Hearings are under way with PBS and NPR over their failure to kiss the Trump ring enough in their coverage of the US election.
During the last US federal election, the American mainstream media spent a huge portion of their time sane washing Trump and making him seem as presentable as humanly possible as a politician. This included completely re-writing the senile and incomprehensible ramblings of the then presidential candidate into something that makes some kind of sense, doing everything in their power to ignore Project 2025, minimizing the many controversies Trump was already embroiled in, and launching political attacks on Trumps opponents to the point where they brought down a respected president in the process.
For some of these news organizations, the thinking appeared to be that if they preemptively kissed the Trump ring, then they would be spared Trumps wrath when he, as long promised and carried out, embark on a world tour of vengeance of all political foes, perceived or otherwise. Of course, as I had written about during the election, this effort to try and kiss the Trump ring even before he was declared the winner of the election was invariably going to backfire. Here’s part of what I wrote back then:
While this is a potential risk for smaller outlets such as our (since we don’t have as many protections as the larger outlets out there), this could also create a bad situation for even the mainstream media. Mainstream media outlets are much more publicly visible and have a much larger reach. As such, when they publish something, there are more eyeballs on that publication. As a result, if anything in that piece is considered “offensive” to Trump, there is a much greater chance that Trump is going to want to retaliate against either that journalist, that outlet, or both.
If there is a way of rationalizing this idea that “we’re professional” and “we’re politically neutral” would somehow spare them from the wrath of a thin-skinned wannabe dictator, I’m not seeing it.
In typical “Drew Wilson was right” fashion, the words ended up being downright prophetic (though, in this case, I wasn’t the only one making such a prediction even if I was an outlier at the time with these ideas). Today, we are learning that NPR and PBS, two of Trumps well known targets for vengeance, is now being hauled before congress to answer for their crimes of not acting as a Trump propaganda outlet enough. From NPR:
NPR CEO Katherine Maher and her counterpart at PBS, Paula Kerger, appeared Wednesday before a House subcommittee on government efficiency, where they defended public broadcasting against accusations by Republican lawmakers of political bias.
At the heart of the hearing, entitled “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable,” was the question of whether public broadcasting should receive federal funding. The subcommittee chairwoman, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, has said she wants to cut all federal funds to public broadcasting.
Pointing to specific stories and programs at both networks, GOP lawmakers at the hearing said the public broadcasters aired opinions and programming that did not represent the views of the majority of Americans.
“PBS news is not just left leaning, but is actively uses taxpayer funds to push some of the most radical left positions,” Greene said in her opening statement. “Like featuring a drag queen on the show ‘Let’s Learn,’ a show targeted toward young children ages 3 to 8 years old.”
Kerger, the PBS CEO, later responded to Greene’s assertion, saying that the drag-queen “was not actually on any of our kids’ shows.”
“It was mistakenly put on the website of our New York City station,” she said. “It was immediately pulled down. It was never broadcast.”
Greene echoed other Republicans on the committee, saying “For far too long, federal taxpayers have been forced to fund biased news. This needs to come to an end and it needs to come to an end now,” she said.
This isn’t the first time NPR and PBS have been the target of the psychotic Trump regime. Yesterday, we reported on how Trump was renewing his call to defund both organizations.
That was a followup to Trumps war on journalism and free speech which included Trump’s demand to throw journalists in jail, sending a legal threat to the New York Times and Penguin Randomhouse, Trump silencing the Associated Press, Trump silencing the Huffington Post and Reuters, Elon Musk echoing the call to jail reporters, Kash Patel threatening the media, the two “investigations” into media outlets for publishing thought crimes, the lawsuit against a pollster for the crime of being wrong on a poll, the call to end legal protections for journalists, and, of course, Trumps renewed call to more broadly jail all political opponents. So, some insight to Trumps plans to suppress dissent in the country from a journalism perspective at the very least.
Ultimately, it seems that all that sane washing of Trump didn’t work out too well for journalists and major outlets who are now feeling the brunt of Trumps wrath and vengeance anyway. For a number of these entities, their seeing their master stroke plan of kissing up sufficiently to the dictator crumble and they find themselves in a world defined by regret and despair (assuming they are reading the situation for what it really is of course). It would be a moment of schadenfreude if it wasn’t the entire world that is, in part, paying for the American mainstream media’s mistakes. After all, if unwritten thought crime laws are widely enforced on the public, who besides Trump’s most loyal subjects benefit anyway?
At any rate, the internal mass destruction of America is continuing with a professional wrecking ball at the helm.
