NPR and PBS are scrambling to keep their funding, and MRC’s VP for External Affairs Dan Schneider has been myth-busting through their best arguments.
Scheider told WMAL host Larry O’Connor on his show Friday that NPR and PBS have hired lawyers and lobbyists who are “going around saying if Republicans cut this funding, that there’s going to be blood on their hands.”
He explained that the leftist outlets are working to sway senators who will soon vote on the funding. Their argument: if the taxpayer funding is cut, “Americans all over the country are going to lose emergency alerts and access to local news. None of this is true. These are all lies,” said Schneider.
Schneider went on to debunk claims that funding for local NPR stations stays in their local communities.
“[The Corporation for Public Broadcasting] is a congressionally chartered organization that just receives appropriations from Congress to give out to NPR and PBS,” he said. “If this were in the private sector, people would go to prison. It's a kickback scheme. …They're supposed to be news outlets, but instead they're just misinformation outlets.”
Schneider explained that NPR claims it receives less than one percent of its funding from the federal government. “But what happens is that these local stations do get tons of money, but then immediately kick back that money to the home offices here in Washington, D.C., of NPR and PBS … to pay for programming that comes out of Boston and LA and and New York City, all of these other places,” he said.
The MRC External Affairs VP went on to note, “There is hardly any local news on NPR. It's all this national and international propaganda,” pointing specifically to the BBC, headquartered in London, England.
Schneider continued by calling out Republican Sens. Mike Rounds (SD), Dan Sullivan (AK) and Jerry Moran (KS) for their hesitancy to defund America’s two publicly-funded leftist broadcasters.
“They are throwing up these strawman arguments about tribes and local communities. We can get Starlink off of Walmart for $350, and that gives not just NPR and PBS but tens of thousands of options,” said Schneider.
O’Connor chimed in in agreement. “They make it sound like people who live in these rural areas in their own state are bumpkins who don't have cell phones and can't figure out how to find their local AM station,” he said, later adding: “It's insulting, frankly, to hold them up as these straw men and prop them up as their rationale for just toeing the line so that they can be in the good graces of the elites in Manhattan and Washington, D.C.”
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