Comment by bbanyc

When Congress passed the CPB defunding bill, the Republican sponsors paraded around the most deranged takes to air on NPR in the last few years and asked, why should our tax dollars keep going to this?

And I'll be the first to admit that NPR has completely lost its mind, it's losing its listenership, and it needs to be humbled a bit. But audio is much cheaper than video and NPR's remaining listeners will easily be able to make up the shortfall. Meanwhile we're going to see PBS, whose news coverage mostly avoided the pitfalls NPR fell into and who run a lot more non-news programming, take a huge funding hit and resort to even more pledge drives and reruns, while local affiliates in large swaths of the country have to close entirely.

This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and not even throwing out the bathwater.