1. NPR has never been really apolitical, as long as I can remember, but until the Obama error, um, era, sorry, and they fawned over everything he did, it was usually kept down to a dull roar. It got really bad, though, when the Trump campaign started, enough so that I had to stop listening to the comedy shows (e.g. Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me) because they became simply bitter and spiteful … even moreso after he won. But, in the end, such programs are opinion pieces of a sort.

   But the rest of the programming has also jumped over the advocacy shark. The news shows … well, just listen to them. Science Friday has become politicized, especially over global warming. The Marketplace shows jump on every chance they get to paint Trump as an economic illiterate, and talk down every bit of good news there is.

   They also air commercials, but that’s a minor quibble compared to the above.

   So, yeah, I’ve been in the “defund NPR” camp for some time now. This just adds to the list of reasons. Let it survive or die based solely on the support it can garner from the population who want to listen and choose to contribute … just like any other business.

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2. Reading lists from NPR? I’d rather beat myself in the head with the butt of my Kalashnikov!

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3. I remember a time when people (many of them these same NPR folks) were upset when some government apparatchiks proposed reviewing Library records to see who was checking out books that could be useful to terrorists. How long before Amazon provides your Kindle purchases to an ANTIFA kangaroo court?

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4. Public TV stations are funded by subscribers and donors. Do they also receive federal funding? I really don’t know. Anyone?

   1. It can be hard to find a straight answer. The network is funded by many sources, and you need to backtrack through layers of grants.

      Here’s one story on it.

      https://www.foxnews.com/politics/taxpayers-provide-more-than-25-percent-of-nprs-funding-analyst-says

      Whether to believe Fox, is up to you. But I tend to believe their numbers would be closer to reality than NPR’s own, simply because Fox has no incentive to either exaggerate or minimize it.

      1. There’s a very easy way to show that NPR is taxpayer funded: the screams you hear when someone proposes to take away that funding. If that funding didn’t exist there wouldn’t be any screams.
         QED.

         1. Yep, remember when this came up earlier, and the left screamed that republicans wanted to take “Sesame Street” off the air.

5. Wow…. decolonize your bookshelf.

   What a concept. In one way, I actually support it. The background logic for pretty much every leftist economic principle is based on a very colonial mode of thinking. Economic inequality is 100% based on the belief that your wealth is based on how much land you have control of. A reality in colonial times, no longer valid.

   If NPR were to de-colonialize their thinking, they might actually provide some value to the world.

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