My Border Patrol cousin in rural Ajo, AZ (40 miles north of the Mexican border) on the possibility of Channel 8 (PBS) going dark: “Cuz, it’ll be up to us CBP/ICE agents to update the soon to arrive winter visitors from Seattle and Portland on the increasing temperatures here in Ajo and the illegals skipping us this winter, because, you know, the .003 degrees increase will cause them to die as they’re attempting to scale the border wall! Oh, the humanity!! God I love my job, cuz!!”
In Illinois, the state industrial complex is building a $3+B water pipeline to the western Chicago suburbs based on non peer reviewed analysis by some assistant professors at U. of Illinois. Good for their tenure. Illinois is a single party state and the state industrial complex is like a cancer that takes more and more each year.
It's so on-brand for these people to go down with facially disingenuous concern-trolling about "underserved rural communities." I happen to know how they talk about rural Americans behind closed doors.
lets not forget "racists"..... or on a bad day...... "fascists!". I'm still scratching my head over that one...I've never really met anybody in the Midwest who thinks that the state should control the means of production under a nationalistic authoritarian regime.
Nice work, Greg! You raise some great questions. I'm a big fan of the PBS and wish them every success, should they decide to return to sanity and find some respect for their fellow citizens and their own obligation to truth.
They could begin by spending some of that treasure trove they already have. The Harvard Effect. Taxpayers should not be paying organizations that have such available funds. Nor should such organizations be 501c3 that makes donations tax deductible.
I love the meme I saw splattered about that Sesame Street didn't change from when you were a child you were just raised to be a selfish asshole. Something like that.
I grew up in the 70's and 80's with Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, and Captain Kangaroo. They are all rolling in their graves at what Sesame Street became. Even Nova became a bastion of what "Science" is today. Science and journalism are kind of the same now. Truth is a bystander to hero worship and desire for the big chair with the fat paycheck.
My favorite part of PBS (as a subscriber) is that Nova in particular is so incredibly wrong on everything it's done for the last 15 years. James Webb obliterated all of these fools in 2 years.
At this moment I am negotiating a possible asset sale of the small manufacturing company I founded and have been running for over 20 years. Looks like I won't make very much for my trouble. That is because I made a poor decision two decades ago to get into a business of making high quality tangible goods in the US, instead of running some elaborate tech, crypto or medical grift. Or making mid six figures in the government administration space (I haven't made six figures in a quarter century).
Sometimes I am appalled at how younger people seem to be chasing so many scams these days, but maybe, looking at who wins and who loses in modern America, I shouldn't blame them.
Pre-Trump, we were also forced to subsidized organizations that advocate against our democratic interests, and already have more than sufficient funds to operate.
If your business is profitable and your employees can run it profitably with just a little bit of consulting from you along the way, consider an ESOP exit strategy.
Great point. So why not use some of that money to save workers from being fired? It seems like they're using the excuse of budget cuts to axe employees they'd already planned to axe.
I'd have a lot more respect for public broadcasting and these ultra-rich universities if they used their cash reserves to save employees--if they kept cuts to a minimum. But that's not what is happening.
Thought of this when I saw that it was American Experience they chose to axe at WHBH - seems like they're cutting off the nose to spite the face, fund our station or we'll shoot this nonpartisan documentary.
That's a couple of people bemoaning the loss of "American Experience," with the implication that the program was an example of what public media should be/do--"this nonpartisan documentary."
Sorry, but I think y'all have Stockholm syndrome.
You've been held hostage for so long, and fed PC-Progressive bullshit, that you can't differentiate unbiased any more.
Just look at the programs on their website--90% of them are pure PC-Prog (racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, capitalism). EVERY one has a PC-Prog spin, even if the subject isn't--the story of Mr Polaroid, for example is told by an androgynous black woman(?).
There are millions of American Experience stories that could be told--WITHOUT a PC-Prog/NPR/PBS lens. Good riddance to the PBS bias!
An intimate portrait of the woman whose groundbreaking writings revolutionized our relationship to the natural world and launched the modern environmental movement.
American Coup: Wilmington 1898
The little-known story of a deadly 1898 race massacre and coup d’état in Wilmington, North Carolina, when white supremacists overthrew the multi-racial government of state’s largest city through a campaign of violence and intimidation.
Change, Not Charity: The Americans with Disabilities Act poster image Change, Not Charity: The Americans with Disabilities Act
Change, Not Charity: The Americans with Disabilities Act
The dramatic story of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. The film highlights the determined people who literally put their bodies on the line to pass the legislation that changed the lives of all Americans.
Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP
The story of civil rights hero Walter White — one of the most influential Black men in mid-century America and leader of the NAACP from 1929 to 1955, yet one of the least known figures in civil rights history.
The American Diplomat
Explore the lives and legacies of three African American ambassadors who broke racial barriers to reach high-ranking appointments in the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations and left a lasting impact on the Foreign Service.
Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space
Meet the influential author and key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Also a trained anthropologist, Hurston collected folklore throughout the South and Caribbean — reclaiming, honoring and celebrating Black life on its own terms.
The Sun Queen
Scientist Mária Telkes dedicated her career to harnessing the power of the sun. Though undercut and thwarted by her male colleagues, she persevered to design the first successfully solar-heated house in 1948 and held more than 20 patents.
Stonewall Uprising
In 1969, homosexuality was illegal in almost every state... but that was about to change. The Stonewall riots marked a major turning point in the modern gay civil rights movement.
The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer
A brilliant scientist, Oppenheimer was tasked with the development of the atomic bomb in the top-secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico during World War II.
The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi's Schools
Explore what happened when the small Mississippi town of Leland integrated its public schools in 1970. Told through the remembrances of students, teachers and parents, the film shows how the town – and America – were transformed.
The Gilded Age
Meet the titans and barons of the glittering late 19th century, whose materialistic extravagance contrasted harshly with the poverty of the struggling workers who challenged them. The vast disparities between them sparked debates still raging today.
The Eugenics Crusade
The Eugenics Crusade tells the story of the unlikely –– and largely unknown –– campaign to breed a “better” American race, tracing the rise of the movement that turned the fledgling science of heredity into a powerful instrument of social control.
The Cancer Detectives
The Cancer Detectives tells the untold story of the first-ever war on cancer and the coalition of people who fought tirelessly to save women from cervical cancer—which was once the number one cancer killer of women.
The Blinding of Isaac Woodard
In 1946, Isaac Woodard, a Black army sergeant on his way home to South Carolina after serving in WWII, was pulled from a bus for arguing with the driver. The local chief of police savagely beat him, leaving him unconscious and permanently blind.
Casa Susanna
In the 1950s and ’60s, an underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to express their true selves.
The Perfect Crime
The shocking story of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy college students who murdered a 14-year-old boy in 1924 to prove they were smart enough to get away with it.
Lol chill my man I've never even watched or listened to it or whatever, was going off the way it was framed in the article, it was the luke-warmest of takes based on trust of the outfit we're both paying subscribers to, sorry I got it wrong Jesus Christ
Same principle Obama applied during the government shutdown. They had rangers sprinting to every gate of the National Parks to ruin people’s vacations before even considering other ways to save money. Never let a crisis go to waste.
Yes! The Trump cuts bailed out the execs at PBS; gave themthe best excuse to continue the cuts they began in 2023 and continued into 2024, 2024, prior to the cuts.
or...maybe they woke up and realized they have been riding the gravy train with biscuit wheels and decided to cut the dead wood they've been carrying for years...cuz it was gubmint monies paying for it.
I think I've read that's a fairly common salary for the CEO of a major league non-profit. Here's the superintendent of the school district in the Chicago suburb where the current Pope grew up doing well for himself:
"What is it about Dolton and inexcusably bloated salaries for elected officials and administrators?
The outgoing superintendent of the school district for elementary and middle schools in the village of Dolton and neighboring Riverdale, we’ve just come to learn, is making $450,000 a year and by the time he retires two years from now his salary will balloon to $510,000.
Just to put that in perspective, Pedro Martinez, who is running the nation’s fourth largest school system at Chicago Public Schools, is making a little over $350,000 in salary. How in the world is Kevin Nohelty, who oversees 10 schools, making nearly $100,000 more?
Dolton Elementary School District 148 has fewer than 2,000 students. Chicago Public Schools has a little over 325,000.
Nohelty amazingly is the highest paid school superintendent in all of Illinois, according to research from conservative publisher Wirepoints.
Another point of contrast: the median household income in Dolton is $58,706, which is $23,000 lower than the statewide median, making the exorbitant pay for the local school boss that much more galling."
Here is the layoff story in PBS' own words in 2024. Trump cuts were a blessing for them; best excuse for "saying goodbye to dear friends and colleagues".
Excellent reporting. I hope this becomes common knowledge, like how most people now know that many top universities are sitting on billions of dollars while threatening to fire cancer researchers if they don't get federal funding for DEI administrators.
As an aside, I absolutely hate that tired old trope about something costing just as much as a cup of coffee a day. Let them come pry my daily cup of coffee from my still slightly warm, dead hands.
As well, if that's the metric, it should be easy enough to do a fundraising event asking people to donate $1.60 per day in perpetuity. Gee why wouldn't every American adult go for that?
Defunding public broadcasting is the best fundraising gift they could ask! Oh, the pledge drives that will follow to "make up" for the cuts "keep this station on the air." And all those Act Blue people who will dutifully send them ever more unrestricted money. The folks at WGBH and MPR are secretly giddy with joy.
Here in Oregon, the NPR station stated on air over and over the past several weeks that the Federal cuts represented 9% of their budget. And won’t you please become a new subscriber or up your memberships to a sustainer level?
One of the local classical stations did that even before the ink was dry- raising their funding cycles from 4 to god knows what a year (I don't know how many now, I got sick of the puling and stopped listening). This was to cover what they even admitted was a smallish gap in funding. I personally thought that having local buisness sponsorships- while not full on ads, but call outs to sponsorship on air, might solve such a small gap, but they would rather extort their listeners, it seems.
They could also get rid of the DEI hires they got in to do 'special' shows. This is radio mind you, so they had to get the most obvious voices they could to prove to the audience that their new Hosts were diverse. The gay guy lisps outrageously and the black woman has a discernable african-american accent. I can't even with the gay guy's segments. His sibilance is over the top. All I can see is Sylvester the cat spitting all over the microphone. The black lady isn't too bad, but she seems relegated to minority music and nothing else. It seems like a weird tokenism going on there.
Maybe NPR is wonderful, but I’ve never listened to a second of it in my 48+ years. Yet somehow I’ve been able to go elsewhere andaccess news and weather as well as entertainment and cultural features.
As for PBS, every show has commercials that somehow are not commercials because they state “ funding for this program, made possible by…” whichever corporate sponsor or left wing endowment.
And every PBS show also is funded by “viewers like you.” So perhaps going forward, NPR and PBS can call their commercials commercials, and continue to charge “viewers like you” for streaming subscriptions as they have for a few years now.
It was wonderful once. I remember it. But, like happened with so many things in the 2010s, it transformed into something very ugly while coasting on its previous reputation and pretending like nothing happened.
When Garrison Keillor was just doing poetry (and not Marxist ideology) it was worth tuning in. But now the place is run by "head girls" and they forced out Keillor with what in hindsight looks like a very spurious allegations by an employee during the height of the "me too" era. The folks that are in charge may seem nice on the surface, but they're cannibals at heart.
A lot of institutions go through a natural evolution, being once wonderful and impressive, turning into senescence and death eventually. I suppose that’s the case with NPR.
Great work. Thanks! There’s been a lot of public hand-wringing lately about institutions—people picking sides, drawing lines, warning of collapse or calling for restoration. But maybe we can cool it and accept that the internet is acting as an accelerant to natural or even overdue changes . We tend to think of institutions as large public or quasi-public organizations—bureaucracies, agencies, legacy media, universities. But that’s a narrow view. Institutions aren’t created by charters or tax codes—they arise naturally from collective behavior, from the patterns and norms that emerge as societies organize themselves. Marriage, for example, began long before governmental paperwork. Over time, institutions like this can remain unstructured, become privately formalized, be taken over and controlled by the state—which has quietly become the default definition, and maybe that’s part of the problem. They can also decay or be overtaken from within by parasitic factions. The collapse of something like PBS isn’t necessarily a tragedy—it’s part of this cycle. And the rise of new institutions like Racket, Triggernometry and Unherd isn’t the breakdown of trust; it’s where trust has gone.
Endowments that size almost always grow far faster than they are spent, particularly when they are competently administered. When administrators and those with authority over disbursements act like they are shutting down the enterprise for lack of outside funding, it raises a serious question as to how they plan to disburse or manage these giant nest eggs.
Good reporting Greg. Please extend this to a series. Next allotment should explore who gets the revenue from all Sesame Street and like programming from all revenue sources (royalties from copyrights, advertising both during and outside of TV program time slots, merchandise, etc.). And then tell us how much annual revenue they get from donation drives vs standard subscription revenue.
In the late 1970s/early 1980s I worked in the building that housed NPR's headquarters in D.C. at the time at 2025 M Street, NW. NPR leased the whole building even though it didn't need all the space and sublet the space it wasn't using. At one point it was up on the Hill crying poor while, at the same time, it was taking back whole floors it was subletting depriving itself of the revenue the subletting was producing. Since then I've ignored all of it, and PBS's, claims of financial woes. At some point the claims may be true but I saw too much of the boy crying wolf to believe them.
Yes, indeed.. it is so very interesting when we follow the money trail.. PBS became another Covid Plandemic/Depopulation casualty as far as I was concerned.. When they started taking donations from Pfizer, and other big Pharma criminals.. Like the Gates Foundation.. I had known for almost two decades that if the Philanthropath Gates was financing it.. then whatever that entity might be, it was now circumspect..
Now would be the perfect time for NPR et al to lead by example. They're all in favor of wealth redistribution policies to deal with wealth/income inequality when it comes to the tax code. Why not walk the talk? All that need be done to avoid these layoffs is to cut K. Maher's pay (and all the high earners) and use the funds to retain the lower level staff. C'mon NPR, wealth redistribution charity begins at home.
Thanks Greg. A great, necessary and spot on story. I think that sadly, increasingly, maybe because Trump's common sense and popular policies and wins make it harder for them, it is becoming even more common for all news (leaving out Fox) outlets to feel it is necessary to spin every news story into something that Trump can be criticized for. Feeding the atmosphere of Trump hatred is their highest priority and it's impossible not to notice.
The job of a progressive journalist is first of all to promote progressive goals; in this case to a) maintain government subsidized progressive propaganda; and b) damage the Trump Administration whenever possible.
By our standards, they’re behaving unethically. By their standards, we’re behaving unethically when we tell the truth.
I was amused recently to read in the liberal media about Axiom’s manned mission to space. I had to drill down very far before it was made clear that the Axiom mission involved a SpaceX capsule being launched by a SpaceX rocket. Anything to avoid giving Elon Musk credit.
And sadly, I think mostly due to what has happened to our institutions of higher education, the percentage of journalists that consider themselves to be progressives is wildly disproportionate to not only the rest of the general population, but to all of American journalism
Yes, Trump has become the ultimate scapegoat. Ironically, he's also one of them at heart, and does his own grifting. But, hey, sometimes it takes in Insider to get the job done!
How will rural Americans survive without constant stories of how climate change disproportionately affects trans women of color?
I nominate you for top comment!
I second BeadleBlog's nomination.
third
fourth
I, too, enjoyed Brent's comment.
My Border Patrol cousin in rural Ajo, AZ (40 miles north of the Mexican border) on the possibility of Channel 8 (PBS) going dark: “Cuz, it’ll be up to us CBP/ICE agents to update the soon to arrive winter visitors from Seattle and Portland on the increasing temperatures here in Ajo and the illegals skipping us this winter, because, you know, the .003 degrees increase will cause them to die as they’re attempting to scale the border wall! Oh, the humanity!! God I love my job, cuz!!”
That about covers it.
we will build them high speed internet forever
Right after the Cali high speed rail is completed. 🥴
These are hundred year projects, resistance is futile
"Retirement projects".
I personally spent 14 years suing to stop that project. The courts protected the status quo...
In Illinois, the state industrial complex is building a $3+B water pipeline to the western Chicago suburbs based on non peer reviewed analysis by some assistant professors at U. of Illinois. Good for their tenure. Illinois is a single party state and the state industrial complex is like a cancer that takes more and more each year.
The gerrymandering outlines in the sorry State of Illinois is the poster child for gerrymandering.
They'll tune in to CBC.
Oh the humanity!
They will have to go to their public libraries like everybody else for the book readings.
It's so on-brand for these people to go down with facially disingenuous concern-trolling about "underserved rural communities." I happen to know how they talk about rural Americans behind closed doors.
Deplorables, I think is the word.
lets not forget "racists"..... or on a bad day...... "fascists!". I'm still scratching my head over that one...I've never really met anybody in the Midwest who thinks that the state should control the means of production under a nationalistic authoritarian regime.
No modern Progressive rant is complete without a "MAGA!" or two.
A whole basket of deplorables, as Her Majesty so eloquently put it.
Not even behind closed doors! Remember in 2024 when White Rural Rage was the toast of the coastal elite and network shows? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rural_Rage
I live in rural Pennsylvania. We have Facebook and smart phones here.
And I in rural Oklahoma, where we have internet, as well as Starlink available. Imagine that!
Yes, but, (put upon scoffing Coastal voice) no diversity and so no cute ethnic eateries! And no queer theater, ugh! 🙄
I have had to correct some of my most virtuous friends about calling our neighbors Rednecks. Rednecks would be people of color, no?
I don't think they bother to close the door before trashing "flyover country."
Nah they’re pretty up front about it
Oh, please dish!
Nice work, Greg! You raise some great questions. I'm a big fan of the PBS and wish them every success, should they decide to return to sanity and find some respect for their fellow citizens and their own obligation to truth.
They could begin by spending some of that treasure trove they already have. The Harvard Effect. Taxpayers should not be paying organizations that have such available funds. Nor should such organizations be 501c3 that makes donations tax deductible.
I'm afraid that ship has sailed, but time will tell.
I love the meme I saw splattered about that Sesame Street didn't change from when you were a child you were just raised to be a selfish asshole. Something like that.
I grew up in the 70's and 80's with Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, and Captain Kangaroo. They are all rolling in their graves at what Sesame Street became. Even Nova became a bastion of what "Science" is today. Science and journalism are kind of the same now. Truth is a bystander to hero worship and desire for the big chair with the fat paycheck.
My favorite part of PBS (as a subscriber) is that Nova in particular is so incredibly wrong on everything it's done for the last 15 years. James Webb obliterated all of these fools in 2 years.
The best thing I’ve seen on PBS lately was Steve Bannon’s most recent Frontline interview (from about 12 days ago).
Most amusing! Many thanks!
At this moment I am negotiating a possible asset sale of the small manufacturing company I founded and have been running for over 20 years. Looks like I won't make very much for my trouble. That is because I made a poor decision two decades ago to get into a business of making high quality tangible goods in the US, instead of running some elaborate tech, crypto or medical grift. Or making mid six figures in the government administration space (I haven't made six figures in a quarter century).
Sometimes I am appalled at how younger people seem to be chasing so many scams these days, but maybe, looking at who wins and who loses in modern America, I shouldn't blame them.
Best of luck with your sale. I hope you get a good deal for all your hard work.
The issue is why take risk and work hard, while we individuals that risk and work are forced to subsidize others to do neither.
Pre-Trump, we were also forced to subsidized organizations that advocate against our democratic interests, and already have more than sufficient funds to operate.
If your business is profitable and your employees can run it profitably with just a little bit of consulting from you along the way, consider an ESOP exit strategy.
Have you ever heard of ACIPCO in Birmingham. Alabama?
Have not.
I think you won, actually.
Great point. So why not use some of that money to save workers from being fired? It seems like they're using the excuse of budget cuts to axe employees they'd already planned to axe.
I'd have a lot more respect for public broadcasting and these ultra-rich universities if they used their cash reserves to save employees--if they kept cuts to a minimum. But that's not what is happening.
Thought of this when I saw that it was American Experience they chose to axe at WHBH - seems like they're cutting off the nose to spite the face, fund our station or we'll shoot this nonpartisan documentary.
That's a couple of people bemoaning the loss of "American Experience," with the implication that the program was an example of what public media should be/do--"this nonpartisan documentary."
Sorry, but I think y'all have Stockholm syndrome.
You've been held hostage for so long, and fed PC-Progressive bullshit, that you can't differentiate unbiased any more.
Just look at the programs on their website--90% of them are pure PC-Prog (racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, capitalism). EVERY one has a PC-Prog spin, even if the subject isn't--the story of Mr Polaroid, for example is told by an androgynous black woman(?).
There are millions of American Experience stories that could be told--WITHOUT a PC-Prog/NPR/PBS lens. Good riddance to the PBS bias!
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/collections/streaming-now/
Rachel Carson
An intimate portrait of the woman whose groundbreaking writings revolutionized our relationship to the natural world and launched the modern environmental movement.
American Coup: Wilmington 1898
The little-known story of a deadly 1898 race massacre and coup d’état in Wilmington, North Carolina, when white supremacists overthrew the multi-racial government of state’s largest city through a campaign of violence and intimidation.
Change, Not Charity: The Americans with Disabilities Act poster image Change, Not Charity: The Americans with Disabilities Act
Change, Not Charity: The Americans with Disabilities Act
The dramatic story of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. The film highlights the determined people who literally put their bodies on the line to pass the legislation that changed the lives of all Americans.
Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP
The story of civil rights hero Walter White — one of the most influential Black men in mid-century America and leader of the NAACP from 1929 to 1955, yet one of the least known figures in civil rights history.
The American Diplomat
Explore the lives and legacies of three African American ambassadors who broke racial barriers to reach high-ranking appointments in the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations and left a lasting impact on the Foreign Service.
Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space
Meet the influential author and key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Also a trained anthropologist, Hurston collected folklore throughout the South and Caribbean — reclaiming, honoring and celebrating Black life on its own terms.
The Sun Queen
Scientist Mária Telkes dedicated her career to harnessing the power of the sun. Though undercut and thwarted by her male colleagues, she persevered to design the first successfully solar-heated house in 1948 and held more than 20 patents.
Stonewall Uprising
In 1969, homosexuality was illegal in almost every state... but that was about to change. The Stonewall riots marked a major turning point in the modern gay civil rights movement.
The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer
A brilliant scientist, Oppenheimer was tasked with the development of the atomic bomb in the top-secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico during World War II.
The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi's Schools
Explore what happened when the small Mississippi town of Leland integrated its public schools in 1970. Told through the remembrances of students, teachers and parents, the film shows how the town – and America – were transformed.
The Gilded Age
Meet the titans and barons of the glittering late 19th century, whose materialistic extravagance contrasted harshly with the poverty of the struggling workers who challenged them. The vast disparities between them sparked debates still raging today.
The Eugenics Crusade
The Eugenics Crusade tells the story of the unlikely –– and largely unknown –– campaign to breed a “better” American race, tracing the rise of the movement that turned the fledgling science of heredity into a powerful instrument of social control.
The Cancer Detectives
The Cancer Detectives tells the untold story of the first-ever war on cancer and the coalition of people who fought tirelessly to save women from cervical cancer—which was once the number one cancer killer of women.
The Blinding of Isaac Woodard
In 1946, Isaac Woodard, a Black army sergeant on his way home to South Carolina after serving in WWII, was pulled from a bus for arguing with the driver. The local chief of police savagely beat him, leaving him unconscious and permanently blind.
Casa Susanna
In the 1950s and ’60s, an underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to express their true selves.
The Perfect Crime
The shocking story of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy college students who murdered a 14-year-old boy in 1924 to prove they were smart enough to get away with it.
Lol chill my man I've never even watched or listened to it or whatever, was going off the way it was framed in the article, it was the luke-warmest of takes based on trust of the outfit we're both paying subscribers to, sorry I got it wrong Jesus Christ
Ah wait, AI slop, I rescind my apology and replace it with a go fuck yourself
What?
Keep a civil tongue in your head, son.
I'm a writer--have been for several decades BEFORE there was the "Artificial Plagiarist" using the dash.
Might want to think twice before accusing someone of something.
And same goes for assuming value for a program you don't know anything about.
Easy test, if you're not a robot post only the following: "I'm an idiot incapable of taking my own advice"
Babble away, sonny.
Until your experience catches up with your tongue, might want to hold the latter.
Same principle Obama applied during the government shutdown. They had rangers sprinting to every gate of the National Parks to ruin people’s vacations before even considering other ways to save money. Never let a crisis go to waste.
Yes! The Trump cuts bailed out the execs at PBS; gave themthe best excuse to continue the cuts they began in 2023 and continued into 2024, 2024, prior to the cuts.
Those are called hostage puppies.
🤣😂
or...maybe they woke up and realized they have been riding the gravy train with biscuit wheels and decided to cut the dead wood they've been carrying for years...cuz it was gubmint monies paying for it.
Maybe. Too often, though, it's the "dead wood" that does the cutting.
The 500k/year salaries. That’s some non-profit salary.
I have read that some are in the $700,000. range.
I think I've read that's a fairly common salary for the CEO of a major league non-profit. Here's the superintendent of the school district in the Chicago suburb where the current Pope grew up doing well for himself:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/03/28/dolton-superintendent-salary-dolton-schools/
"What is it about Dolton and inexcusably bloated salaries for elected officials and administrators?
The outgoing superintendent of the school district for elementary and middle schools in the village of Dolton and neighboring Riverdale, we’ve just come to learn, is making $450,000 a year and by the time he retires two years from now his salary will balloon to $510,000.
Just to put that in perspective, Pedro Martinez, who is running the nation’s fourth largest school system at Chicago Public Schools, is making a little over $350,000 in salary. How in the world is Kevin Nohelty, who oversees 10 schools, making nearly $100,000 more?
Dolton Elementary School District 148 has fewer than 2,000 students. Chicago Public Schools has a little over 325,000.
Nohelty amazingly is the highest paid school superintendent in all of Illinois, according to research from conservative publisher Wirepoints.
Another point of contrast: the median household income in Dolton is $58,706, which is $23,000 lower than the statewide median, making the exorbitant pay for the local school boss that much more galling."
Yes, take a look at PBS fundraising videos to get an idea of where management's head is at. Could have been made in the 1960's!
Yeah, where’s the outrage and protests for the little guy on the layoffs while the “non profits” are sitting on tens or hundreds of millions?
Being really rich and being a hypocrite kind of go together.
Bill.. Completely agree..
https://current.org/2024/06/pbs-lays-off-24-staffers-cuts-vacant-positions/?wallit_nosession=1
Here is the layoff story in PBS' own words in 2024. Trump cuts were a blessing for them; best excuse for "saying goodbye to dear friends and colleagues".
As a rule, left-wing people cut the most sympathetic things first and preserve the grift, so that they can do PR about how awful austerity is.
Excellent reporting. I hope this becomes common knowledge, like how most people now know that many top universities are sitting on billions of dollars while threatening to fire cancer researchers if they don't get federal funding for DEI administrators.
As an aside, I absolutely hate that tired old trope about something costing just as much as a cup of coffee a day. Let them come pry my daily cup of coffee from my still slightly warm, dead hands.
As well, if that's the metric, it should be easy enough to do a fundraising event asking people to donate $1.60 per day in perpetuity. Gee why wouldn't every American adult go for that?
They want that $5.00 per day that Starbucks charges for a cup of drip coffee. Insane.
Defunding public broadcasting is the best fundraising gift they could ask! Oh, the pledge drives that will follow to "make up" for the cuts "keep this station on the air." And all those Act Blue people who will dutifully send them ever more unrestricted money. The folks at WGBH and MPR are secretly giddy with joy.
They sure seem upset about losing what they keep insisting is a tiny, insignificant portion of their funding.
Here in Oregon, the NPR station stated on air over and over the past several weeks that the Federal cuts represented 9% of their budget. And won’t you please become a new subscriber or up your memberships to a sustainer level?
One of the local classical stations did that even before the ink was dry- raising their funding cycles from 4 to god knows what a year (I don't know how many now, I got sick of the puling and stopped listening). This was to cover what they even admitted was a smallish gap in funding. I personally thought that having local buisness sponsorships- while not full on ads, but call outs to sponsorship on air, might solve such a small gap, but they would rather extort their listeners, it seems.
to always appear to be in crisis is a fundraising strategy.
They do it well for sure.
They could also get rid of the DEI hires they got in to do 'special' shows. This is radio mind you, so they had to get the most obvious voices they could to prove to the audience that their new Hosts were diverse. The gay guy lisps outrageously and the black woman has a discernable african-american accent. I can't even with the gay guy's segments. His sibilance is over the top. All I can see is Sylvester the cat spitting all over the microphone. The black lady isn't too bad, but she seems relegated to minority music and nothing else. It seems like a weird tokenism going on there.
https://current.org/2024/06/pbs-lays-off-24-staffers-cuts-vacant-positions/?wallit_nosession=1
In PBS own words, the real reasons for cuts that began in 2023, and contined into 2024, 2025, well before Trump cuts.
Maybe NPR is wonderful, but I’ve never listened to a second of it in my 48+ years. Yet somehow I’ve been able to go elsewhere andaccess news and weather as well as entertainment and cultural features.
As for PBS, every show has commercials that somehow are not commercials because they state “ funding for this program, made possible by…” whichever corporate sponsor or left wing endowment.
And every PBS show also is funded by “viewers like you.” So perhaps going forward, NPR and PBS can call their commercials commercials, and continue to charge “viewers like you” for streaming subscriptions as they have for a few years now.
Just so you know, NPR is not wonderful.
It was wonderful once. I remember it. But, like happened with so many things in the 2010s, it transformed into something very ugly while coasting on its previous reputation and pretending like nothing happened.
When Garrison Keillor was just doing poetry (and not Marxist ideology) it was worth tuning in. But now the place is run by "head girls" and they forced out Keillor with what in hindsight looks like a very spurious allegations by an employee during the height of the "me too" era. The folks that are in charge may seem nice on the surface, but they're cannibals at heart.
“Be kind,” while inserting the shiv.
I've never met one of the "be kind" types who wasn't simmering with barely contained malevolence.
…d’accord.
A lot of institutions go through a natural evolution, being once wonderful and impressive, turning into senescence and death eventually. I suppose that’s the case with NPR.
I might have guessed! 😂
My solution to keep PBS on the air. The local stations need local support to survive. I don't care a lick about NPR.
Great work. Thanks! There’s been a lot of public hand-wringing lately about institutions—people picking sides, drawing lines, warning of collapse or calling for restoration. But maybe we can cool it and accept that the internet is acting as an accelerant to natural or even overdue changes . We tend to think of institutions as large public or quasi-public organizations—bureaucracies, agencies, legacy media, universities. But that’s a narrow view. Institutions aren’t created by charters or tax codes—they arise naturally from collective behavior, from the patterns and norms that emerge as societies organize themselves. Marriage, for example, began long before governmental paperwork. Over time, institutions like this can remain unstructured, become privately formalized, be taken over and controlled by the state—which has quietly become the default definition, and maybe that’s part of the problem. They can also decay or be overtaken from within by parasitic factions. The collapse of something like PBS isn’t necessarily a tragedy—it’s part of this cycle. And the rise of new institutions like Racket, Triggernometry and Unherd isn’t the breakdown of trust; it’s where trust has gone.
Thanks for this, Nathan. The best possible response to the wailing!!
Endowments that size almost always grow far faster than they are spent, particularly when they are competently administered. When administrators and those with authority over disbursements act like they are shutting down the enterprise for lack of outside funding, it raises a serious question as to how they plan to disburse or manage these giant nest eggs.
Cushy retirements for the remaining execs?
Good reporting Greg. Please extend this to a series. Next allotment should explore who gets the revenue from all Sesame Street and like programming from all revenue sources (royalties from copyrights, advertising both during and outside of TV program time slots, merchandise, etc.). And then tell us how much annual revenue they get from donation drives vs standard subscription revenue.
I second the motion for more reporting, Greg. Please follow the money all the way to the last endowment dollar.
There are a LOT of toys licensed by the Children's Television Workshop. I always wondered where all that money went.
Now they're called Sesame Workshop. They're a nonprofit, and for what it's worth, they post their financials online: https://sesameworkshop.org/about-us/financials/
Maybe feature some other stations as well. Great idea, Jack.
In the late 1970s/early 1980s I worked in the building that housed NPR's headquarters in D.C. at the time at 2025 M Street, NW. NPR leased the whole building even though it didn't need all the space and sublet the space it wasn't using. At one point it was up on the Hill crying poor while, at the same time, it was taking back whole floors it was subletting depriving itself of the revenue the subletting was producing. Since then I've ignored all of it, and PBS's, claims of financial woes. At some point the claims may be true but I saw too much of the boy crying wolf to believe them.
Yes, indeed.. it is so very interesting when we follow the money trail.. PBS became another Covid Plandemic/Depopulation casualty as far as I was concerned.. When they started taking donations from Pfizer, and other big Pharma criminals.. Like the Gates Foundation.. I had known for almost two decades that if the Philanthropath Gates was financing it.. then whatever that entity might be, it was now circumspect..
The guy who stole an operating system code snd christened it MS-DOS? That guy?
That’s the guy!
Chuckling at "Philanthropath."
Nice!
Propaganda and apparently money laundering seem to be their main product.
Now would be the perfect time for NPR et al to lead by example. They're all in favor of wealth redistribution policies to deal with wealth/income inequality when it comes to the tax code. Why not walk the talk? All that need be done to avoid these layoffs is to cut K. Maher's pay (and all the high earners) and use the funds to retain the lower level staff. C'mon NPR, wealth redistribution charity begins at home.
No, it is our wealth they want to redistribute. Not theirs.
Bingo.
Hoist them on their own petard!
Thanks Greg. A great, necessary and spot on story. I think that sadly, increasingly, maybe because Trump's common sense and popular policies and wins make it harder for them, it is becoming even more common for all news (leaving out Fox) outlets to feel it is necessary to spin every news story into something that Trump can be criticized for. Feeding the atmosphere of Trump hatred is their highest priority and it's impossible not to notice.
The job of a progressive journalist is first of all to promote progressive goals; in this case to a) maintain government subsidized progressive propaganda; and b) damage the Trump Administration whenever possible.
By our standards, they’re behaving unethically. By their standards, we’re behaving unethically when we tell the truth.
I was amused recently to read in the liberal media about Axiom’s manned mission to space. I had to drill down very far before it was made clear that the Axiom mission involved a SpaceX capsule being launched by a SpaceX rocket. Anything to avoid giving Elon Musk credit.
And sadly, I think mostly due to what has happened to our institutions of higher education, the percentage of journalists that consider themselves to be progressives is wildly disproportionate to not only the rest of the general population, but to all of American journalism
"By their standards, we're behaving unethically when we tell the truth."
Another phrase I need to commit to memory. Well put.
Yes, Trump has become the ultimate scapegoat. Ironically, he's also one of them at heart, and does his own grifting. But, hey, sometimes it takes in Insider to get the job done!