Public broadcasting’s taxpayer funding is probably safe as long as the White House and at least half of Congress remain controlled by Democrats, but it is difficult to see how it survives if the situation ever reverses—as it is sure to do one day.

Vociferous supporters of PBS, NPR, Pacifica Radio, and all the other public broadcasting outlets (of whom there are legions) will irately blame NPR veteran Uri Berliner, activist Chris Rufo, journalist Bari Weiss, and others who have recently shone a spotlight on just how lopsidedly progressive (nay, woke) PBS and especially NPR have become.

They would do better to look inward and blame their own hubris, or at least that of the management of public broadcasters. They thought they could take money from everyone, but only reflect, and respect, the thinking of a woke minority that may be ascendant in the Ivies, the federal administrative state, and the management of the Smithsonian institutions, but scarce in tailgate parties at SEC football games or backyard barbecues across this land.

Many of us have long known that there was a serious problem with a taxpayer-funded programming system that ignored half the country. As a full disclosure, I have written extensively on the need to defund NPR and PBS, for the Heritage Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and, most recently, by authoring one of the chapters in the Mandate for Leadership document written by Project 2025.

>>> Taxpayers Shouldn’t Have To Fund Biased, Woke Public Broadcasting

Project 2025 has brought together more than 100 conservative groups to, among other things, write recommendations for the next conservative president. Ergo, one of these recommendations is to withdraw taxpayer support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which gets around half a billion dollars a year in congressional appropriations and then disburses these monies to NPR, PBS, Pacifica, etc.

NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, is the poster child of everything wrong with the CPB. She was chosen to lead the network of radio stations present in every American state and every city despite a long history of very progressive public statements which made clear that she would have a very conscious bias toward all things Left.

That should have been a problem for a broadcaster whose signature show is called All Things Considered, and which, again, is partially paid for by everyone. But it obviously was not a problem. Maher was lauded by all as the woman who could lead NPR in the 21st century.

How biased is Katherine Maher? Well, in one tweet written in 2020, she called Trump a “deranged racist sociopath.” In another, she cheered on as Black Lives Matter, a group set up by Marxists who say they want to dismantle American society, norms, and even the family, gelled into a global network in 2014.

On and on it goes. Her tweets and public statements in TED talks, etc., are so cringe-worthy that Robby Soave wrote in Reason magazine, “Her earnest, uncompromising wokeness—land acknowledgments, condemnations of Western holidays, and so on—sounds like they were written by parody accounts such as The Babylon Bee or Titania McGrath

But it’s when she delves into truth and the First Amendment that the fun stops. Maher thinks constitutional protections for free speech get in the way of the information suppression she evidently would like to see.

“The First Amendment in the United States,” she said in a video for the Atlantic Council, makes it “a little bit tricky” to censor “bad information” and “the influence peddlers” who spread it.

>>> The Next Generation of Marxists Is Marching Through the Institutions

In a tweet in 2018, she claimed “ideological diversity” is “often a dog whistle for anti-feminist, anti-POC stories about meritocracy.”

And in a 2020 TED talk, Maher said that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”

Truth, she added, is what happens “when we merge facts about the world, with our beliefs about the world. So we all have different truths. They are based on things like where we come from, how we were raised, and how other people perceive us.”

All of this began to come to light when Berliner, a 25-year-veteran of NPR who has since resigned, went public by writing an expose in Weiss’s Free Press and detailed how progressives had taken over NPR. Rather than engage with him, Maher suspended Berliner, who then quit. The invaluable Rufo, for his part, has spent the past week exposing all the bad ideas that Maher has espoused over the years.

But none of this is Rufo’s fault, or Weiss’s, or Berliner’s. It is the fault of Maher, the people who hired her, and the environment they have fostered at NPR over the years. Even if they do fire her now, that still is unlikely to save their public funding. All conservatives are seething now, repeating under their breath, “NPR delenda est.“