Every objection from Democrats to the current realignment of responsibility underway in Washington, DC is based on a severely flawed premise. What people need cannot exist if the government doesn’t take the people’s money to fund it and control it. It’s not that you don’t know what you want; it’s that you may not spend your hard-earned dollars on what they want you to want.
What they think you need.
Put another way, if the subject of defunding NPR or PBS comes up, you should ask, so you’re saying that no one else can or will do that (whatever it is) without the government involved, even if there is a real demand for it? And, if it’s so valuable, why wouldn’t more private investment prop it up?
PBS and NPR are heavily funded by private foundations and “viewers like you.” That, and big buckets of money from taxpayers, many of whom wouldn’t even notice if either of those dinosaurs were to disappear.
Opponents argue that proposed funding cuts would create dangerous gaps in Americans’ access to information in places where Fox News misinforms millions already. And they get the Hog Report at the top of every hour.
At the same time, the same people have laundered billions, perhaps trillions, through the government, on failed projects to expand broadband access to the rural areas they claim will suffer if PBS and NPR lose government funding.
The government clearly isn’t the solution to the problem that NPR and PBS are supposedly meant to address.
In reality, there are few, if any, places in the US where there is no broadcast signal or information access.
Only four counties in the U.S. have limited broadcast access, primarily receiving only NPR or PBS, with Aleutians East Borough in southwestern Alaska being one of them. This region is extremely remote, with sparse populations and challenging geography (e.g., islands, mountains).
Some of those residents may not want access, and defenders have yet to explain how residents have managed to function without it, in some instances, since before it existed. Places that a government with a stated intent and hundreds of billions can’t manage to reach by any other means.
There is no constitutional mandate to ensure everyone everywhere has access to information, even the partisan filtered bilge that seeps from the progressive sour on the bloated ass of NPR. But as I’ve noted more than once. If you’re so desperate to ensure these remote areas have access, instead of giving BLM and Antifa buckets of money, have your deep-pocketed billionaires fund that instead.
You know why they won’t. There aren’t enough voters there to make a difference in any election anywhere. Even when they could easily target their giving to ensure these few and far between remote places have access to news and information, controlled or otherwise, it’s not worth it, even to them.
Those rich bastards don’t give a shit about the 3,652 people in Aleutians East Borough (42% of whom do not have internet access or a broadband subscription). They wouldn’t give them the time of day, let alone fund the additional infrastructure needed to connect the other 1,533 residents to the internet. NPR and PBS are about messaging to large urban areas filled with people they’ve trapped in generational poverty, and upper-middle-class and wealthy white elites who support public broadcasting as a virtue signal.
There is literally nothing on public radio or TV that you can’t find elsewhere, and given the challenge, that programming, if it has any value at all, will find a home somewhere else. In other words, it can exist without government and, in fact, should not exist if it can’t without taxpayer support.
You didn’t build that; the narrative that without government nothing can happen or thrive is a lie. It’s the opposite. The government cannot exist without a people who, quite often, find themselves at its mercy because they did not keep it small, limited, and answerable to them, and that’s what this is.
The elected government is doing the people’s business, which includes getting the government out of the radio and TV business, which should not be viewed as a bad thing. Private interests can pick up the pieces and fund it themselves, and the government can make money by charging for licenses and taxing the privilege.
And if that’s not good enough, all those popular programs can move to the podcast platform, where Democrats claim there aren’t enough left-wing voices, and at least 58% of the people in Aleutians East Borough can choose to listen in, or not.
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