A long time ago, before dreams of a second Trump presidency were ever really jelling as a possibility in everyone’s mind, we were under assault from the censorious truth guardians and slippery language lizards that those running the Biden administration were installing throughout our government and whose true believers manned the public media bulwarks on the outside.
These self-appointed, self-described defenders of democracy, like the collaborators at Twitter and Facebook, who worked to suppress inconvenient opinions and conflicting information, however worthy or accurate it might have been, were making decisions on what was right, proper, and necessary for the American public to see vice allowing them the privilege inherent in the First Amendment of speaking and reading freely.
One of the slipperiest and most smug in her castle was Katherine Maher. Not only was she the head of National Public Radio and been Wiki’s chief as well, but she also, at the time, was the chairman of the board that oversaw Signal, the encrypted messaging app.
She also had a loose association with the truth. As solidly ensconced as these people were during that 2021-2024 reign of oppressiveness, her smugness was appreciated in many quarters by her similarly placed and over-educated fellows.
The rest of us normal, freedom-loving Americans were horrified.
Hannibal Lecter with a vagina.
— American Gulag (Слава Америке!) 🇺🇸 (@MIGHTY_MIDDLE) April 19, 2024
Maher’s mantra wasn’t so much getting rid of whatever she determined to be bad information so much as replacing it with what she determined to be what we should be hearing.
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher doesn’t just want to “stamp out bad information” on the internet. She wants to replace it with “good information”—i.e., left-wing narratives—and force the public to “sit within that good information” as “a collective.”
Big Sister has arrived. pic.twitter.com/7kfq8VYHfj
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) April 18, 2024
Which is why she was the perfect pick to run NPR, the ostensibly American national public radio that skewed exclusively to progressive ideology.
“In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
– Katherine Maher, former CEO of Wikimedia, current CEO of NPR
Is there a better encapsulation of a post-modernist worldview?
— stevemur (@stevemur) May 20, 2026
Everything in their progressively perfect lives was upended on 5 November 2024, when the United States of America chose to elect Donald Trump instead of their preferred candidate for a continuation of the Obama years.
One of the plethora of Trump’s targets was funding for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and NPR. The broadcast companies had long been burrs under conservative saddles thanks to tax dollars feeding the endless biased vitriol, which had only gotten worse as the prospect of a Trump victory became alarmingly clearer.
When Trump took office with a slim GOP majority in both houses of Congress to boot, one of the first budget knives to fall was on the two publicly funded media outlets.
NPR tried mightily to fend off the axe by insisting that its cut from the feds was so minuscule, there was no point. The federal budget would hardly notice the savings from deleting the direct Corporation for Public Broadcasting money NPR received.
…NPR negotiated with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for a $7 million bailout. They agreed that instead of giving NPR a lump sum, the CPB would send most of this funding to local stations who would then choose to buy radio shows from NPR. That’s an arrangement that exists to this day.
“Partly just to keep the money coming because the Republicans who were all for cutting it all off,” said Mitchell. “But it was less unacceptable to them if it went through the stations. And there was a philosophy that: public broadcasting was to represent the entire country.”
Today, NPR receives only about 1% of its operating budget directly from the federal government. Other revenue includes donations, returns from its endowment and corporate sponsorship.
They sort of explained the shell game they played with the reverse-purchasing, money-laundering deal they worked out with member stations, which used federal CPB grants to buy those programs from NPR.
Slick.
…However, NPR also receives about 30% of its funding from fees for its programs, mostly from its 246 member stations. Those stations receive an average of about 13% of their funding from the CPB, although there’s a lot of variance across stations.
Hey remember when they tried to tell us that only 1% of their operating budget came from federal funding?
Good timeshttps://t.co/SwzTZxFyvI pic.twitter.com/yuqNwqpstS
— Mark (@rhapsodyboard1) May 19, 2026
The Ponzi scheme began unraveling when it became apparent that Congress and Trump meant ALL of the CPB funds, not just NPR’s wee portion. If the member stations had no moolah to kickback to the mother ship, well, hang on.
So Maher sued the Trump administration, much to everyone’s delight…
…has decided there’s some God given natural right to buttloads of taxpayer dollars to fund her fiefdom. In classic AWFL fashion, no loud-mouthed, abhorrent Bad Orange Man-whatever his gig – has any right to interfere with her collecting those treasury checks.
You can’t make this stuff up.
‘It’s an AFFRONT!’ she sniveled, dabbing at her sodden, streaming eyes.
National Public Radio and three Colorado-based public radio stations have filed a lawsuit against President Trump, contesting an executive order that seeks to cut federal funding to public broadcasters, including NPR and PBS.
The lawsuit was lodged in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. The plaintiffs are seeking to block implementation of the order, claiming it infringes upon public broadcasters’ constitutional rights and jeopardizes their mission to provide fair, independent reporting.
…claiming they were infringing on NPR’s First Amendment Rights.
The Babylon Bee Would Like To Announce We Are Joining NPR In Suing The Government For Not Giving Us Millions Of Dollars https://t.co/feJk3c4sOV pic.twitter.com/7auGEBTCbg
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 28, 2025
That tack came to naught, and now?
What is described as a ‘bloodbath’ is brewing because some folks are going to be out of a job at the cash-strapped NPR.
WAAH
Turns out there wasn’t a market for a 24/7 AWFL podcast https://t.co/g8ZMoZMGK4
— Sunny (@sunnyright) May 19, 2026
If employees are smart, they’ll take a buyout while there’s any money available.
NPR is slashing jobs and restructuring its newsroom as the public-radio giant grapples with a financial crunch fueled by federal funding cuts, weakening station revenue and dramatic changes in how Americans consume news.
The nonprofit broadcaster told staff this week that roughly 300 employees, mostly on newsgathering desks, are eligible for voluntary buyouts as executives scramble to close an $8 million budget gap.
NPR management expects only about 30 employees to accept the buyouts voluntarily, meaning layoffs in the 425-strong newsroom could follow if too few workers opt in.
The downsizing comes during a grim moment for the news biz, with the Washington Post seeing brutal cuts and CBS News launching layoffs earlier this year.
I do kind of take issue with the framing here. It’s not necessarily a grim moment for the ‘NEWS business’ so much as grim times for purveyors of fake news and horrifically biased reporting. Even worse if it was done on the public dime.
…National and general-assignments desks will merge, according to NPR Editor-in-Chief Thomas Evans. Culture, education, religion, addiction and sports coverage will be consolidated into a single society-and-culture desk, he said.
Science and climate coverage will also combine, while global health reporting will move under the international desk, under the new plan.
NPR is also eliminating its regional bureau chief structure and replacing it with a centralized “Regions & Stations” desk designed to coordinate local and national reporting.
The cuts mark NPR’s second major retrenchment in recent years. In 2023, the network axed about 10% of its workforce after a projected deficit exceeded $30 million.
Pity about that climate desk.
And it seems that when NPR wailed about the news ‘deserts’ in the hinterlands that would be left if they were forced to turn off their microphones, they might just have exaggerated the teensiest bit.
Might have.
While the number of such ‘deserts’ are up, so are local news start-ups. It’s a transformational landscape, and NPR is one of the last dinosaurs wallowing in the tar pit, bellowing for help.
…“This report highlights the historic transformation in local news,” said Tim Franklin, professor and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Medill. “On one hand, news deserts are expanding, and closures are continuing apace. On the other, hundreds of startups are emerging. The questions are what will the local news ecosystem look like in a few years, and will parts of the U.S. be left behind?”
I can attest to this emerging phenomenon personally here in Pensacola. We have a tremendous local news source here run by a retired Naval officer who does all sorts of interviews and stories on important and interesting issues, with all of his content posted on Facebook. It’s accessible to everyone.
There are several others beside him, not to mention our local morning news radio host, who is constantly engaging with listeners on social media, including Facebook. It’s a thriving relationship, and he’s broken several important stories online after riding around and talking to people.
What was once a cherished local paper is now a USAToday worthless set of four pages, with no local news. Not even in a high school sports-hungry town. It’s worthless. The only thing they print locally is angry, TDS-laced letters to the editor. They do seem to find room for those.
If there are innerwebs, there can and most likely will be local news somewhere eventually.
Yeah. Anyone losing a job is dreary.
But there are some times in life when maybe the writing was on the wall, and choosing to ignore it out of arrogance and privilege was ill-advised.
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