If you remember the 2012 presidential election, you may recall Democrats accusing Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan of wanting to kill Big Bird. Well, Trump finally got the job done. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports PBS and NPR, has voted to close itself down after funding cuts.
As a member of Generation X who grew up watching Sesame Street, I am fine with this. The show used to be about teaching reading and math and would sometimes take on social issues, but did so in a broad, respectful way. In recent years, these networks embraced wokeness. They did this to themselves.
NBC News reports:
Corporation for Public Broadcasting is officially shutting down months after GOP funding cutsThe Corporation for Public Broadcasting — which helped fund NPR, PBS and many local radio and TV stations — is officially shutting down, months after Congress passed spending cuts that stripped it of more than $1 billion in funding.CPB’s board of directors voted to dissolve the private, nonprofit corporation after 58 years of service, the organization announced in a news release Monday.“For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans—regardless of geography, income, or background—had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling,” said Patricia Harrison, CPB’s president and CEO.Harrison added that when President Donald Trump signed into law last summer a measure to rescind funding by Congress, CPB’s board “faced a profound responsibility: CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks.”CPB said its leaders determined that “without the resources to fulfill its congressionally mandated responsibilities, maintaining the corporation as a nonfunctional entity would not serve the public interest or advance the goals of public media.”
More from CNN:
Many Republicans have long accused public broadcasting, particularly its news programming, of being biased toward liberals but it wasn’t until the second Trump administration —- with full GOP control of Congress — that those criticisms were turned into action.Ruby Calvert, head of CPB’s board of directors, said the federal defunding of public media has been devastating.“Even at this moment, I am convinced that public media will survive, and that a new Congress will address public media’s role in our country because it is critical to our children’s education, our history, culture and democracy to do so,” Calvert said.CPB said it was financially supporting the American Archive of Public Broadcasting in its effort to preserve historic content, and is working with the University of Maryland to maintain its own records.
Here’s a video report from the Washington Examiner:
Featured image via YouTube.
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