NPR: Our Federal Tax Dollars for Marxist News, Partisan Censorship and Pan Flutes?

By John Kass

April 21, 2024

As a life-long, big city newsman so focused on work that my musical choices involved only news radio jingles, I no longer enjoy listening to news on the radio. Why?

Because it’s mostly biased corporate leftist crap, and I keep fretting about whether Alexander Soros has purchased this local news station or that one and bent its newsroom to his daddy’s will as if they were the once-thriving Cambodian middle class.

Meanwhile cable TV news is so full of snickering liberal rage, and pouty left-wing news presenters with epic hair, that I can’t stand it.

But I’ve come up with a positive alternative:

National People’s Radio.

Que the Pan flutes and the bird sounds from the Amazon rain forest. Yes, the time has come.

And, added plus, “free” public television with programming set up by a corporate board of prominent American conservatives including the scholar Victor Davis Hanson, radio broadcaster Dan Proft, Tom Bevan co-founder of Real Clear Politics and University of Chicago Professor Emeritus Charles Lipson.

For example, we’d have President Joe Biden, accompanied by those Pan Flutes playing the theme of Cmdr. McBragg, telling the story of Joe’s heroic Uncle Ambrose being devoured by cannibals in New Guinea. Whether it happened or not. You can’t make omelets without breaking a few eggs, right Walter Duranty?

And lengthy panel discussions on “It’s the Economy Stupid” about how much things cost at the store, what they cost now and how great things were BJ (Before Joe) and droll comedies from Britain on the humorous antics of liberal chumbolones, and sad dramas from Britain about sad middle-class depressives.

We’ll have sports too, from 24-hour fly fishing to 24-hour soccer that often ends 0-0, and city apartment terriers killing alley rats.

We’ll call that one about the rat-killer “Prince of the City” along with a kid’s cartoon show on the heroic “Prince” protecting a multi-racial family from cartoon rats.

To fund it all, we’ll invoke a complicated hidden federal tax scheme replete with complicated grants and call it just a bunch of “grants” that are all much too intricate for Americans to bother about in Congress. So I hope you’ll never get to the bottom of it and the money keeps flowing in to support my elitist fly-fishing documentaries and scoreless soccer.

Wait a minute. You don’t think Americans should pay for red-blooded rat hunting sports and right-wing comedies on the death of the citizen and fly-fishing stories with corporate “sponsorships” to entertain a tiny fraction of the population?

Buzz off, fascist.

Oh and if Congress dares even think about cutting our funds, we’ll unleash the dogs—talking puppet dogs and real dogs—aimed at those hateful Congresspersons.

Think about it.

What member of Congress wants to seek re-election having starved “Prince” to death with voters listening to tearful voice overs by Edie Falco?

Why not force all American taxpayers to subsidize my own conservative world view and call it all “Public Broadcasting?”

This has worked well for decade upon decade with National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting constantly skewing the news and public discourse to the left and then farther to the left, presenting slithering fake corporate conservatives like David Brooks, and there did not seem any chink in their progressive armor.

Until now.

Because now they’ve been fully exposed. And all that’s left are the tears of the clowns.

And the only ones who worry about them are the chumbolones. But you’re not some idiot to be snickered at and mocked. You’re no chumbolone.

First came that scathing essay in the left-of-center news site “The Free Press” by longtime NPR business editor Uri Berliner on “How NPR Lost America’s Trust.” I highly recommend that you read it. So, I link to it here.

Berliner has since resigned rather than be subject to humiliation and pain of endless struggle sessions led by NPR boss Kathleen Maher.

Welcome to the club, Uri.

Maher has been unrelenting in hurling her left-wing bias and woke screeds across the internet while boasting about censoring news she disagrees with. I love that photo of her, a Karen outdoors, with her Joe Biden hat on, all masked up. Outdoors.

She’s become a living parody of an elite left-wing flesh-eating shrew. Some internet fearmongers are suggesting that Maher is a creation, a consortium of various paranoid fantasies. Sadly she’s none of these things. She’s real, a left wing raptor with her claws deep into what used to be American Free Speech.

The conservative journalist Christopher Rufo has chronicled Maher’s ridiculous screeching, as has the liberal writer Matt Taibbi, and many others.

She’s the smoked fish at the brunch table, and people of all stripes come up and take pieces of her, but now she’s going bad.

“Exclusive: All Things Considered, Lawmakers Say It’s Time to Defund NPR” says the headline in my favorite news magazine, The Federalist.

Is it time to defund NPR?

Absolutely.

Now is the time.

Uri Berliner’s essay hit many of the points that drives me crazy about the insufferable leftist corporate media:

The suppression and government sponsored censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story. The constant repetition of the Hilary Clinton hoax that the 2016 election was stolen by the Russians and that Trump was a Putin stooge, for starters.

The New York Post broke the story on Hunter Biden’s Laptop from Hell. The Post’s great columnist Miranda Devine wrote the book on the “Laptop from Hell.”

I pushed to write columns about it. This was met with icy stares or outright groans from editors at “the paper.” I’m so glad I took the buyout and got the hell out.

“National Public Radio’s managing editor, Terrence Samuel, guaranteed he’ll leave an immortal legacy of NPR as National Jester Radio, the national broadcast clown car with this quote about why leftist NPR ignored the most important story in decades.

“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” Samuel said.  “And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was . . . a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.”

“Of course you don’t. Shake that rattle stick Terry, the stick jesters often carry.”

After killing that legitimate story at NPR, Samuel the Medieval Jester went over to the equally left-wing and pathetically juvenile USA Today. Its opinion section is primary school for illiterate Jacobins.

And before Kathleen Maher was railing against white patriarchy and Trump, she was CEO of Wikipedia and her claws sank themselves deep into the First Amendment. She said it was a “mistake” to allow Wikipedia to to be “free and open.” And so, like some media Cruella DeVille,  she worked to crush it. Larry Sanger, co-creator of Wikipedia was horrified. He told Christopher Rufo in “City Journal” that Maher’s leftist zeal sickened him.

Larry Sanger:  “The bias of Wikipedia, the fact that certain points of view have been systematically silenced, is nothing new. I’ve written about it myself. But I did not know just how radical-sounding Katherine Maher is. For the ex-CEO of Wikipedia to say that it was somehow a mistake for Wikipedia to be “free and open,” that it led to bad consequences—my jaw is on the floor. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised that she thinks it, but I am surprised that she would say it.”

What Katherine Maher did to Wikipedia has shocked and depressed him.

The time has passed for wondering if the left will ever release its claws on so called National Public Radio or “public television.” These are caves where the raptors live, and they are consumed by contempt for the American middle class.

But I don’t think we should be compelled to pay for their corrosive fantasies with our tax dollars.

They laugh at us. They don’t think you can ever stop them. But you can. You can end the snickering of the left. Put Big Bird into a pot of hunter’s stew, seasoned with allspice, cinnamon and loaded with onions.

You can stop  NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from ridiculing you and your family. They might act as if they’re state-owned media, but they’re not Pravda, this isn’t Stalinist Russia, they don’t have real power over you. Not yet.

You’re Americans, not rabbits. Stand up to them.

Let Congress know you’re tired of being abused over the “public” airwaves.

Defund NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting now.

-30-

About the author: John Kass spent decades as a political writer and news columnist in Chicago working at a major metropolitan newspaper. He is co-host of The Chicago Way podcast. And he just loves his “No Chumbolone” hat, because johnkassnews.com is a “No Chumbolone” Zone where you can always get a cup of common sense.

Comments 66

  2. “…plus, ‘free’ public television with programming set up by a corporate board of prominent American conservatives including the scholar Victor Davis Hanson, radio broadcaster Dan Proft, Tom Bevan co-founder of Real Clear Politics and University of Chicago Professor Emeritus Charles Lipson.”

    I know Tom Bevan is your friend, but he doesn’t deserve being mentioned in the same breath as Victor Davis Hanson, and Dan Proft – on his RCP podacast, he’s hardly a foil to the hyper-partisan, cheerleader for Joe Biden, liberal shill Carl Cannon.

    If he’s a voice for conservatives, conservatives would do well to find another.

  3. ” Put Big Bird into a pot of hunter’s stew, seasoned with allspice, cinnamon and loaded with onions.”

    Get the T-shirts and bumper stickers printed up!

      2. Sounds delish. Damn fine column Mr K! Couldn’t agree more.

        I just read the Wiki bio of Ms Maher (which she prolly wrote herself). I wonder why she can’t keep a job for more than a couple-three years.

        Best regards, Speez

    3. Yes please, extra onions, and a dash of cardamom!

      My take- After studying the history of public radio and TV, from back when WTTW made that creepy children’s show, with the guy in the Robin Hood outfit who sat on the book (showing my age), “public” media never really needed to exist. Anything good (such as Dr. Who with the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker) could have been brought to us by commercial TV that didn’t charge us through (cough cough) donations, supplying us with totebags and t-shirts.

      1. Because tax dollars are never enough for this bunch, and virtue signaling coffee cups brings out the entrepreneur in what is essentially a government entity.

  4. Great article. I listened to a lot of NPR in the mid 80s [my roommate liked it] but never cared for it much. I loved Public Television in the 70s -80s [Masterpiece Theatre, Nature, Don Kirshner, Austin City Limits, This Old House, & The BBC Royal Shakespeare Theatre Plays {most of them}]. Other than the ‘Visions’ travel series, though, nothing worth watching has been put out in decades and PC/Woke news has become unwatchable [especially Mid East ‘Experts’ who can’t speak Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, or Hebrew]. With the three networks no longer the only alternatives and with cable and now streaming becoming so widespread there’s no longer any reason for them. Eliminate the taxpayer funding!

      1. I wouldn’t give that for it! The Irish RM, I Claudius, Rumple of the Bailey, Yes Minister & Yes Prime Minister on the other hand, priceless!
        UK students I knew in grad school used to refer to US Public Television as “the BBC in exile”. All Creatures Great & Small and the Lovejoy Mysteries were the cream of the crop – to me. But, to each his own!

  5. Thanks for exposing Maher for what she is. I’ve written both our Senators (Braun and Young) asking them to defund NPR. I did not bother writing our left wing Congressman Frank Mrvan as I knew it would be a waste of time based on his responses to my other letters. Maybe I’ll forward your article to him.

  6. Defund public radio and public TV and let George Sorios support them. He’s got the money. Advertisers will not support it them, because there will be no benefit to the advertisers. Without public funding they would disappear. Then public radio and public could join their hero, Josef Gobbles, in the dustbin of history.

  7. “Commander McBragg” has me cleaning up cereal! Columns like this are worth three times what you charge!! Welcome back, Mr. Kass, and full speed ahead!

  8. Add Katie Couric to the list of the liberal elite who consider conservatives to be ignorant. She showed her true self on the Bill Maher show. And to think she was once called America’s cheerleader!

  9. I’m not as disciplined as John. I still listen to NPR occasionally, in the way you keep listening to an uncle who’s declined into ranting about geese stealing his lunch.

    I’ve come up with a fun NPR game. Take a guess at the current subject NPR is beating to death and turn on your local NPR Marxist Machine. If you guess the subject is “grievance,” there’s about an even chance that you’re right. It won’t be the grievances of Venezuelans whose lives have been ruined by socialists or the grievances of Swedes who welcomed a million Somalian immigrants and a national crime wave. Oh no, just grievances of people wronged in America.

    There aren’t enough women playing percussion in American symphony orchestras.

    Chicago schoolchildren are mostly illiterate due to “underfunding.”

    Drag queens deserve longer story times with third graders.

    College graduates burdened by $300,000 in college loans for a degree in Racial Inequities . . . can’t get a job!

    Play the NPR Grievance Game. It’s a lot more fun than NPR itself.

    1. It won’t be easy. Enough Congresscritters and Senators have to be elected that are capable of withstanding the absolute fury of lefties screaming accusations of “Sesame Street Genocide” and fighting you every step of the way to pass a defunding bill. You may need more than that if a veto override is needed.
      If you’re successful in getting that done, you need to be eternally vigilant going forward to make sure the lefties don’t reinstate it the first chance they get.
      Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is figuring out just how important this is in the general scheme of setting things right in Washingtoon. So many things to do – what to do first?

      1. Good point. It took 100 years to finally kill the absurd Federal Tea Board. And apparently the Tea Board still met for many years after defunding! In fact the late Senator Harry Reid had to make it his “life’s mission” to kill this inane beast. So you’re right. NPR is going to be infinitely harder to defund. Killing it? Fergetaboutit. The Lefties, as you say, will have a tantrum and hold their collective breath and turn blue until funding is restored.

        So as to where to start? What to do first? Maybe we should start small. Like first develop our chops by defunding the Mushroom Council or Popcorn Board.

  11. It would be a great start. Yet it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
    I listen and watch many news programs. To say I’m appalled is an understatement.
    I must ask how is it that something I watched live is spun into a web of lies?
    Seriously are you telling me what I saw I didn’t see? What next unicorns and fairy godmothers granting wishes.
    A movie Good Morning Vietnam showed us what reporting the news was. It’s a big red X on truth.
    Yes I’d listen to you and the esteemed men you mentioned. My wish list would be complete.
    Thanks and hope you’re doing better.

    1. As I noted on my facebook link to John’s great article – “Un-fund the most witless, humorless, partisan and snooty voices on the airwaves. The Seventh Level of Hell(Souls who were violent toward others are condemned to be submerged in boiling blood. People who hurt themselves are pecked at by bird-women called harpies or attacked by dogs. Those who committed violent acts against God writhe in burning sand and burning rain.) plays NPR 24/7.”

  13. Well written and spot on. And by your supporters comments, totally agreed with. Eventually funding for public radio and television will end, but that won’t happen until the government’s borrowing capability crashes. Till then, boycott both.

  14. Glad you’re back, brother John! Remember when Katie Couric was a cute chick? Those were the days. Let NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting go the way of Air America! Remember when Al Franken was Funny? Those were the days. We the People will not relent!

  17. Thank you John. Thank you for bringing this up here. Fraud Kathleen Maher and NPR has been a HUGE story on Substack over the past couple of weeks. It’s nice to see some of this nonsense exposed. Unfortunately there are still too many idiot brain dead people out there who think this is all great.

    Defunding NPR, yes, it’s a start. But there’s a lot more out there that needs to meet the same fate. Like the illegals, student refunds, teacher unions (in fact all unions that don’t speak for or truly represent their membership), Presidential and Congressional salaries.

    Yes NPR is a place to start the process.

  18. Γιάννη,
    If only we had the power to pull their plug off the government dole. (And no, we are NOT chumbolones!) But I kinda doubt it’ll ever happen, as long as Joe mumbles and his evil Soros minions control purse strings. But this close to Greek Easter, you never know…miracles may happen! Καλό Πάσχα, και Καλή Ανάσταση to your οικογένεια!!

  20. Great column! You and the NY POST seem to get the news right. Defund NPR. A waste of time and money. Public television. Hah your column the other day hit the nail on the head. WTTW in no longer Window To The World focused on exposing us to important news and programming the networks ignore but today Winnetka Talking To Winnetka with liberal claptrap that is bent so far leftward and no balance with equal conservative thought. We all pay for it, why only the liberal point of view.

  22. Can’t believe NPR still exists.
    How many people actually listen to NPR according to the ratings?

    Many years ago I tuned into NPR and was turned off by the boring presentations.
    Voices speaking in soft, low whispers, ever so calm and “intellectual”.
    Voices coming out of a padded room.
    Definitely never car news – it would put you to sleep.

    Every so many years I would turn it on and turn it off.
    Nothing had changed over the decades – same dull voices and empty rhetoric.
    Stop funding the sound of void.

    1. I dunno. “Car Talk” had its moments.
      My favorite was the poor sap who called in to ask how to get rid of the smell after his Great Dane barfed into the defroster outlets on top of his dashboard…

    2. Back in the olden days, the story was “we’ll protect you from the advertisers who are trying to control your life……so here is PBS/NPR”
      The smugness and assumption that you’ll buy the story as presented by public broadcasting has evolved into a • one viewpoint is all you need presentation •

  23. I have a different solution. Go ahead and fund it, but resuscitate the old Fairness Doctrine, and require them to alternate one hour of looney liberal programming with one hour of conservative programming featuring folks such as those you mention, along with others from The Federalist Society, National Review, etc. Maybe move your podcast to one of their segments. I would view that as my tax dollars hard at work. At least harder than they seem to be working lately.

    2. The problem with your suggestion is that guess who gets to determine what the balance is?
      I’m old enough to remember Rush declaring “I *AM* Equal Time!” when liberals insisted that they needed equal time to answer *him*…

  24. Up until about three years ago, I regularly listened to favorite shows on NPR. I then had an epiphany regarding how woke they are. I lived with the fact that they were funded by tax dollars. The thought never crossed my mind about defunding them. Yes, it is time to stop supporting them. Thank you

  26. During the process of escaping Chicago a few years ago I started putting my spare change into a plastic baggie. The moving process was hectic so I kept accumulating change until the bag was full. Then I started another bag of random change. Once the move was complete and we were settled in I noticed I had piled up a few more bags of change. We moved here to Texas with a rescue from PAWS from over in Lincoln Park and she’s a beautiful pup. I had also accumulated two more rescues since we moved. We also picked up two ankle biters since then. All rescues. I took the bags of random change to WalMart and put them into a counting machine and it came up to more than one hundred bucks! Yes, Dos Ankle Biters and Baby the Wonder Dog surely do appreciate the dog food provided with the money that I used to give away. These charities I used to donate to have surely suffered under Joe Bidenflation. The only charities that I now help are the Ronald McDonald House and the ASPCA. I used to work near the McDonald House in Chicago and would see the families leaving go to the hospital to see their sick kids. Totally legit as far as I could see. I also donate to the ASPCA and other local shelters that rescue abused animals. Non- kill of course. Donate your money to those that deserve it. Not the fat cat beaurocrats that feed at the public trough on taxpayers dime to feed them a steady diet of bullshit. NPR and PBS are biased and full of bloviating crap. If you have any inclination to give your money away, please choose wisely…

    1. Curious to know if you’ve seen and can stomach the list of annual salaries paid out at ASPCA? We care about abused and abandoned animals, and my grandson puts in a whole lot of hours at our local shelter, but MILLIONS of dollars for the top 15 staffers? That’s a tough one to swallow….

      1. Thanks for the info Karen, I’ll definitely look it up. This is why I recommend donating to local rescues also. Local no- kill shelters are more easily held accountable. I’m sure McDonalds charities might have some issues too but I’m going from experience and what I observed personally. Everyone staying there has a sick kid and benefits from having a place for the family to stay during medical treatment. I’m sure having family around helps the child in the hospital immensely.

  27. John, another FIRST RATE column….doing what Kasso does best! You send me scurrying around, looking for more information.

    This whole “defund NPR” is a much bigger tangle than many of us (me!) might have realized. As with anything else “Washington” does, it is not as simple as one line-item in the federal budget, or even a section. Their money is all mish-mashed through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and veiled in some very nice things – TV shows like “A Capitol Fourth” and such. But, when you add up the federal money going to that cadre, it comes to $574.29 million a year! They break it down so that Public TV Stations and Programming gets $383.81M; something called System Support gets $34.5M; Public Radio and Grants gets $127.94M; and Corporation for Public Broadcasting gets $28.75M for “operations”.

    That isn’t the whole story, though, because there are all kinds of federally-mandated “requirements” for stations to take (read: pay for) certain CPB/NPR offerings before they can have access to other programming they may want to take for their air…..and all that money pours into the coffers as well.

    It’s a whale of a tank of money, more convoluted than you can imagine and it allows their tentacles to reach far, wide and deep – – deep into the fabric of our society and wide enough for those dollars to flow freely. It is truly time for the whole mess to no longer be part of the federal budget. NOWHERE in my relatively brief plunge into this did I see ANY kind of reasoning or rationale for that to exist as part of our government. ALL of what they do would be commerically available as a part of entreprenurial America. What they do does not have to be funded by well over half a billion of our tax money.

    1. Excellent analysis. I like you thought there would be a simple budgetary line item clearly delineating tax payer support. But nooooo. As you discovered it’s a whole big web of obfuscation … likely on purpose. But one thing is crystal clear. When NPR claims that only 1% of their budget depends upon taxpayer monies, we know they are full of it.

  28. Great column today sir. I could really rant on subjects like this but I’d be repeating ideas from other more eloquent comments that precede me here.

  29. Public broadcasting made sense in the 1960s when there were far fewer television and radio stations than there are now, not to mention the internet with streaming services and social media. It’s been mainly left-wing crap for decades with the occasional interesting program thrown in to keep people mollified. Yes, it’s past time to defund this anachronism.

    To mollify the liberals we can designate the PBS/NPR funds to fight our proxy war in Ukraine. That money, plus the money congress gave them yesterday will surely result in complete and utter victory for the Ukrainians.

  30. I seldom listen to radio any more, either it’s leftist stuff or Rush Limbaugh wanna-be’s.

    As to Public TV, it stopped being good when they fired Louis Rukeyser and John McLaughlin died.

    If it wasn’t for the occasional televised Nebraska sports events, I probably wouldn’t watch it at all.

    Now even Sesame Street has become grooming grounds for leftist sexual identity matters.

  31. John, glad your back and at the top of your writing! Yes, defund NPR and really the whole Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Of course, the Democrats won’t agree, so it would take both houses of congress and a supportive President to make it happen. But try we must, or they’ll convince the next generation that they’re Untouchables! We really need a complete overhaul of federal agencies and spending, one agency or organization at a time. Having been involved with reviewing federal grants a few years back, it is horrific where some of the taxpayer “grant” money goes. Yes there are justified grants, but also, so, so much waste of our tax dollars!

  32. Ya know how to get Congress to defund NPR? Tell them that the Ukraine needs the money. They’ll happily send the tax dollars to the Ukranian Biden Family Retirement Fund!

  33. Glad your humor is still as sharp as ever! I love your ideas for free public TV’s board of directors. As for the rats, though I love terriers, I think it would be more fun to see what a New York politician wants to do to curb the rat problem–feed the rats contraceptive pills. You’d get a two for one show. Women would be fighting the rats for free healthcare and the male rats who accidentally eat the contraceptives, too, would become transgender rats. Eventually, the transgender rats will have their own parade.

  34. She looks better with the mask on. The left is glowing very brightly right now with the group think phenomenon of Shadow Projection. Thinking also of Hillary Clinton’s fear of Donald Trump (Michelle Obama too). It just never stops, but – if I got this right, the negative spaces, this silhouette
    is one of a massive blind spot on the part of the left, which means they can’t see it coming. Hoping at least

    I might say, good, this lady has no children. But children would help her and so I hope some day she does.

  35. Yes, and when Big Bird shows up to complain, let’s put him on a rotisserie and eat him. A nice Beaujolais from France should pair well with crispy garlicky potatoes.

  36. I am so saddened by the fact that WTTW is part of the federal funding and at the same time disgusted by NPR and it’s programming to shape the public and their thinking with such a misleading title/call letters. I did stop donating to WTTW but absolutely right about defunding NPR and to think people buy into defunding the Police!!! “ The dumbing down of America”, as my late husband, who passed away to young use to say is truly coming to pass!

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