River News: Our View

Wow, talk about the proof in the pudding. National Public Radio just gave a hands-on first-class demonstration of why government subsidies to the media are bad, no, horrific.

NPR is, of course, a world-class left-wing purveyor of distorted government narratives, paid for in part by taxpayers. They are known for their monotone voices — zombies, really, as Bob Hope once described Democrats — feeding their ideology to the masses via compelled tax funding.

So last week, a very-respected NPR editor, Uri Berliner, decided to call out his employer for said left-wing bias, urging more diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom. NPR has long denied any bias and heralded itself as a channel of truth — much as the Democratic Party denies its totalitarian agenda and declares itself to be, lol, the savior of democracy — while everybody else knows the score.

So what happened then? 

Well, the new NPR chief, Katherine Maher, decided to upbraid Berliner, saying his call for more diverse opinions was “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.” Translation: Opposing viewpoints make Democrats sick to their stomach … and determined to get better by stamping out the infectious message of free speech and expression.

Berliner ultimately resigned. So much for left-wing diversity and tolerance.

Now, we must say a few words about Maher because she’s new in the position. She is, first and foremost, a deep-state spook. Her resume reads more like a candidate to head the CIA than a national media outlet, having worked at various times at the Atlantic Council, the World Economic Forum, the State Department, Stanford University, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

And she’s only 41.

She’s something else, too — a “woke-as-woke-can-be” intersectionalist. This is increasingly a qualification to run government think tanks, government media, and, oh, the military.

So just what is a woke intersectionalist? Yeah, about that, we don’t really know, either. We think it means she’s somewhat to the left of Mao Tse-Tung, but we are not completely sure. Or perhaps it refers to the marriage of the deep state and woke politics, the vows exchanged at the intersection of Police State Drive and Absurdity Avenue.

Maher fits the bill. She’s very deep state on her resume. And woke she is, too, so much so that she has become a parody of herself. Some years ago, on Twitter (when Twitter was still Twitter), the Irish satirist Andrew Doyle created a parody account of the left under the name of Titania McGrath, a fictional activist who describes herself (or themself, as the case may be) as an intersectional ecosexual poet whose preferred pronouns are “variable.”

The posts on X are meant as a send-up of the left, and they are hilarious. However, as independent journalist Matt Taibbi pointed out last week, the real Katherine Maher makes posts that could have been posted by the fictitious McGrath.

Here’s a McGrath post Taibbi uses as an example: “You call it ‘Christmas.’ I call it the mass genocide of innocent turkeys in service of an oppressive patriarchal cult.”

Here’s a real Katherine Maher quote: “Made it through dinner. Zero turkeys sacrificed to the racist uncles.”

One can quickly see why Maher might be upset at the slightest notion that NPR should be objective in its reporting, preferring that reporters put down their recorders and notebooks and instead pick up an ideological bullhorn to spew leftist propaganda.

Here’s Maher view of what reporting should look like, as she addressed CNN’s coverage of looting in Los Angeles in two X posts: “CNN is talking about the tragedy of damage to iconic retail zones and shoe stores in LA. I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property. Also, reporting on extinguished shoe store fires is just lazy reporting” and “Cheesecakes are insured; the right to be black and breathe is without measure.”

In other words, it’s just lazy to report on riots that destroy small businesses and the lives of countless innocent people. One must instead use those violent riots as an opportunity to talk relentlessly about oppression.

Maher just assumed her position as head of NPR a few months ago. Instead of using the job search to choose a person who might revive actual journalism at the outlet, NPR hired one of the most far-left progressives in the country, plucking her almost literally from the pages of a cartoon — a progressive so far out of the mainstream that even moderate Democrats like Taibbi view her as a kook. 

All of which begs the question: Given that NPR has fashioned the most notoriously left news media operation on the planet — and that’s saying something — why does the government keep funding it?

Even if one believed in government subsidies for the media — we don’t because in the real world people and animals rarely bite the hand that feeds them — wouldn’t the concern be that all news outlets get a subsidy, not just ones selected to serve the government narrative?

NPR likes to argue that most of its money comes from corporations and foundations and that just 1 percent of its budget comes from the federal government, but the problem with that argument is that those corporate foundations are for the most part nothing more than window dressing — left-wing thinks tanks disguised as philanthropic institutions donating money to bolster the “civic spirit” but that are in reality tethered to the government and its bureaucracies.

And, as one astute observer pointed out, if NPR truly only gets 1 percent of its funds from the federal government, why is it fighting so hard — and it has been fighting desperately — to keep that tiny sliver of its revenue?

The truth is much different, and Georgetown University law professor Jonathan Turley laid it out: Federal law distributes funds through local stations and the separate Corporation for Public Broadcasting, he wrote, end-running direct contributions to NPR. Turley reports that hundreds of millions of dollars have been set aside for CPB in fiscal year 2026, a sizable increase from 2025.

(It might be worth noting here that the worthless Republican Party, which controls the House, allowed this to happen).

So the “public broadcasting” ecosystem is raking in a lot of dough — our dough, to be precise — to indoctrinate the public with ideas most of its funders oppose. This is just one more example of the insidious way government has invaded American life with its propaganda, spreading like a cancer across the polity, from classroom to the newsroom, from Main Street to Wall Street, from farm to factory, from boardroom to bar stool.

That’s our tax dollars being used to pay for spewing Maher’s deep state propaganda. It makes sense. People make think they are MAGA, and they may be in their heart, but they are still underwriting NPR and its left-wing garbage.

If we aren’t careful and let government and progressives get their tentacles into local media — as they are doing right before our eyes, just as we watched them take over nearly every other aspect of culture — all news will be retreaded in the image of NPR. In other words, all media will be a de facto state-run operation, the historical hallmark of totalitarian regimes everywhere.

Oh sure, government apologists will quickly point out that proposed schemes for subsidizing local news will be content neutral. The government will give you a tax credit to subscribe to a newspaper, and you can choose any newspaper you want, left or right, the government will say.

Beware such promises because the history of American bureaucratic power is that subsidies always come with strings attached, and there are no exceptions. It’s just that on some of them you have to look harder to see them.

Also, the government is run by known liars. Remember the Affordable Care Act? Remember Obama’s promise that, if we pass that massive health-care subsidy, Americans would be able to choose from a “marketplace” of plans? Not to mention, Americans would be able to keep their own doctor.

All of it was a lie. Turns out, you couldn’t keep your own doctor in a lot of cases, and, as for that marketplace, well you could choose among plans, but the plans had to satisfy certain government conditions, such as every plan had to have maternity coverage, regardless of whether you wanted it or needed it. Such restrictive coverage requirements drove up prices on those “choice” plans.

And so it would be with local media subsidies. Readers would soon learn that they couldn’t keep the newspaper of their choice, not if they wanted the tax credit, because the government would almost certainly require newspapers to meet certain criteria — diversity quotas in newsrooms, fair doctrine applications — to qualify for the credit, just as was the case in health care under the Affordable Care Act. 

That’s a prediction, to be sure, but it’s based on two very credible and known realities: the history of government subsidy in America is a history of attaching strings to virtually every subsidy, and, second, the government is populated by known liars. Believe anything they say at your own peril.

If all that doesn’t convince you, just remember that NPR is the poster child of what happens when the government subsidizes the media — it ends up being an absurdist caricature, personified in NPR’s case by the freakish Katherine Maher. Go read her tweets for yourself to see what happens when the government effectively runs a journalism enterprise — it quickly abandons both the journalism and the “enterprise.” 

NPR may be a brazen case, but if government media subsidies find their way to the state and local level, we’ll being reading local Katherine Mahers, who will not only castigate those who eat turkeys as racist and patriarchal but lecture us that the looting of your small business by thugs is not a violent property crime worthy of reporting to the community but an opportunity to do a feature story on the “oppressed” thugs torching our businesses and society.

It’s becoming a Maher, Maher world.