MRC vice president Dan Gainor appeared on CNN’s New Day on Sunday to discuss the Trump administration’s budget plan, which zeroes out money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. While the PBS lobby tried to claim America deeply loves a channel that they barely watch, Gainor hit hard enough on its left-wing tilt to cause the anchor to ask if the defunding was just about “conservative revenge.”
First, Savidge gently questioned Patrick Butler, who heads the lobbying group for PBS pork in every state, America’s Public Television Stations. “Patrick, how confident are you that we are going to see this kind of a fight with these significant cuts?”
Butler prattled on about what PBS news and documentaries are not -- “education and public safety and civic leadership overwhelmingly at the local level” -- and a poll (that surely APTS bought and paid for) claiming that 66 percent of Trump voters who say they would like to maintain or increase federal funding for public broadcasting.
Then Savidge asked Gainor why the conservatives would defund something “cherished” by so many:
SAVIDGE: So, Dan, what do you say to that? I mean, obviously, NPR, PBS, is cherished by many, many families as both a source of information and entertainment. Why the cuts?
DAN GAINOR: Why the cuts? We have been pushing for this for years. I've spent 20 years in journalism. I can tell you, what you get is -- you don't get independence, you get propaganda.
Just look at the PBS Twitter feed, since Friday, about half of all of their tweets have been pushing, so we have government funded PBS using it's resource to push for government funding. That's the B.S. We're just debating the letter of the day and that's P.
SAVIDGE: Well, you know, it's a good thing you mention that Twitter feed, because I wanted to take a look at some of your own posts, including one that says, "There's no legitimate reason for government to fund left-wing media," and then the next one, there are a ton of liberal billionaires who could find -- apparently -- change in their couches enough to fund this. My point here is, is this budgetary decision-making based upon just conservative revenge or is there a real financial logic here?
GAINOR: Well, of course, there's a financial logic to it, but it goes back to, should we be funding something that is openly left wing? This is a network -- actually both networks are networks that have an agenda. Was NPR neutral back in 2011, when one of the executives was found on video to be calling Republicans anti-intellectual and Tea Party racists?
That cost the head of NPR her job. Was it neutral when they fired Juan Williams simply for expressing that he was concerned about radical Islam --
SAVIDGE: I get it. You don't like the content. My question was, though, can you tell me what is the budgetary reasoning? In other words, why do you want to take the money away and where will you put the money?
GAINOR: Well, I'm not putting the money anywhere. To me, I’d cut a lot more out of government.
But this is $445 million of taxpayer money that is going -- instead of going to things that, you know, basically everybody cares about, it is going to things to compete against ordinary businesses. You’ve got talk radio and news channels around the country that are using their own tax dollars that go to fund these outlets that turn around and compete with them with the imprimatur of the federal government.
CNN then brought in media correspondent Brian Stelter to insist that there’s an argument for less funding, as well as an argument for billions and billions of spending. Guess which side CNN would take. Media leftists always want to “enhance” the liberalism of the media through funding more “public” media.
