Ahead of a likely vote this week on a rescissions package to claw back $1 billion in funding for National Public Radio (NPR) and PBS, CBS’s streaming platform and MSNBC went full doom and gloom and lied to viewers Monday, insulting their intelligence by arguing rural Americans rely on NPR and PBS as “critical” lifeline, “their only source of information,” and “emergency alerts.”
CBS’s free news channel CBS News 24/7 first broached the rescission package in the 10:00 a.m. Eastern hour.
Congressional correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns cited the funding for NPR and PBS as part of the package (along with USAID) and falsely claimed these far-left stations are “the only major source of information, especially in cases of emergencies like the one we just saw in Texas recently”:
Fact check: Pants on fire.
As we’ve established at NewsBusters, less than six percent of daily programming on NPR stations in rural states are actually local newscasts with the rest being national news and talk programs.
Secondly, we also noted this month that Pew pegs the number of Americans with internet access at 96 percent with Starlink having potential to even further bridge that remaining gap.
Third, the funding they claim that would go away is sent to the stations...but then rerouted back to the national mothership as licensing fees.
Fourth, our Craig Bannister took a look at Texas NPR affiliates and their response to the deadly Hill Country floods. Sadly, it’s been silence. On their social media page, they were too busy with (likely timed) posts demanding support amid the rescission fight.
And they had abandoned X — still a major source of news and information for at least 20 percent of the country — in 2023.
Those reasons don’t even touch its far-left bias, such we’ve covered exhaustively (see studies here, here, here, here, and here to get the idea).
Huey-Burns reupped this lie continued a few hours later, doubling down on the claim that GOP senators “from very rural states” might buck President Trump because “it’s really their only source of information” for their constituents:
Anchor Reed Cowan from CBS San Francisco concurred with this caveman worldview of rural Americans in the year of our Lord 2025: “Well, and I’m a child of rural America myself, and so I’m very much aware of the conversation relative to rural impacts on radio and rural impacts on hospitals, etc. They are constituents. It’s fascinating to hear from them.”
At the same time, MSNBC’s Chris Jansing Reports had a full segment on the rescissions package with Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman. Jansing fretted Trump was looking to claw back funding from “popular programs” like PBS and NPR.
Sherman obviously agreed, citing “concerns among rural lawmakers that public broadcasting is going to be cut.”
After Sherman explained to Jansing that rescissions packages are different from the wider discussion of the legislative ceding authority to the executive over multiple lifetimes, he closed with the same disparaging stereotyping of rural Americans, suggesting these (ruby red) individuals would be unable to find out about the world around them without NPR and PBS:
Back on CBS News 24/7, Huey-Burns’s colleague Nikole Killion took the baton an hour and a half later:
To see the relevant July 14 transcripts, click here (for CBS News 24/7) and here (for MSNBC).
