Who deserves tax $$ more, Elon or Elmo?
Project 2025 swings at a perennial Republican punching bag - public broadcasting
By Sam Bellamy
Elon Musk has received tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies, regulatory tax credits, preferential loans and government contracts, including multiple deals that kept his companies alive.
By contrast, the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio receive about $500 million in funding, combined, from the federal government each year.
So, can you guess who the authors of the new conservative playbook, Project 2025, have targeted for the elimination of all taxpayer aid?
Would it be the world’s richest man, who’s worth an estimated $442 billion at this writing – up $170 billion since Donald Trump’s election?
Or would it be the people who bring us Sesame Street, Ken Burns documentaries, All Things Considered, Fresh Air and a host of other programs that inform, educate, entertain and generally edify us year after year?
We don’t need Masterpiece’s Sherlock or the kids from The Magic School Bus to figure that one out, do we?
If, like me, you’ve been watching the brakes and the steering slowly fail on the Republican bus for a few decades now, you know that trying to kill the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been a favorite pastime of the Grand Old Party for years – second only to trying to hit-and-run Obamacare.
In the latest foray, the authors of Project 2025 observe with evident indignation that “every Republican President since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting of taxpayer funding.”
This means, of course, that for “half a century, Republican Presidents have failed to accomplish what they set out to do.”
Imagine that. Noted intellectuals like George W. Bush, outwitted by the likes of Count von Count.
Now, of course, it’s Trump’s turn (again) to try to slay the “leftist” beast. Project 2025 declares that conservatives will “reward a president who eliminates this tyrannical situation” of funding public broadcasting, which does not “even bother to run programming that would attract conservatives.”
You’re probably at a loss, like me, to identify what’s liberal about Antiques Roadshow, Car Talk or This Old House. But in their never-ending crusade to shut down public broadcasting, Republicans gloss over the fact that most programs have no discernible political ideology, at least to those of us who don’t believe in Jewish space lasers or Haitian immigrants snacking on all creatures great and small, especially small.
Nevertheless, conservatives contend that public broadcasting is, in the word of Project 2025, “a liberal forum for public affairs and journalism.”
Accusations like that always remind me of Stephen Colbert’s quip that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” And never mind that PBS and NPR news shows routinely include conservative commentators, including as guests on the revival of Firing Line, the late right-wing icon William F. Buckley’s show.
Apparently conservative critics won’t be content until deep thinkers like Tucker Carlson can explore the grievances of clueless white guys on Morning Edition or Alex Jones gets to harass the grieving parents of school shooting victims on PBS News Hour.
Project 2025’s authors, like Newt Gingrich and other conservative leaders of yore, also can’t abide educational programs like Sesame Street, which they claim are “biased to the Left.”
Are Bert and Ernie a smidge too Sacco and Vanzetti? Is Oscar the Grouch brainwashing kids to notice homeless people living out of garbage cans? Or maybe it’s just all those people of color hanging out on Sesame Street? They’ve been there for decades now, loitering on the sidewalk. Can’t we gentrify?
(HBO, by the way, announced this month that it’s ending a nearly decade-long deal under which it paid production costs for Sesame Street in exchange for the right to air new episodes before they appear on PBS. HBO is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, the same conglomerate that owns CNN. Elmo and friends are, at least for now, homeless.)
Project 2025, with evident consternation, cites a Pew Research survey more than a decade ago that found that 25% of PBS viewers are “mostly liberal” and 35% are “consistently liberal.” NPR’s audience, the authors of Project 2025 harrumph, are “even to the Left of that,” with 26% “mostly liberal” and 41% “consistently liberal.”
But the authors of Project 2025 fail to mention other interesting surveys showing that PBS viewers and NPR listeners, like opponents of the conservative messiah Donald Trump, typically went further in school than those who don’t partake in public broadcasting.
While children’s programming attracts families across all income and education levels, adult programming on PBS and NPR tends to draw more educated Americans, who rarely find thoughtful offerings, for free, from commercial outlets.
Education levels aren’t the end-all and be-all of intelligence, of course. Some very bright people don’t go to college simply because they don’t have access to money, or they prefer to pursue careers where a degree isn’t necessary. And, as many of us can attest, some rather dim people in our midst possess one or more post-secondary degrees.
But perhaps Republican leaders hate public broadcasting simply because they’re resentful. They can’t stand that its programming appeals to an audience they can’t capture, the people who are too knowledgeable to accept Jewish space lasers, Cat-in-Hat-eating Haitians or – to use a less ludicrous example – the claim that Trump will magically bring down the price of eggs.
Public broadcasting encourages people to cultivate and nurture a love of learning and use critical thinking skills. That’s not at all conducive to manipulation by deceitful politicians like Trump and taxpayer-supported plutocrats like Musk.
They’d prefer Americans to believe Elmo is a lefty and Downton Abbey’s class struggles are divisive Marxist propaganda. They’d rather we all live in the alternative reality of Fox News or Newsmax, where ignorance is strength, 2+2=5 and Mr. Rogers would have been chased from the neighborhood long ago.