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- Photo by Indra Projects on Unsplash Once again, a federal judge has ruled that the executive branch can’t be the executive branch and do executive branch things. This time, it’s defunding NPR and PBS.
The argument is that the president can’t defund them because he doesn’t like what they say about him. Now, I can get that. I can get behind that.
They shouldn’t be defunded because of that.
Tilting At Windmills is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. They should be defunded because they suck at their jobs, and the American taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for not just crappy journalism, but a profound bias that thinks everyone who isn’t them is an uncultured swine.
One prime example of this is how NPR handled the Hunter Biden laptop story, or, more accurately, how they refused to handle it at all. Yes, that was 2020, but it’s not like I’m going to ever let that one slide.
If that was the only prime example, it would be enough in my book, but it’s not. Oh no, there’s a far more recent example, and it sums up just how much they suck at journalism.
It’s in who NPR chose to quote after the terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue and who they didn’t choose to quote .
NPR didn’t manage to quote a single member of the Michigan synagogue that was attacked last month by a crazed Hezbollah-supporting terrorist last month — but did manage to track down his pals 6,000 miles away in Lebanon, a new report reveals.
Now even NPR’s public editor is criticizing the lefty broadcaster for the stunning oversight.
Instead of focusing on the victims in the heinous attack, a March 14 “All Things Considered” segment sent an NPR reporter to the Lebanon hometown of Ayman Ghazali, 41, who just days earlier had rammed his truck into a Jewish preschool at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township.
Now, understand that I have no issue with them looking for the terrorist’s buddies in Lebanon. Finding out who this guy was and what made him tick—did he come here just to be a terrorist, or if he was radicalized here—is newsworthy.
But how do you cover a terrorist attack at an American synagogue without airing an interview with any of the survivors at all? That’s basic journalism. That’s the bare minimum that should be done.
NPR didn’t do that, and even their own public editor has a problem with it, which is great, but where was this outrage when it happened? That was weeks ago. It should have been addressed right then and there, and it wasn’t.
Neither NPR nor PBS is for the public at large. They’re for the so-called coastal elites and people who like to pretend they’re more sophisticated than they really are.
And that’s fine. That’s a market that’s being served. In a free market, that’s what matters.
But we shouldn’t be paying for it. There’s nothing in the Constitution about funding public broadcasting or any form of news media at all. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press, but not funding for the press.
This happened, as just the latest example of journalistic malpractice, and this is what we get from NPR’s public editor, McBride:
“This story on this village should not be judged as NPR’s complete coverage of the Michigan synagogue. NPR ran multiple stories on the attack,” she wrote.
“In all of that coverage, voices from Temple Israel are absent. I couldn’t find any stories that quote rabbis, congregation members or the families of the children who had to flee the building.”
She also acknowledged that parallel coverage by local news outlets did cover the congregation extensively.
“NPR or Michigan Public Radio pulled away from the story at Temple Israel too soon,” she said.
She added, “when important voices are missing from coverage, it distorts the audience’s perception of everything else.”
This, of course, is after she started by defending the coverage they did give. Again, I can see that as potentially newsworthy, but when no one can seem to do the most obvious thing and talk to survivors of the attack, that’s not pulling away from a story too soon, though. Oh no, that’s something else entirely. Share That was a conscious decision. That was the obvious place to start. It’s so obvious that pretty much everyone else who had people in place did just that. NPR didn’t. They chose not to do it, not because they wanted to move on to the next story but because they literally didn’t give a damn about the Jewish men, women, and children whose lives were being put in danger.
They cared more about the Hezbollah terrorist, the brother of a commander in that terrorist group, than the Americans who were in jeopardy.
This wasn’t a mistake. This was a decision that will likely be repeated over and over again.
Which is fine, if that’s what they want to do, but they can do it by funding themselves entirely. I don’t want my tax dollars going toward this anti-American propaganda organization pretending to be unbiased news. It’s just that simple.
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