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I suppose this is in response to this executive order: ENDING TAXPAYER SUBSIDIZATION OF BIASED MEDIA https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/end

I suppose this is in response to this executive order: ENDING TAXPAYER SUBSIDIZATION OF BIASED MEDIA https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/ending-taxpayer-subsidization-of-biased-media/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/endi... I would add that PBS has this to say about public media funding: > The U.S. is almost literally off the chart for how little we allocate towards our public media. At the federal level, it comes out to a little over $1.50 per person per year. Compare that to the Brits, who spend roughly $100 per person per year for the BBC. Northern European countries spend well over $100 per person per year. > And it really shows in the health of their of their public broadcasting systems. They tend to view those systems as essential democratic infrastructure. And, indeed, data show that there is a positive correlation between the health of a public broadcasting system and the health of a democratic governance. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-the-history-of-public-media-in-the-u-s-as-republicans-target-federal-funding https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-the-history-of-p...

gkolli 1y ago
This part of the EO is peculiar: “The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall determine whether “the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio (or any successor organization)” are complying with the statutory mandate that “no person shall be subjected to discrimination in employment . . . on the grounds of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex.” 47 U.S.C. 397(15), 398(b). In the event of a finding of noncompliance, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall take appropriate corrective action.” Why is the Secretary of Health and Human Services the one responsible for this?
- sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
  Because RFK Jr is considered sufficiently loyal that they are willing to follow Trump's directives without question. This is the only qualification that truly matters to Trump. This qualification is particularly important for a role you want to use to arbitrarily punish people who aren't loyal enough.
- threetonesun 1y ago
  They hand out responsibilities to whomever is most likely to agree and follow through with whatever Trump says.
ryandrake 1y ago
Totally toothless. CBP is created and funded by Congress, the president doesn't get to tell them how to spend their funds.
- kasey_junk 1y ago
  Ask the nih how that’s going.
- mbfg 1y ago
  --doesn't-- -> shouldn't no one will stop him.
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
  Have you not been paying attention to what is happening? Republicans do not care and will not stop Trump from doing what he wants.
- micromacrofoot 1y ago
  thousands of people have been laid off due to similarly "toothless" orders
MurkyLabs 1y ago
Isn't it crazy that the supposed 'biased media' directly targets PBS who I know from watching children's shows as well as NOVA (it's been going for 51 seasons). These shows don't scream biased to me, they scream educational.
- lamename 1y ago
  Education to the uneducated (or those who would prefer we remain uneducated in the face of power) can easily cast any education as "biased" against their purposes. Most people see through that for what it is, but an increasing population of Americans don't.
  - brnt 1y ago
    “It is a well known fact that reality has liberal bias.”
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - mlyons1340 1y ago
      This is a really dumb quote.
      - ethbr1 1y ago
        It started under Bush Jr. And was true in its context then.
      - EasyMark 1y ago
        I never found it so, as going through "liberal" media I tend to see far fewer lies than I do when I wonder over to the world of mainstream conservative news.
      - AlexeyBelov 1y ago
        3 months old account, that is totally real, disagrees? Wow okay.
mike_hearn 1y ago
PBS would say that. Back here in reality the BBC is trusted by only about 40-44% of the British population, and actively distrusted by around a quarter. The true number who trust it is probably lower, as those polls suffer volunteering bias and other problems that push responses to the left when there's no ground truth to weight to. There's a profound moral problem with forcing people to pay money for media they actively distrust or despise. There's certainly no link between "health" of a democracy and the funding level of state-funded media, unless you're the sort of person who defines a healthy society as one where everyone believes the government all the time.
- yladiz 1y ago
  What profound moral problem are you talking about? If you take your point even further, you could argue there’s a moral problem with forcing people who are distrusting of or despise the government to pay taxes at all, but it’s generally agreed that the health of a country in part does depend on revenues generated by taxes (since you need money to pay for things that benefit many people, like roads, public transit, etc.).
  - mike_hearn 1y ago
    Yeah, the morality of taxation and the role of the state is a deep topic that has been debated for thousands of years. Nearly everyone accepts that taxation is justified for some cases where you can't really avoid benefiting from the expenditure, the textbook example being public goods like defense (you can't opt-out of benefiting from the defeat of an invading army) or a lighthouse (you can't stop a sailor who didn't pay from seeing it). And post-communism most people accept that taxation is not justified for many other cases, for example, using tax money to gift the president a private golf club would not be moral (he can buy golfing time with his salary or prior wealth). The benefit only accrues to the user in that case, and they can easily pay for it themselves. In the past you could argue that state media was more like a lighthouse, because signals were broadcast from towers unencrypted and there was no way to restrict reception to people who paid. So, pass a tax and make everyone pay if they own any kind of receiving device at all. But technological progress has changed everything. It's now easy to restrict broadcasts to only people who paid for them. TV/radio is no longer like a lighthouse, it's now more like a magazine and therefore it's immoral to tax fund them because they're not public goods anymore. You wouldn't be happy to find the government had forcibly subscribed you to the Wall Street Journal, right? You'd point out that people who want to read it can just buy a copy themselves. Same thing for TV/radio.
shadowgovt 1y ago
Yeah, this is the funniest thing about this EO. Decades of the Republicans chipping away at public broadcast funding resulting in public broadcasting having to ground itself firmly in outside charitable donation. Of all the ostensibly-federal organisms, they (and the Post Office, thanks Amazon) are best-situated to be outside direct monetary government influence.
- chii 1y ago
  But outside donations do also have potential strings. Think how much strings mozilla has been having with the money google gives them. Of course, there's no strings attached from a legal perspective. But i dont think anyone is kidding themselves that it's not strings attached money. Hopefully, the public broadcasting donations are from various small amounts from many viewers, and collectively they are less corrupting. But this isn't guaranteed, and during economic recessions, these sorts of sources tend to dry up (and get replaced with big money sources, and thus their agendas).
sva_ 1y ago
What a poor example. As a German, we are forced to pay much more than that, about 220 euro annually. Only a small percentage actually goes into news and such, most are entertainment programs. I don't know anyone who is younger/my age that is in favor of it or consumes it. It is basically the boomers forcing us to subsidize their shitty crime shows. Annually they collect about 9 billion euro, no surprise the author of that piece creams their pants at the prospect of being able to fuck the population over like that. I mean how much money can you reasonably expect for reporting news? People who can't afford food and clothes are forced to contribute to the insane salaries of the moderators of some of the shows. They're also not unbiased at all, they skew heavily left. The system is pretty rotten, can't wait for there to be a reform of it. /rant
- immibis 1y ago
  Reality skews heavily left. Should the news be about reality or ideology?
  - sva_ 1y ago
    Reality is indifferent to our political views.
- Nifty3929 1y ago
  Everybody loves communism except those who've actually experienced it. My wife and I were visiting a Western European country and watching the street from our balcony. Outside there was a parade of communists rallying for an upcoming vote. Well, my wife is from an actually communist country, and wanted to warn all those people that they would not have been allowed to parade or demonstrate in the country she's from. And would probably be a lot hungrier.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    It's somewhat messier than that. While I am aquatinted with the authoritarian nightmare that was Stalin himself, and with the DDR's Stasi, and think that Marx's vision was *only* an improvement *relative to pre-New Deal era capitalism* and doesn't have much to offer to the modern world[0], there's people in ex-communist countries who yearn for a return to the "good old days" and don't see what the problem was. (And hunger probably wouldn't be a big thing today: the communist eras most associated with that were fairly early into the process of transitioning away from agrarian and towards industrial societies. Probably would be less choice of food, but there would likely still be enough food, unless they started seeing every failure as a sign of sabotage like Pol Pot did. Which is a thing I'm worried about with Trump, because that failure mode is not limited to just communists). [0] because the modern world treats women as equals and we have universal education (which was novel for the era Marx wrote in), and trade unions are a thing. This gets most of the benefits without the various different failure modes that come with different kinds of Communism.
nkotov 1y ago
That's a $1.50 too many.
sershe 1y ago
$100 per person per year is an insane amount of spending on an information outlet controlled by the government. The value of public broadcasting to me is 0, but I do occasionally get exposed to NPR thru other people listening to it and it appears extremely biased to me. My favorite example was when a woman who is quite "woke" politically turned off some NPR program about the perils of patriarchy that i was involuntarily listening to. I asked why and it was too cringe even for her. Why would I want to pay for that?
Nifty3929 1y ago
>>The U.S. is almost literally off the chart for how little we allocate towards our public media. So? This is no justification for spending any particular amount of money on public media. We also rank near the bottom on spending for Bigfoot observational studies and head-regrowth technology. Perhaps the burden should be on folks to justify why we would want politicians to spend any money at all on public media. I love Sesame St and Mr Rogers as much as anybody - I grew up on that stuff. It was great. But certainly folks can see how this could gradually move into more politicized topics where it's better for the government to stay entirely out of it. And frankly, any form of "news" is on the wrong side of that line. Of course, it's theoretically possible to provide entirely factual news - but I would in no way trust any government (or entities funded thereby) to deliver it. Far to risky. At this point it's probably best to zero out all the funding, and then come back later and see if there is a genuine need for some form of public broadcasting.
- explodes 1y ago
  News can be non-political. Also throwing out your bigfoot analogies didn't really add any meaningful response to GP.
EasyMark 1y ago
Not paying for them with public money is neutral with me; however yet again, this is illegal, only Congress can change funding for these organizations and yet Congress lets another act of tyranny go through unanswered and democracy ends not with a bang and not even with a whimper...

gkolli 1y ago

This part of the EO is peculiar: “The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall determine whether “the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio (or any successor organization)” are complying with the statutory mandate that “no person shall be subjected to discrimination in employment . . . on the grounds of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex.” 47 U.S.C. 397(15), 398(b). In the event of a finding of noncompliance, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall take appropriate corrective action.” Why is the Secretary of Health and Human Services the one responsible for this?

sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
Because RFK Jr is considered sufficiently loyal that they are willing to follow Trump's directives without question. This is the only qualification that truly matters to Trump. This qualification is particularly important for a role you want to use to arbitrarily punish people who aren't loyal enough.
threetonesun 1y ago
They hand out responsibilities to whomever is most likely to agree and follow through with whatever Trump says.

ryandrake 1y ago

Totally toothless. CBP is created and funded by Congress, the president doesn't get to tell them how to spend their funds.

kasey_junk 1y ago
Ask the nih how that’s going.
mbfg 1y ago
--doesn't-- -> shouldn't no one will stop him.
ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
Have you not been paying attention to what is happening? Republicans do not care and will not stop Trump from doing what he wants.
micromacrofoot 1y ago
thousands of people have been laid off due to similarly "toothless" orders

MurkyLabs 1y ago

Isn't it crazy that the supposed 'biased media' directly targets PBS who I know from watching children's shows as well as NOVA (it's been going for 51 seasons). These shows don't scream biased to me, they scream educational.

lamename 1y ago
Education to the uneducated (or those who would prefer we remain uneducated in the face of power) can easily cast any education as "biased" against their purposes. Most people see through that for what it is, but an increasing population of Americans don't.
- brnt 1y ago
  “It is a well known fact that reality has liberal bias.”
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - mlyons1340 1y ago
    This is a really dumb quote.
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      It started under Bush Jr. And was true in its context then.
    - EasyMark 1y ago
      I never found it so, as going through "liberal" media I tend to see far fewer lies than I do when I wonder over to the world of mainstream conservative news.
    - AlexeyBelov 1y ago
      3 months old account, that is totally real, disagrees? Wow okay.

mike_hearn 1y ago

PBS would say that. Back here in reality the BBC is trusted by only about 40-44% of the British population, and actively distrusted by around a quarter. The true number who trust it is probably lower, as those polls suffer volunteering bias and other problems that push responses to the left when there's no ground truth to weight to. There's a profound moral problem with forcing people to pay money for media they actively distrust or despise. There's certainly no link between "health" of a democracy and the funding level of state-funded media, unless you're the sort of person who defines a healthy society as one where everyone believes the government all the time.

yladiz 1y ago
What profound moral problem are you talking about? If you take your point even further, you could argue there’s a moral problem with forcing people who are distrusting of or despise the government to pay taxes at all, but it’s generally agreed that the health of a country in part does depend on revenues generated by taxes (since you need money to pay for things that benefit many people, like roads, public transit, etc.).
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  Yeah, the morality of taxation and the role of the state is a deep topic that has been debated for thousands of years. Nearly everyone accepts that taxation is justified for some cases where you can't really avoid benefiting from the expenditure, the textbook example being public goods like defense (you can't opt-out of benefiting from the defeat of an invading army) or a lighthouse (you can't stop a sailor who didn't pay from seeing it). And post-communism most people accept that taxation is not justified for many other cases, for example, using tax money to gift the president a private golf club would not be moral (he can buy golfing time with his salary or prior wealth). The benefit only accrues to the user in that case, and they can easily pay for it themselves. In the past you could argue that state media was more like a lighthouse, because signals were broadcast from towers unencrypted and there was no way to restrict reception to people who paid. So, pass a tax and make everyone pay if they own any kind of receiving device at all. But technological progress has changed everything. It's now easy to restrict broadcasts to only people who paid for them. TV/radio is no longer like a lighthouse, it's now more like a magazine and therefore it's immoral to tax fund them because they're not public goods anymore. You wouldn't be happy to find the government had forcibly subscribed you to the Wall Street Journal, right? You'd point out that people who want to read it can just buy a copy themselves. Same thing for TV/radio.

shadowgovt 1y ago

Yeah, this is the funniest thing about this EO. Decades of the Republicans chipping away at public broadcast funding resulting in public broadcasting having to ground itself firmly in outside charitable donation. Of all the ostensibly-federal organisms, they (and the Post Office, thanks Amazon) are best-situated to be outside direct monetary government influence.

chii 1y ago
But outside donations do also have potential strings. Think how much strings mozilla has been having with the money google gives them. Of course, there's no strings attached from a legal perspective. But i dont think anyone is kidding themselves that it's not strings attached money. Hopefully, the public broadcasting donations are from various small amounts from many viewers, and collectively they are less corrupting. But this isn't guaranteed, and during economic recessions, these sorts of sources tend to dry up (and get replaced with big money sources, and thus their agendas).

sva_ 1y ago

What a poor example. As a German, we are forced to pay much more than that, about 220 euro annually. Only a small percentage actually goes into news and such, most are entertainment programs. I don't know anyone who is younger/my age that is in favor of it or consumes it. It is basically the boomers forcing us to subsidize their shitty crime shows. Annually they collect about 9 billion euro, no surprise the author of that piece creams their pants at the prospect of being able to fuck the population over like that. I mean how much money can you reasonably expect for reporting news? People who can't afford food and clothes are forced to contribute to the insane salaries of the moderators of some of the shows. They're also not unbiased at all, they skew heavily left. The system is pretty rotten, can't wait for there to be a reform of it. /rant

immibis 1y ago
Reality skews heavily left. Should the news be about reality or ideology?
- sva_ 1y ago
  Reality is indifferent to our political views.
Nifty3929 1y ago
Everybody loves communism except those who've actually experienced it. My wife and I were visiting a Western European country and watching the street from our balcony. Outside there was a parade of communists rallying for an upcoming vote. Well, my wife is from an actually communist country, and wanted to warn all those people that they would not have been allowed to parade or demonstrate in the country she's from. And would probably be a lot hungrier.
- ben_w 1y ago
  It's somewhat messier than that. While I am aquatinted with the authoritarian nightmare that was Stalin himself, and with the DDR's Stasi, and think that Marx's vision was *only* an improvement *relative to pre-New Deal era capitalism* and doesn't have much to offer to the modern world[0], there's people in ex-communist countries who yearn for a return to the "good old days" and don't see what the problem was. (And hunger probably wouldn't be a big thing today: the communist eras most associated with that were fairly early into the process of transitioning away from agrarian and towards industrial societies. Probably would be less choice of food, but there would likely still be enough food, unless they started seeing every failure as a sign of sabotage like Pol Pot did. Which is a thing I'm worried about with Trump, because that failure mode is not limited to just communists). [0] because the modern world treats women as equals and we have universal education (which was novel for the era Marx wrote in), and trade unions are a thing. This gets most of the benefits without the various different failure modes that come with different kinds of Communism.

nkotov 1y ago

That's a $1.50 too many.

sershe 1y ago

$100 per person per year is an insane amount of spending on an information outlet controlled by the government. The value of public broadcasting to me is 0, but I do occasionally get exposed to NPR thru other people listening to it and it appears extremely biased to me. My favorite example was when a woman who is quite "woke" politically turned off some NPR program about the perils of patriarchy that i was involuntarily listening to. I asked why and it was too cringe even for her. Why would I want to pay for that?

Nifty3929 1y ago

>>The U.S. is almost literally off the chart for how little we allocate towards our public media. So? This is no justification for spending any particular amount of money on public media. We also rank near the bottom on spending for Bigfoot observational studies and head-regrowth technology. Perhaps the burden should be on folks to justify why we would want politicians to spend any money at all on public media. I love Sesame St and Mr Rogers as much as anybody - I grew up on that stuff. It was great. But certainly folks can see how this could gradually move into more politicized topics where it's better for the government to stay entirely out of it. And frankly, any form of "news" is on the wrong side of that line. Of course, it's theoretically possible to provide entirely factual news - but I would in no way trust any government (or entities funded thereby) to deliver it. Far to risky. At this point it's probably best to zero out all the funding, and then come back later and see if there is a genuine need for some form of public broadcasting.

explodes 1y ago
News can be non-political. Also throwing out your bigfoot analogies didn't really add any meaningful response to GP.

EasyMark 1y ago

Not paying for them with public money is neutral with me; however yet again, this is illegal, only Congress can change funding for these organizations and yet Congress lets another act of tyranny go through unanswered and democracy ends not with a bang and not even with a whimper...