President Donald Trump has fought plenty of political heavyweights, but now he’s up against a foe far tougher than Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris: Big Bird. The president is ordering federal agencies and the taxpayer-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stop supporting National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. His May 1 executive order is titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media.” How biased are NPR and PBS? They mostly appeal to members of one political party, according to Pew Research: 32% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning respondents surveyed say they regularly get news from NPR, and a similar number — 31% — say the same about PBS. Only 11% of Republicans and GOP-leaners report they get news from PBS, and the figure for NPR — 9% — is even worse. Something about NPR is three times more agreeable to Democrats than to Republicans. Should everyone be taxed to pay for radio and TV programming that caters primarily to Democrats? Public radio and TV executives hide behind yellow feathers whenever they’re criticized. “Big Bird Taken Off Death Row,” announced a Washington Post headline in June 1995 when Newt Gingrich, the first Republican speaker of the House of Representatives in 40 years, backed down from attempts to defund CPB. “Sesame Street” was just too popular with parents. Today’s face of public broadcasting, however, isn’t Big Bird or Elmo — it’s Katherine Maher, NPR’s outspokenly progressive CEO . “America is addicted to white supremacy,” Maher — who is white — claimed on Twitter in 2020. But she didn’t make NPR woke — just the opposite: Maher’s in charge because she perfectly represents NPR’s preexisting institutional bias. Before Maher, NPR was already appending “trigger warnings” to readings from the Declaration of Independence , with disclaimers appearing not only on items newly published on its website after the 2020 George Floyd riots but applied retroactively as well. “The audio of this story quotes the US Declaration of Independence — a document that contains offensive language about Native Americans, including a racial slur,” warns the note prefixed to “The Declaration: What Does It Mean to You?” a “Morning Edition” story from July 4, 2013. Maher recently testified to Congress that “much of my thinking has evolved over the last half decade” since she characterized other Americans as white-supremacy addicts. Before her evolution, Maher also called President Trump a “deranged racist sociopath” and “fascist.” She was executive director and CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, publisher of Wikipedia, at the time. Before that, she was the foundation’s chief communications officer.
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