President Donald Trump has fought plenty of political heavyweights, but now he’s up against a foe far tougher than Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris: Big Bird. The president is ordering federal agencies and the taxpayer-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stop supporting National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service.

His May 1 executive order is titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media.” How biased are NPR and PBS? They mostly appeal to members of one political party, according to Pew Research. Thirty-two percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning respondents surveyed say they regularly get news from NPR, and a similar number — 31% — say the same about PBS.

Only 11% of Republicans and GOP-leaners report they get news from PBS, and the figure for NPR — 9% — is even worse. Something about NPR is three times more agreeable to Democrats than Republicans. Should everyone be taxed to pay for radio and TV programming that caters primarily to Democrats? Public radio and TV executives hide behind yellow feathers whenever they’re criticized.

“Big Bird Taken Off Death Row,” announced a Washington Post headline in June 1995 when Newt Gingrich, the first Republican speaker of the House of Representatives in 40 years, backed down from attempts to defund CPB. “Sesame Street” was just too popular with parents.

Today’s face of public broadcasting, however, isn’t Big Bird or Elmo — it’s Katherine Maher, NPR’s outspokenly progressive CEO. “America is addicted to white supremacy,” Maher — who is white — claimed on Twitter in 2020. But she didn’t make NPR woke — just the opposite: Maher’s in charge because she perfectly represents NPR’s preexisting institutional bias.

Before Maher, NPR was already appending “trigger warnings” to readings from the Declaration of Independence, with disclaimers appearing not only on items newly published on its website after the 2020 George Floyd riots but applied retroactively as well. “The audio of this story quotes the U.S. Declaration of Independence — a document that contains offensive language about Native Americans, including a racial slur,” warns the note prefixed to “The Declaration: What Does It Mean to You?” a “Morning Edition” story from July 4, 2013.

Maher recently testified to Congress that “much of my thinking has evolved over the last half decade” since she characterized other Americans as white-supremacy addicts. Before her evolution, Maher also called President Trump a “deranged racist sociopath” and “fascist.” She was executive director and CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, publisher of Wikipedia, at the time. Before that, she was the foundation’s chief communications officer.

If Maher has “evolved” only in the past five years, she’s hardly cut out to run any media organization, let alone a taxpayer-funded one. But if she really does think the president’s fascist and America’s racist, and is now lying about these inconvenient convictions, what does that say about her character?

Whatever the answer, she has no business leading any organization that claims to be nonpartisan. (Maher’s mother, as it happens, is a Connecticut state senator — a Democrat.)

She can’t have it both ways, insisting America is in the grip of fascism one moment, then soliciting government support the next — who’d want to be funded by a fascist’s government? Shouldn’t it be a point of pride for people like Maher to accept no money from fascists or racists?

NPR’s leader is an ideologue but also an opportunist, and her public statements reveal not just her animosity toward the Republican president but her nihilistically relativist worldview. “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done,” she mused in a 2022 TED Talk, adding, “We all have different truths. They are based on things like where we come from, how we were raised, and how other people perceive us.”

This might sound like mush, but it means that objective truth — truthful truth, one might say — is too divisive a standard and instead “truth” must derive from identity, and identity politics. NPR’s programming and practices reflect that philosophy as much as its choice of CEO. When someone does speak up for a true truth at NPR, he can expect to be punished.

That was the experience of Uri Berliner, a senior editor with 25 years’ experience at NPR, who was suspended without pay after he wrote an essay for The Free Press last year exposing the “lack of viewpoint diversity” inside the broadcaster. PBS isn’t as egregiously slanted as NPR, but that’s not saying much. “Public broadcasting” is simply a misnomer: these corporations are “public-private partnerships,” which means in practice they take public money to promote private beliefs that align with one party’s left wing.

Big Bird’s popular enough to thrive without subsidies. NPR and PBS have become megaphones for messages like Maher’s, and it’s high time taxpayers stopped being forced to pay for them.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com.

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