One of the reasons Republicans have never mustered the gumption to defund public broadcasting is because it upsets the entire leftist media, and its budget is so relatively tiny for the political pain. On Saturday, The New York Times took seriously Elon Musk’s determination to cut the taxpayer-funded tilt. The headline was “NPR and PBS Stations Brace for Funding Battle Under Trump.” Reporters Benjamin Mullin and Kate Conger pitched it as “Elon vs. Elmo,” as John Sexton put it: Elon Musk is gunning for public media. In his new role advising President-elect Donald J. Trump, Mr. Musk has floated sweeping cuts to the federal government, including the elimination of entire departments and the firing of agency leaders. One of the most concrete proposals on his list is eliminating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding that the government funnels to PBS and NPR stations, home to cultural touchstones like Elmo, Big Bird and Fresh Air. For decades, NPR and PBS have overcome similar threats. But this year, “the attention and intensity” of the calls to defund public media seem greater, said Michael Isip, the president and chief executive of KQED, which operates NPR and PBS stations in the San Francisco Bay Area. NPR and PBS stations are bracing for the fight. After the election, leaders of NPR’s biggest member stations circulated a report that warned “it would be unwise to assume that events will play out as they have in the past,” with regard to their federal funding. PBS received an update on the situation from political consultants at a board meeting in early December. And station directors in some states are already making their case to legislators. This is another reason why NPR and PBS keeps their half-billion dollars a year. While the Media Research Centers of the world don’t have unlimited money for lobbying, they use millions to keep their government millions. It’s a lopsided fight. Let's remind everyone that Big Bird and Elmo became the property of HBO back in 2015, so they're no longer endangered by PBS defunding. PBS runs second-hand reruns of the HBO shows. Although Warner Brothers Discovery just announced in December they're ending this partnership, airing their last new episodes of Sesame Street this month.  Conservatives object to “public” media because the government shouldn’t fund state-affiliated media, and so it inevitably tends to engage in egregious liberal/Democrat bias. The Times spends most of its time with NPR and PBS sources, and delays the obvious topic of leftist bias until paragraph 23. It’s alleged, of course: Mr. [Jim] Banks introduced his bill weeks after a senior editor at NPR, Uri Berliner, published an essay claiming that the network had a liberal bias… Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said in an interview that it was wrong to require conservatives to fund an outlet dismissive of their perspectives. Mr. Gonzalez contributed to Project 2025, a policy playbook to overhaul the federal government, writing that the government should defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “This will be one of those things that will make America better,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “Not to coerce them into paying something for a media outlet that mocks their views.” The Times can't waste a paragraph in underlining Berliner's exhibits of bias. They were too busy repeating claims that "public" stations are needed for emergency broadcasting, like private stations can't possibly accomplish that. Expecting local NPR and PBS stations to fulfill their obligations to inform and educate Americans across the country without public funding is unreasonable, Mr. Nuzum, the former NPR executive, said. “It’s the equivalent of bringing a public radio tote bag to a gunfight,” he said. Isn't it a little weird that opponents of "public" broadcasting are "gunning" for it, or bringing a "gunfight"?

NEW ORLEANS, LA — The FBI announced today that the horrific scene in New Orleans was not a terrorist attack, thereby confirming to the nation that it was, in fact, a terrorist attack.

Egregiously biased online “credibility” arbiter NewsGuard rates several right-leaning U.S. media outlets as less reliable than several state media outlets from tyrannical foreign powers Qatar, communist China and Russia. Media in China is almost entirely under the control of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), making outlets propaganda arms for a genocidal government. Tyrannical Russia and Qatar also fund and run state media outlets. China Global Television Network (CGTN) and Global Times, designated by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2020 as “foreign missions,” and the South China Morning Post have higher NewsGuard ratings than multiple U.S. outlets. So do Qatar’s Al Jazeera and Russia’s RT. NewsGuard gives harsher ratings to Newsmax, OANN and LifeNews than it does foreign state propaganda. Last year, MRC Free Speech America found for the third year in a row that NewsGuard rated left-leaning media sites 26 points higher on average than right-leaning media sites. But recent MRC research shows that NewsGuard also continues to rate foreign state propaganda higher than several U.S. media sites. NewsGuard attempted to deny its anti-free speech behavior in a recent letter to the Federal Communications Commission, but MRC research shows otherwise. For instance, NewsGuard gives a Qatari state media outlet a score of 82.5/100: Al Jazeera English.  Al Jazeera is funded by and answerable to the Qatari government, which actively harbors Islamic terrorists. Al Jazeera also gives voice to pro-terrorist propaganda, particularly Hamas. Even NewsGuard had to admit that Al Jazeera had promoted egregiously false information about the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, including by falsely blaming Israel for a Gaza hospital explosion, which was actually caused by a misfired Hamas rocket. The New York Times also perpetuated this same falsehood along with several other outlets, for which MRC Free Speech America lambasted NewsGuard for still doling out perfect scores to them at the time.   NewsGuard also admitted that Al Jazeera “promotes violent Islamism, antisemitism, and anti-Americanism, and that it harshly covers government at odds with Qatar,” but ultimately concluded that this applies more to the Arabic version of Al Jazeera than the English version. The Middle East Media Research Institute accused Al Jazeera of complicity in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks after it aired “exclusive” clips of the massacre, enthusiastically describing the terrorist onslaught as collapsing the “settler walls” and “arrogant occupation army.”  Another state media outlet that receives a higher rating than some U.S. right-leaning media sites is CGTN, a Chinese Communist Party state media outlet. While NewsGuard does not give CGTN a very high score at 39.5/100 —  warning that it “severely violates basic journalistic standards” — the so-called media ratings firm still gives CGTN a higher score than at least three American media sites. Global Times, like CGTN, is a Chinese state media site. NewsGuard gives Global Times a credibility rating of 39.5/100. While NewsGuard does disclose the extreme bias of Global Times, including its justification of the ongoing Uyghur genocide in China, it does not mention the fact that Global Times has repeatedly threatened other nations with war, including Australia, the United States and Taiwan. South China Morning Post (SCMP) is owned by Alibaba, a company founded by Jack Ma and largely owned and controlled by the CCP, according to The National Pulse and Forbes. NewsGuard gives SCMP a stellar rating of 85/100 credibility rating. NewsGuard does not acknowledge SCMP’s CCP ties, though it does admit that the site has become noticeably more pro-China in recent years. Contrast the ratings NewsGuard gives Al Jazeera and CCP-run CGTN with the 20/100 credibility rating for American media site Newsmax. NewsGuard rates Newsmax as lacking credibility because it disagrees with the authorities that Newsmax cites and claims that certain evidence-based opinions on the media site are false. One of NewsGuard’s main complaints is that Newsmax published an article based on research made public by the surgeon general of Florida, Dr. Joseph Ladapo. NewsGuard denies that the surgeon general is a credible medical authority and instead picked a medical authority, Dr. Paul Offit, who pushed the left’s narrative on COVID-19 vaccines. NewsGuard apparently considers Offit’s statements sufficient to discredit Newsmax for reporting on Ladapo’s research and justify an abysmal rating. NewsGuard also accuses Newsmax of lacking credibility because it reported that President-elect Donald Trump called for National Guard troops on Jan. 6, 2021, which retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg has testified is true.  Outrageously, NewsGuard gives Russian state media outlet RT the same score as Newsmax: 20/100. Though NewsGuard gives RT a negative rating in almost every category, it still rates the Russian media site higher overall than American site LifeNews. NewsGuard gives LifeNews a 17.5/100 credibility rating and takes issue with the website’s exposure of the harms of abortion and the benefits of pro-life treatments, further exposing its bias by going so far as to call the America media company “anti-abortion.” NewsGuard justifies abortion pills, which doctors have said killed at least two women this year, claiming that abortion pill reversals, which have reportedly saved over 6,000 babies’ lives, are an “unproven process.” NewsGuard likewise gave another American site, OANN, a horrible rating: 25/100. One accusation NewsGuard makes is that Covid-19 was engineered in a Wuhan, China, lab, a theory for which multiple scientific experts have argued. NewsGuard took issue with OANN interviewing investment expert and data analyst Edward Dowd, who discussed some of the data relative to COVID-19 vaccines. As always, NewsGuard rates websites as lacking credibility based on whether or not the website promotes sources and opinions with which NewsGuard agrees. Yet one of the categories in which NewsGuard rates Newsmax so badly is handling the difference between news and opinion and gathering and presenting information responsibly. NewsGuard outlandishly claims on one hand that Newsmax, OANN and LifeNews fail to present information responsibly and publish false content, while at the same time claiming Al Jazeera and SCMP have a positive score in both of these categories. It further rates CGTN and Global Times well as far as supposedly not repeatedly publishing false content. NewsGuard also absurdly uses the same language for LifeNews and OANN as it does for RT and CGTN: “severely violates basic journalistic standards.” But it appears that NewsGuard is the one severely violating basic journalistic standards. NewsGuard has come under scrutiny from Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr, who cited previous MRC research on NewsGuard’s ratings. In 2023 and again in 2024, congressional Republicans put forward legislation concerning the Department of Defense in the National Defense Authorization Act to prevent contracting with online blacklisters, like NewsGuard. Conservatives are under attack. Contact ABC News (818) 460-7477, CBS News (212) 975-3247and NBC News (212) 664-6192 and demand they report on NewsGuard’s clear left-wing bias, and contact your representatives and insist that they defund and investigate NewsGuard.