News/Commentary

PBS seems determined to be early candidate for DOGE chopping block

December 2, 2024 | | Print Article

Programming “made possible by viewers like you” served up a ready justification to be first on the chopping block for the Department of Government Efficiency at over half a billion dollars per year.

At President-elect Donald Trump’s direction, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are expected to find at least $2 trillion to shave from the federal government’s bloated budget by Independence Day 2026. Tuesday, “PBS News Hour” demonstrated why the Corporation for Public Broadcasting should be stripped of resources during a segment fomenting violence against the incoming administration.

“It’s really clear to us that hate and extremist groups are using the election of Donald Trump as an encouragement to cause fear and anxiety in communities of color and religious communities and in the LGBTQ community,” contended Southern Poverty Law Center President and CEO Margaret Huang over the banner “Rising Hate” after a report on text messages informing recipients to “report to a plantation to pick cotton.”

“Because of his use of racist, sexist, and other discriminatory rhetoric on the campaign trail, he’s essentially encouraged his followers to spew hateful rhetoric, and he’s emboldened them to embrace this hateful ideology,” the SPLC head continued despite the lack of a reported source of the messages at the time of her commentary.

Reacting to the continued narrative-building of division, the argument was made by many on social media that it was well past time for PBS, NPR, and their parent, the CPB, to lose their annual appropriation of over $500 million of U.S. taxpayer money courtesy of Congress.

Included among those ready to “turn off the spigot” was Ramaswamy, DOGE co-chair designee, who days earlier had shared a video reminding social media users about NPR CEO Katherine Maher, known for her issues with the First Amendment, complaining about “truth… preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”

“Seeking truth isn’t the real problem,” reacted the businessman. “It’s wasteful spending. Taxpayers spend $535MM/year on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR’s parent). Even worse, that *isn’t even authorized* by Congress. Let’s turn off the spigot & see what happens. No one will be harmed.”

Meanwhile, PBS anchor Stephanie Sy continued the narrative on Trump as she said, “You know, even if Trump has stirred up feelings of racial animus, he also saw gains, as you know, in this election among Latinos and African Americans. With the second Trump term, do you expect that there will be more or less tolerance for this kind of hate speech?”

In response, Huang, whose organization recently kicked a hornet’s nest by doxxing writers from The Babylon Bee’s sister site Not the Bee, expressed, “I think that many people who supported the president-elect did so because they share his rhetoric and ideology. But many other people did not. Many people voted for him for economic reasons because they’re frustrated by the economic situation of the country, and they wanted a change from what they were experiencing over the last few years.”

“That is not a mandate to embrace racial hatred or misogyny. And I believe, in fact, that, as we move forward with the incoming administration, more and more people are going to reject that rhetoric and call for a change,” she added.

While Huang went on to raise concerns about “incidences of violence” without citing any actual examples, absent from her argument about “hateful rhetoric” was any umbrage with the Harris-Walz campaign and the Democratic Party referring to Trump as a fascist, Nazi, and “literally Hitler” while he was the one subject to multiple assassination attempts.

As it happened, it was his administration’s nominees that were confronted with bomb threats during Thanksgiving week adding further support to calls to see the rhetoric and propaganda lose its subsidization.

Kevin Haggerty
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