But what I don't think people remember is that a guy like Hitler didn't just show up and "make a dictatorship". He was an opportunistic guy who showed up when Germany's democratic, constitutional republic was weakened by a poorly-functioning congress, and most of the actual power was concentrated in the executive branch. When the time came, Hitler wasn't the one who passed the Reichstag Fire Decree allowing him to suspend the freedom of the press and jail his political opposition. That law was passed by president Hindenburg.
Hitler didn't create a dictatorship. He was handed one on a silver platter - by an ailing 85 year old man with too much power.
"It’s important to remember that while the President issues the orders, there are other actors behind the scenes writing them for him. They have goals that go beyond a single man considering ideological crimes."
All dictators/authoritarians have a whole layer of very capable people under them that will implement orders from above without thinking about ethics or morality. But they will do a good job. Hitler had people like Himmler and Speer, Stalin had Beriya and many others (don't know names). The interesting thing is that these people will also do well in democracies. A lot of ex-nazis in Germany turned into good democratic people (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Filbinger). You also have these people in companies where for example layoffs are done in the most humiliating way.
bhouston says ">Saving grace is that his is not widely popular...<"
Ummmm, he was elected President in a resounding defeat for Democrats. And if the election were held today the results would be the same or even worse for Democrats:
"Trump trounced Harris in all the “blue wall” and Southern battleground states and maintained leads in Arizona and Nevada, prompting a torrent of anguish among Democrats. "
Today we continue to hear the "torrent of anguish among Democrats", who spout the same solutions they did preelection.
There's a bug in the US system to do with having a crazy person elected president but congress people either like the crazy he's doing or afraid of his brownshirts.
I don't think bias is the right word. It's more that a station not bound by corporate sponsors better has the ability to reflect the voice of the people, and Americans generally lean progressive when you ask them directly about policy.
While I don't watch NBC or CNN (they talk about 5 minute topics for 2 weeks), I notice often that a progressive bias, as far as I understand, is not immediately bending the knee to any rightwing pushback. It shouldn't be biased to say climate change is real, for instance, but that has been politicized so much that it's seen as a progressive bias. It's only in recent years that Republicans have switched from "It's not real" to "well doing something about it is too hard."
A better example of a bias would be texts from Fox news anchors privately trashing Sidney Powell as a lying hack while they, simultaneously, plan to boost her appearances to make election interference seem more plausible [1]. Or saying they can't fact check Trump anymore [2].
I listen to planet money and a few other podcasts. They seem pretty fair to me. The only way I could maybe see a progressive bias is that they have representation in their staff of racial and sexual minorities. I see no issue with that.
Honest question, does NPR have any token conservative pundits or voices on their broadcasts or shows? I know they have a lot of minority representation. As usual, Trumps proposed solution is idiotic. But maybe there could be an unofficial settlement to make sure all perspectives are heard?
To wit, during the BLM riots of 2020, NPR published a piece on how looting was a legitimate form of protest. I mark that as the moment they lost both my trust and my attention. A very sad, eye opening moment for me.
What in the world are you on about? They published an interview with an author who had - admittedly - controversial takes looting. You make it sound like they were telling people to go smash windows.
Was it this? On August 27, 2020, Natalie Escobar for Code Switch interviewed Vicky Osterweil about her book In Defense Of Looting. The segment was titled "One Author's Argument 'In Defense Of Looting'", and was subsequently retitled "One Author's Controversial View: 'In Defense Of Looting'".
Are you sure that article wasn't an interview with an author who wrote a book that took that stance? Having a conversation with someone who has arguably extremist views is very different from holding that extremist view.
You don’t have to agree with this take, but it has historical precedent and merits discussion. In popular culture, “Do The Right Thing” (controversially?) posed the question back in 1989. And Black leaders have been talking about it since the 60s: https://jacobin.com/2020/09/martin-luther-king-riots-looting...
It doesn't take away CPB's money - it just tells them that they can't fund NPR and PBS anymore, but NPR only gets about 1% of it's funding from CPB anyway. I couldn't find the number for PBS.
Readit News
I would add that PBS has this to say about public media funding:
> The U.S. is almost literally off the chart for how little we allocate towards our public media. At the federal level, it comes out to a little over $1.50 per person per year. Compare that to the Brits, who spend roughly $100 per person per year for the BBC. Northern European countries spend well over $100 per person per year.
> And it really shows in the health of their of their public broadcasting systems. They tend to view those systems as essential democratic infrastructure. And, indeed, data show that there is a positive correlation between the health of a public broadcasting system and the health of a democratic governance.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-the-history-of-p...
Why is the Secretary of Health and Human Services the one responsible for this?
This qualification is particularly important for a role you want to use to arbitrarily punish people who aren't loyal enough.
Some episodes even have the audacity to claim that humans evolved from apes and that the earth is billions of years old!
They do not want LGBTQ people to be acknowledged in any way, or be allowed to exist.
They would ban the Golden Girls if they could. They WILL try.
The obvious problem is they are conflating one or two programs with _the entire organization_. I grew up on PBS watching Arthur and Clifford and I'm sure they put out tons of quality content to this day. It's just when Trump thinks of that org he just thinks of the politically biased parts (ie a couple of shows and podcasts that cover Washington politics) and not the massive other parts that provide quality content.
no one will stop him.
As a German, we are forced to pay much more than that, about 220 euro annually. Only a small percentage actually goes into news and such, most are entertainment programs. I don't know anyone who is younger/my age that is in favor of it or consumes it. It is basically the boomers forcing us to subsidize their shitty crime shows.
Annually they collect about 9 billion euro, no surprise the author of that piece creams their pants at the prospect of being able to fuck the population over like that. I mean how much money can you reasonably expect for reporting news?
People who can't afford food and clothes are forced to contribute to the insane salaries of the moderators of some of the shows. They're also not unbiased at all, they skew heavily left. The system is pretty rotten, can't wait for there to be a reform of it.
/rant
Its pretty heinous, especially for those of us who simply don't consume mainstream Austrian media in any form.
However, there is nothing to be done. The tax has to be paid.
ORF is heinous propaganda, and I despise it, as I do with all mainstream Austria media, which is inexcusably corrupt.
My wife and I were visiting a Western European country and watching the street from our balcony. Outside there was a parade of communists rallying for an upcoming vote. Well, my wife is from an actually communist country, and wanted to warn all those people that they would not have been allowed to parade or demonstrate in the country she's from. And would probably be a lot hungrier.
The value of public broadcasting to me is 0, but I do occasionally get exposed to NPR thru other people listening to it and it appears extremely biased to me. My favorite example was when a woman who is quite "woke" politically turned off some NPR program about the perils of patriarchy that i was involuntarily listening to. I asked why and it was too cringe even for her.
Why would I want to pay for that?
Back here in reality the BBC is trusted by only about 40-44% of the British population, and actively distrusted by around a quarter. The true number who trust it is probably lower, as those polls suffer volunteering bias and other problems that push responses to the left when there's no ground truth to weight to.
There's a profound moral problem with forcing people to pay money for media they actively distrust or despise. There's certainly no link between "health" of a democracy and the funding level of state-funded media, unless you're the sort of person who defines a healthy society as one where everyone believes the government all the time.
As for other public broadcasters, in e.g. Finland Yle is trusted by 82%, by far the highest for any media.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/45744-which-media-out...
Such organizations are important for the voting public to remain informed and thus elect with an informed choice.
... It would also not surprise me if ~25-35% of the US population 'did not trust PBS / NPR' because they didn't like what they heard and thus preferred to disbelieve the sources.
Not really sure why skewing left would improve trust ratings either, unless you're suggesting that people on the right don't trust any media, or only trust media that is right wing coded. The BBC is definitely not a left wing outlet by the standards of the UK.
Decades of the Republicans chipping away at public broadcast funding resulting in public broadcasting having to ground itself firmly in outside charitable donation. Of all the ostensibly-federal organisms, they (and the Post Office, thanks Amazon) are best-situated to be outside direct monetary government influence.
Hopefully, the public broadcasting donations are from various small amounts from many viewers, and collectively they are less corrupting. But this isn't guaranteed, and during economic recessions, these sorts of sources tend to dry up (and get replaced with big money sources, and thus their agendas).
So? This is no justification for spending any particular amount of money on public media.
We also rank near the bottom on spending for Bigfoot observational studies and head-regrowth technology.
Perhaps the burden should be on folks to justify why we would want politicians to spend any money at all on public media.
I love Sesame St and Mr Rogers as much as anybody - I grew up on that stuff. It was great. But certainly folks can see how this could gradually move into more politicized topics where it's better for the government to stay entirely out of it. And frankly, any form of "news" is on the wrong side of that line. Of course, it's theoretically possible to provide entirely factual news - but I would in no way trust any government (or entities funded thereby) to deliver it. Far to risky.
At this point it's probably best to zero out all the funding, and then come back later and see if there is a genuine need for some form of public broadcasting.
The value destruction of the last few months has been astonishing.
The only truly worrying part of the EO for me is the "The heads of all agencies shall identify and terminate, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, any direct or indirect funding of NPR and PBS."
Some of the most interesting work we've done has been almost completely funded by the Department of Education.
The station I work for has many sources of revenue but I suspect this will harm some smaller stations.
https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...
When you consider the rural media options, this will be a huge shift in those markets if the funding is not replaced.
"NPR's two largest revenue sources are corporate sponsorships and fees paid by NPR Member organizations"
NPR member organizations are government funded, and then that government funding rolls back up to NPR. So, they're mostly funded by ads and the government. Source in other comment.
The elephant in the room is that these stations must be supported. I've been donating to a few stations for many years and have recently donated to others and will continue to do so as long as I'm able. If I somehow wind up with an estate worth anything, I'd also love to be able to will something to one or more stations.
The FCC for example has been threatening to revoke broadcast licenses of media it says are biased. No conservative media have received these threats.
They consider bias any reporting, no matter how factual, that contradicts anything the administration has said, now matter how objectively wrong it is.
Is it fair to criticize Trump? What if that criticism is based on "alternate facts" according to Trump?
There are no longer "unbiased" news sources, all sources have moved to either the left or right.
I used to have respect for NPR, today it is, to me, the Fox News of the left, and no different than other sources. I do not have a problem with that, it is what it is. But it should not be funded with taxpayer money.
Try listening to the president of NPR at the congressional hearing and then her interview on NPR done shortly after that hearing. For the former, she was unable/unwilling to express any opinions, nor was she able to recall anything she personally said/posted for the past two years. For the latter, she was fed a series of flattering softball questions clearly made to make her and NPR look good. That is not news or reporting, it was NPR doing PR for NPR.
When I watch Fox News it's usually pretty easy to spot several things that are simply made-up per day. Including entire stories.
You hear much of that on NPR?
[EDIT] FWIW I think NPR news is god-awful, because they focus way too much on horse-race politics crap and Monday-morning quarterbacking campaigns, I suppose because they're so scared shitless by accusations of bias that they prefer to fill time with topics that are neutral and don't deal with actual issues at all, because we've been in a place for decades now where dealing with real issues in a serious way makes appearing "biased" against Republicans totally unavoidable.
But people don't think of NPR news and Fox News news. They think of (and what they actually pay attention to) are the opinion shows that dominate the ratings. That is where the gulf is huge and things are totally out of control.
It's much more tame in the 10 minute segments of running down headlines for the day, but people don't engage much with that anymore. Not as exciting as being told how right you are.
This is more than made for by the interviews - Trump, Vance, Harris, Zelensky, the doge team, etc.
Speaking of unbearable, NPR's "soft stories" are invariably about someone's sob story. Ok, I get it, there are a lot of hard luck stories out there, but they seem to relish in misery.
All in all, neither are great, but none of the mainstream media are. I do like "All in" podcasts :-)
After reading it for several years after, its reporting it somewhat reminds me of the BBC. I think its relative bi-partisanship is something that should be cherished instead of trying to crowbar it into a particular bias.
A perfect example of this is in my previous post. I was listening to their "interview" with their CEO, and the interview was put into context of her recent senate hearing (which I knew nothing about). She sounded like a reasonably well informed CEO with good intentions, doing what is best for the public.
I decided to listen to her senate hearing (which I would not have even thought of doing because I did not even know she did this), and came out with the opposite impression - someone who obfuscates, lies, and should not be responsible for the public good.
Was there anything said in the NPR issue that was incorrect or a lie ? No. They are a lot smarter than that. They are clever people who think they are smarter than everyone else, but are not to be trusted.
> Try listening to the president of NPR at the congressional hearing and then her interview on NPR done shortly after that hearing. For the former, she was unable/unwilling to express any opinions, nor was she able to recall anything she personally said/posted for the past two years. For the latter, she was fed a series of flattering softball questions clearly made to make her and NPR look good. That is not news or reporting, it was NPR doing PR for NPR.
These two statements don't go hand in hand. It makes it sound like previously media people were robots without opinions. They only had "unbiased" coverage on their minds. And now, because the head of a company like the president of NPR has opinions, we should write off the whole org. They can no longer be considered "unbiased".
Lets be real. There was always a bias in media. Sometimes it was used by the government to spread an agenda. This isn't a recent trend. You don't need to find an NPR PR interview for that.
What is new though is people engaging in false balance and bothsideism. Sure, NPR President might have some leftist view. And sure, they might have a leftist lean to their reporting. The question is whether it is "Fox News of the left". Objectively, no. There is no proof for example, that the company knowingly spread lies and when in court admitted to it and paid a $787 million dollar settlement. You can still dislike their coverage but lets not pretend there is equivalency here.
Today, there is extreme polarization, and it is probably impossible to provide a single news source that is "objective" or "unbiased".
I am not making an ethnic or political judgement here. And, yes, I know there will be those who say you have to make a judgment because there is only one viewpoint today that is correct, that the other side is just lying and distorting. And which direction this goes depends on who you speak with.
For me, the only way to maximize what little understanding I have of the world is to go to various news sources. And I am not talking about understanding in the sense of listening to different viewpoints (which is part of it), but actually getting all the "facts", and by "facts" I mean actual events/stories. What people leave out is as important as what they put in.
I am well aware of Fox's issues. And NPR seems like the "nice guys". And I learn things from both that I could not get from one alone. And maybe Fox has more sinister lies and misrepresentations than NPR, and it is my job to sort through that. But for me, I feel Fox is pretty far to the right for me, and NPR is very far to the left for me in their viewpoints and in what they choose to present. So, for me, they are similar, for others, maybe not.
I don't care if the CEO is left leaning or right leaning. But both Fox and NPR conveniently leave out a lot of the story that does not align with their views.
And I do not believe either should get government funding. When we had a society with more homogeneous views, maybe it was ok for the government to fund news sources that provided something that fit within the views of the majority of the population. That is no longer possible.
Not really true. The left has moved right as the right went extreme right.
Globally, the US "left" is pretty conservative.
Dead Comment
Contrast with a lower stakes interview, likely prepared for at least in general if not with vetted and researched questions?
Watch the Senate hearing. This was not a person that did not want to make an offhand statement. This was a person who clearly did not feel comfortable with what she knew she said to "her audience" but not comfortable when it came to a public audience. Many, many times. She sounded like someone repeatedly pleading the fifth.
My opinion, of course.
Oh did they also have to pay an $800m settlement for lying?
This is independent of lawsuits. There are a number of news outlets that have settled lawsuits - ABC, CNN, CBS (imminent), Newsmax, to name a few. Yes, Dominion was a large one. None of these change where these news outlets sit on the political spectrum.
The original discussion has to do with political bias and whether the government should be funding politically biased news organizations. NPR is a politically biased news organization. So is FOX. So are all of these organizations. Only NPR gets government funding.
You have a President who is ordering the defunding of tons of groups (universities, media, aid, institutes) while not clearly having that authority and often doing so for what he views as ideological crimes.
Also arresting and trying to deport people for things that are not clearly crimes (newspaper op-eds, etc) and without due process.
Very strange times.
Right now I have some faith the courts in the US will stand up to this and get the US back on track but I worry that dam may not hold forever.
Saving grace is that his is not widely popular, although that is more for his tariff moves than for the others.
I think "the guardrails will hold" thinking is flawed when you have someone who is willing to completely side step the system and push the limits.
We're not actually sure what holding someone from this administration in contempt even looks like functionally since U.S. marshals are under the DOJ.
Congress needs to transition the US Marshals to the judiciary or expressly codify that the AG has no authority to direct their actions. Won't happen, but it's what Congress needs to do.
Deleted Comment
I'm much more worried about the guardrails when people like that get re-elected: suddenly going along with the illegal action is by far the safest thing to do.
Emoluments, tax returns, the porn star, lying under oath, J6, "fake news", losers and suckers, bone spurs, snubbing Carter, crowd size bullshit, grab em by the pussy, obvious nepotism, lock her up, separating families at the border, "very fine people on both sides", "stand back and stand by", sparring with Fauci, now jailing judges, deporting people off street corners, letting Musk gut government agencies, etc etc.
And that's just off the top of my head; I'm such others have catalogued many, many more of these that I'm forgetting, but yeah... good luck to anyone who can look at a list of these things and be like "ah yes but that was all in the comfortable past, surely the guardrails that failed on every one of those previous instances will somehow hold now. Hooray!"
Ultimately though, despite many many calls not to do so, Congress has goven the executive branch unheard of powers. Executive power needs to be reigned in tightly and then Congressional power needs to reigned in as well. We need to push for Federalism.
The definition of "conservative" means "not-extreme." It is not just "not-liberal." It means being thoughtful, cautious, sticking with the mainstream, learning from the past, not discarding learned wisdom, etc.
Things like anti-abortion, hate-brown-people, put-women-back-in-the-kitchen-or-the-bedroom etc. stuff is often described as "conservative," because so much old culture had it, but these days, they are no longer "mainstream" principles.
I tend to be somewhat "centrist." Some of my own personal values could be construed as "conservative" (like personal Discipline and Integrity, insisting on writing very good-Quality code, or not spending money that I don't have), but I also have values that lean left (like an expansive worldview, not insisting on taking away the Agency of others, etc.).
The wrecking ball that DOGE is running through our government, right now, is not "conservative," at all.
Hey, you're not allowed to send those people on the plane! The plane already left even though I told you not to send it? Well, you gotta get them back! You're not sending them back? I'll just keep telling you that you have to do it, that'll really show you!
Oh, pretty please, would you return that man you illegally sent to that torture prison? No? Oh, ok, well would you at least just talk to me about it in daily reports? No? Oh, ok. I guess he'll just die there. Oh well.
They could have done a bit better with their voting decisions, though.
Sensible people will realize that separation of powers means nothing when the same party holds both powers. R House + R senate + R SCOTUS + R executive => unlimited executive power.
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You have to read into this line from the article:
> Congress directly authorized and funded CPB
He may not have the authority, but his influence over certain congress people and CPB board members can get the process moving.
Also, I have always wondered why CPB cannot just cut federal ties and become a sponsored non-profit?
During all shows you always hear or see that they are sponsored or have grants from major Fortune 500s, private families, and other institutions.
Also, whenever this defund topic comes up, CPB always says, "we receive very little from the fed, so our funding is not much and can be ignored." Well now is the time to put up and split from the US federal government officially.
https://www.propublica.org/article/big-bird-debate-how-much-...
America puts too much faith in its courts and constitution.
The weirdness started in 90s. First it was cultural (TV in 90s, Jerry Springer et al). Then it was electoral (hanging Chads anyone?). Then it was constitutional (Patriot Act). Then it was psychological (all those spooks running various "alt" Q etc.). And now it is lobotomy time. Took almost 3 decades but here we are.
I think this is mostly just an artifact of when you starting paying attention in your life, discounting what happened before, you are likely around 50 years old.
Remember there was the Vietnam war casus belli that was faked, the student protests and shootings, and Nixon spying on his opponents and before that there was the red scare, the Hollywood black list and segregation in the South.
I think weaving together complex set of events like this is too much like the mistake people make in a lot of "evolutionary just so" stories. The degrees of freedom are too large and it is hard to establish true causality in a realm of potentially infinite causal links just by conjecture.
I think it is easier and more productive frankly to see what levers and pressures one had right now on the government and then try to influence those.
I think government is always in tension between opposing forces and you'll align with some and against others depending on your background, disposition, position in society and your particular perspective of kinship.
There was a move to make Business about numbers over People, per my Grandpa's "Back In My Day" speeches he used to give me. He blamed the MBA (no offense to MBAs) for encouraging money-over-people thinking.
This then leads to GOP appearing to value winning political power for itself over building a healthy society, in my view.
You should not. The courts are doing a reasonable approximation of their job, but have no independent enforcement power against the executive and the executive is not being particularly fastidious about compliance with court orders, and there seems to be no willingness either for lower executive officers to comply regardless of direction from above or for Congress to force accountability.
For example, they if they were reliable negotiators they could be leveraging power to get historic wins over how Universities are structured. But because they're not reliable negotiators, these universities have to fight like cornered animals.
Similarly, deporting people with the Alien Enemies Act might have snuck by a conservative supreme court. But the administration seems completely unwilling to show that there is room for remediating mistakes. They've annoyed even conservative Supreme Court members who don't seem eager to support the power grab.
If they were smart they'd also be doing things that made the economy strong, not intentionally harming people and creating a fairly universal thing to bitch and moan about - tariffs/high prices.
On the one sense GOP has had a strong negotiating position historically, as they're the party willing to burn it all down. But eventually you get to a point of unreliability as negotiating partner, that there's no appeasement to be had, and you have to go all in on opposing them.
If it's true then you know you should resist or you're complicit. A lot ot of 20/30/40 something Americans are going to have very difficult conversations with the new generations in 30+ years.
This particular move is part of the broader campaign to destroy the independent media, which as you pointed out, is textbook fascism.
I do hope this experience will lead to people re-evaluating their love of FDR. You can like what he stood for, but he was an equal if not (much) greater abuser of the executive office.
why do you think that, all things considered?
There are some highly visible examples of direct executive action that I hope everyone today sees as authoritarian (japanese internment being the really big one). But FDR's expansion of the executive is the opposite of what Trump is doing. Trump is acting in opposition to the legislation that directs the executive to have its finger in more pies.
Absolute horseshit.
The majority of the New Deal was done through congress, with broad support of a SIGNIFICANT amount of the legislative body, which had just seen massive Democrat wins in the 1932 election specifically to do so. The American people gave his administration this power because Americans were tired of watching people die in ditches, watching their parents suffer through old age with zero support.
1 out of every 5 Americans were unemployed. That's a conservative estimate.
They were tired of this being the case in a country with literal "Robber barons".
There is absolutely no parallel to the current administration, who barely won election, who does not have such a commanding control of the legislative (though they do control it), and who personally appointed a significant quantity of the current supreme court.
There is no vast economic harm that Trump was elected to fix. He is openly defying and ignoring court orders, which FDR did not do.
You are spouting lies. Where did you ever get such an incorrect view of history?
The leader is net split and doesn't care about most of the cluster and the "zookeeper" is happy with the leader.
If the zookeeper doesn't select a new leader the cluster is going to stay in this state.
But it really isn't. It is odd compared to living memory, but across the centuries this sort of things has happened many times. We had similar discussions after 9/11 (deportations/torture/limitations on rights). A little further back there was the red panic of the cold war. All the nixon-watergate-vietnam stuff. Before that, all the nasty things done to various peoples during WWII. Today seems shocking but is actually rather normal historically. The US moves in and out of authoritarianism regularly. And every time, everyone thinks "this time is different" when it really isn't.
He and his administration already ignored a Supreme court ruling, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=lin...
He's already defying multiple court orders and the Congress is not impeaching him. Oh, some of the politicians are introducing articles of impeachment, but you can see quite clearly that this won't go anywhere.
This is no longer a representative democracy, but an autocracy.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-attorney-general-bondi-t...
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/white-ho...
We must save ourselves.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." [1]
Freedom is not free.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/edmund-burke-did-...
The 2026 midterms will be essential in checking his power.
The vastly provided rationale for all shutdowns is combatting anti-semitism, not any vague "ideological crime." However, the definition of anti-semitism has now expanded so much that even advocating for food for the hungry, DEI, anything, is all somehow anti-semitic
See https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-situation--formalis...
The court folds and folds when they realize they can't actually impose what they ordered. I am taking note. The executive definitely is taking note -- Marc Rubio on live TV angrily taunted the judge.
That's the point of the separation of powers.
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Because those words have been overused to the point of no one caring anymore. For those too young to remember, George W. Bush was _also_ called “literally Hitler”, a fascist, dumbest man alive, you name it. The left’s go-to of labeling every single Republican “Nazi” for decades is partially to blame here.
I don't mean to sound hysterical but I don't share your faith for two main reasons:
- my faith in the Supreme Court diminishes with every year. It is clear a majority are far more motivated by ideology than a straightforward reading of the law
- Trump can just ignore the courts. We're not there yet but all signs show we're going in that direction. The end point of that trajectory is the involvement of the police and/or the military. I really, really hope we don't go there.
At that point, it comes down to whether Congress will impeach and remove. If Congress will not impeach and remove, the Courts are defanged and we functionally have (at least) four years of Executive rule with no legal check on that authority. If Congress will impeach and remove, it comes down to whether the Executive complies.
If the Executive does not comply...
... the point is, a lot in the American system actually hinges on the Executive's consent. And the man in the chair right now has no incentive to consent (he knows the moment the chair is no longer his, the weight of the American legal system will come down on his head and he'll at least spend the rest of his life in court cases if not incarcerated. Multiple states want his ass on a platter for crimes in their jurisdictions outside of his function as President).
It's a very dangerous time for the American Experiment, existentially.
Otherwise, it's just a lot of harms being created and not resolving to anyones benefit. This is accelerationist entropy not being stopped but slowed.
It's like saying, we're only going to give you one paper cut per day.
I think when Trump suggested at a rally that his supporters could shoot his opponent if she won, and that didn't immediately end his political career, we were in new and extremely dangerous territory to a degree that most failed to appreciate. Nothing short of fixing the structural problems above will get us out of it. If Trump doesn't manage a fascist takeover, we're just buying time for the next person who tries. Under the current culture and legal circumstances, one can clearly run and govern as a fascist and still see significant support.
I feel like it has to lead to a standoff of some group with guns saying they're following the courts/defending the constitution against another group with guns saying they're following the orders of the president (just like those Nazis who were "just following orders"). I need to print t-shirts with "Is it a coup d'etat yet?" to sell to the onlookers when this happens (in theory I could start selling these now).
He just has to say ‘nuh uh’, and as long as people want their jobs, that’s it.
What do the courts control? Where are their guns?
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Too many judges have the same Federalist Society/Heritage Foundation ideology around expanding federal power. We've also seen the Trump admin drag its feet around complying with or outright ignore court orders.
You think the US is weird? Wait until you hear about what Lincoln did in his time, ha! Even weirder than that thing about committing high treason to create a kingless country with a sovereign elected by the gentile masses of all people! And all that just for "unjust" taxes for wars made and won in their own territories, tsk. There's a good reason why they call it the American "experiment"; because experiments are weird.
> You have a President who is ordering the defunding of tons of groups (universities, media, aid, institutes) while not clearly having that authority and often doing so for what he views as ideological crimes.
> Also arresting and trying to deport people for things that are not clearly crimes (newspaper op-eds, etc) and without due process.
But in all seriousness, I don't see how the end of funding is weirder than the end of it, especially given the history of the the country. I don't see how the status quo is somehow more legitimate. The President is the only elected official of the government. Congress passes laws, and the judiciary can only issue judgements and have no power over the purse nor the sword. The president has the authority to decide where the money goes and how it is attributed and how the laws are executed. The same goes for the non-citizens who reside in the US under the privilege of a visa or other executive permissions; the legal precedents about this are quite clear that the President has broad authority to decide who gets to stay or not. "Due process" defers to the question to which process is due, in the case of illegal aliens there is none except what the executive decide what is due, except for the determination of the illegal alien status in itself.
The courts have no recourse if Trump decides to ignore them, as he already has.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It’s important to remember that while the President issues the orders, there are other actors behind the scenes writing them for him. They have goals that go beyond a single man considering ideological crimes.
The president can't pawn off responsibility to some White House staffer or think tank. An executive order is the president's order.
Is it useful to look at the people who wrote or lobbied for the order? Perhaps if you want to want to understand the context of an order. But none of that context mitigates the president's responsibility for any order. At the end of the day, it is a single person exercising their sole authority to issue executive orders.
This time around he was sure to only fill his cabinet with yes men, so no one could keep him reigned in.
But what I don't think people remember is that a guy like Hitler didn't just show up and "make a dictatorship". He was an opportunistic guy who showed up when Germany's democratic, constitutional republic was weakened by a poorly-functioning congress, and most of the actual power was concentrated in the executive branch. When the time came, Hitler wasn't the one who passed the Reichstag Fire Decree allowing him to suspend the freedom of the press and jail his political opposition. That law was passed by president Hindenburg.
Hitler didn't create a dictatorship. He was handed one on a silver platter - by an ailing 85 year old man with too much power.
All dictators/authoritarians have a whole layer of very capable people under them that will implement orders from above without thinking about ethics or morality. But they will do a good job. Hitler had people like Himmler and Speer, Stalin had Beriya and many others (don't know names). The interesting thing is that these people will also do well in democracies. A lot of ex-nazis in Germany turned into good democratic people (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Filbinger). You also have these people in companies where for example layoffs are done in the most humiliating way.
Ummmm, he was elected President in a resounding defeat for Democrats. And if the election were held today the results would be the same or even worse for Democrats:
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-11-06/trump-defe...
"Trump trounced Harris in all the “blue wall” and Southern battleground states and maintained leads in Arizona and Nevada, prompting a torrent of anguish among Democrats. "
Today we continue to hear the "torrent of anguish among Democrats", who spout the same solutions they did preelection.
Sad!
> The CPB fails to abide by these principles to the extent it subsidizes NPR and PBS.
> Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter.
> What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.
Most Americans wanting to tax the rich/large corporations: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/19/most-amer...
Wanting to legalize marijuana: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/03/26/most-america...
The government should supply universal healthcare to Americans: https://news.gallup.com/poll/468401/majority-say-gov-ensure-...
It’s like you have to cover stuff up, deny and lie to be a conservative.
Is this what we're calling "truth" now?
A better example of a bias would be texts from Fox news anchors privately trashing Sidney Powell as a lying hack while they, simultaneously, plan to boost her appearances to make election interference seem more plausible [1]. Or saying they can't fact check Trump anymore [2].
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/all-the-texts-fox-ne... [2] https://www.mediaite.com/news/this-has-to-stop-now-new-bombs...
Honest question, does NPR have any token conservative pundits or voices on their broadcasts or shows? I know they have a lot of minority representation. As usual, Trumps proposed solution is idiotic. But maybe there could be an unofficial settlement to make sure all perspectives are heard?
Assuming this is even a problem…
The attack on PBS seems ridiculous.
"Reality has a well known liberal bias." — Stephen Colbert, 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ-a2KeyCAY&t=4m11s
Most other administrations were more... considered in their choice of language.
It's telling that you chose not to link the actual piece: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/vicky-osterweil/in-...
Oh and to my original point, why is this not cited or linked to in the executive order? I think it would strengthen it if anything.
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https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/endi...
It doesn't take away CPB's money - it just tells them that they can't fund NPR and PBS anymore, but NPR only gets about 1% of it's funding from CPB anyway. I couldn't find the number for PBS.