In “NPR and PBS Must Transform After Trump’s Cuts Cripple Broadcasters,” which appeared in Sunday’s New York Times, reporters Benjamin Mullin, Jack Healy, and David Chen unwittingly justified the defunding of those taxpayer-funded media outlets that conservatives have been advocating for decades.
On the windswept prairie of South Dakota, a tribal public radio station is selling off its old records to pay the bills. In Warm Springs, Ore., the NPR affiliate is considering dropping “All Things Considered” to focus on tribal issues.
Really? Judging from previous pro-NPR propaganda that warned about what cutting NPR would mean to remote tribal radio stations, you would think they were already focusing on local issues, not All Things Considered.
The decision by President Trump and Republicans in Congress to strip $500 million from public broadcasters this summer is forcing profound changes that will reshape the airwaves, especially in rural and tribal areas of the country.
The reporters gave the game away, tacitly admitting that taxpayer-funded NPR’s national news shows have little to offer conservative listeners (or taxpayers).
Others, fielding complaints from their members, are voicing worries about the political balance in news coverage, a delicate issue for station directors in red states. Republicans have long complained about what they call a liberal bias in public broadcasting, but if rural NPR affiliates shed national shows like “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition,” the airwaves would give listeners few alternatives to conservative talk radio in many areas.….
Last spring, when Mr. Trump and his allies in Congress called for the defunding of public broadcasting, they insisted they were pursuing more political balance on the nation’s airwaves.
The reporters also made the tacit admission that there’s not much of a market for NPR-style liberal radio in South Dakota and it has to be artificially boosted by taxpayer dollars.
But with the corporation now gone, the question confronting much of the country, where airwaves are dominated by the chain stations of Sinclair Broadcasting and iHeartRadio, will be how any news can compete with the political right.
In the Badlands of South Dakota, the airwaves are saturated with unapologetic conservatism. The road to the Pine Ridge Reservation cuts through a sea of prairie grass, while over the radio, on 90.3, a former lawyer for Mr. Trump rails against the “radical left.” Up the dial, between Christian pop and classic rock, other syndicated shows argue against in vitro fertilization and feminism.
That's not to say that you can't find all kinds of liberal podcasts on the internet, even in rural South Dakota.
This was an interesting tidbit:
….In May, an executive at WETA — the PBS station in Washington, D.C., that produces “PBS NewsHour” — met with station executives in Republican states and heard concerns from their members about political bias in the program. “PBS NewsHour” is a linchpin of PBS programming, and its focus on current events can make it a lightning rod in conservative states.
The Media Research Center has in fact issued detailed criticisms of the PBS News Hour in study after study, not for “its focus on current events,” but for the hard liberal spin it delivers within that coverage.
