Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) provided examples of why U.S. taxpayers shouldn’t have to fund public media Tuesday – one was so offensively biased that he stopped to express his disgust.
Taxpayer-funded media like National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) were needed back when there were on three TV stations and a handful of radio stations, but “Those days are long gone,’ Sen. Kennedy explained. “We now have a breathtaking array of ways to get information,” Kennedy said, citing the proliferation of online, cable, and streaming news sources.
“This is the kind of reporting that’s being done today – with your tax money,” Sen. Kennedy continued, displaying charts of opinionated, one-sided headlines from NPR and PBS.
“That’s opinion journalism,” Sen. Kennedy said, after reading the first NPR headline, “Arguments that trans athletes have an unfair advantage lack evidence to support.”
Kennedy went on to read more NPR headlines off the list, such as “What can the White House do to control the narrative around Biden’s ability?” “It wasn’t a narrative. It was just a fact” that Pres. Biden’s cognitive abilities had declined, Kennedy said.
“Now, I don’t want to just pick on NPR,” Sen. Kennedy said, moving on to headlines from a list of “a couple that you saw on television, PBS, paid for with your tax dollars.”
Kennedy rattled off several PBS headlines – but, he stopped to speak out when he got to “‘The Other Olympians:’ Transgender Athletes in the Nazi Era”:
“Come on. Give me a break. I mean, gag me with a spoon.”
Kennedy said that, while he supports the First Amendment right of NPR and PBS to run these types of stories, “They don’t have the unalienable right to report these things using opinion journalism, that no fair-mined American can construe as anything but representing one point of view, with your tax dollars.”
“I am going to try to stop subsidizing media—not just PBS and not just NPR—but any form of media that somehow is getting federal taxpayer dollars. It is just not right. It is not fair,” Sen. Kennedy said, reporting his efforts to pass a bill to defund public media. He also expressed support for the work of Pres. Trump and his Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE):
“I have a bill to do that and we’re also going to pursue it through reconciliation. And I think President Trump and Mr. [Elon] Musk are going to pursue it on their own, and I think that is a very good thing.”
Sign the petition to help us defund PBS and NPR over at defundpbsnpr.org.