Defunding CPB crafty, but ominous

This Sunday we’re working up something a little different.
I, personally, was initially taken aback when I heard that President Donald Trump had issued a late executive order Thursday for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to cease funding for NPR and PBS.
My initial reaction was not disbelief. Trump has been sparring with these organizations for some time. He tried to fire three of their board members late last month to eliminate a quorum for the CPB board and hence end any action until they were replaced.
Congress authorizes funding for the CPB, which amounts annually to about a half billion dollars combined for NPR and PBS.
One could make a serious argument that taxpayers shouldn’t be funding any media outlet. We have a media outlet and we get no federal funding. But we wouldn’t want any. That opens a very nasty, ugly, squirmy can of worms where public officials would then have control over what is published or broadcast.
NPR and PBS also operate with most of their budget from sponsorships and donations.  But if you pull even 15% of their budget away, serious cuts happen. Is it the educational programming that gets cut? Or the base emergency information piece of the organizations?
I’ll be the first to admit, I listen to NPR every morning. They’re hard on Trump. They are.
But I’m not sure it matters. Is it not objective if they fact check and point out errors? Is it not unbiased if they report on the activities of the office? It is troublesome if they go out of their way to make him look foolish, yeah. But even then, it boils down to the facts.
This man just said the Declaration of Independence is a document of “love and unity”. It’s a document of ‘we don’t need you anymore’. The compete antithesis of love and unity. Honestly, the interview in which he made the comment was a tense and acrimonious situation anyway and I think the question just caught him off guard, but it does show a lack of grasp at a minimum.
No one’s perfect at a moment’s notice, but I think we all would agree we expect a little more from the Oval Office.
I find this presidency fascinating. I do. There are times I think this president, in this time, may be the man we need, even if we can’t stand him. That’s as objective and unbiased as I can be.
The left is screaming about the global trade war Trump is engaging in, but if you look at the issue arbitrarily, there’s more to it. How often does he backtrack on his threats of heavy tariffs? Some stick and some don’t. Maybe he really does know something we don’t, but that’s the fascinating part to me. Is he, in this totally unconventional, Alfred E. Newman way, shaking the world by the shoulders?
I don’t think anyone can say he isn’t shaking the world by the shoulders.
But I don’t think, personally, he can shake the media by its collective shoulders. That funding ensures that children get educational programming. It ensures I get “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” on Saturday morning. And if you don’t put that on the background while you’re going about chores or on a road trip, you’re missing something. It’s very comedic and informative. And regularly brings a smile to my face looking at world news in a different way.
The world of media and newsgathering has never been crazier than it is right now. Distrust is at an all-time high and I know this from the comments on posts of Pen City Current news. Governmental agencies are more and more just withholding information under sketchy pretext. This week we had two administrators put on administrative leave six weeks before the end of the school year. The two had already previously resigned from their positions and were called to the Central Office where they were told they’d be on leave the rest of the school year. That’s all we were told other than it wasn’t regarding any discipline. Ok, then why the leave? Our superintendent has also resigned but wasn’t put on administrative leave? We won’t be asking for records because we haven’t heard of anything overtly dangerous in the situation, however a concern could lie in just moving the incident to another district, with other students.
There’s a court ruling that says something to the effect of governmental entities can’t hide information just because it could be uncomfortable or embarrassing to the agency. That’s paraphrasing, but if we stop looking for them, that’s the beginning of the end.
This is the same thing with NPR, PBS, CBS, Axios, or any newsgathering agency. You cannot do it without some bias. You just can’t anymore. If you point to something that seems out of whack, the consumer of the news will digest that information within their own bias. That’s who we are and where we are at. Those engaged in wanting to be informed and can look at things from several viewpoints and be willing to consider ‘all things’, are the ones who are lifted by the information.
But threatening a program that has for generations provided America with news, education, and information with a reduction of  10 to 15% of their annual budget, which by the way impacts more than 1,000 news organizations across the country because they are being mean, isn’t American. Pushing through is American. Making your point in a concise and compelling, non-violent format, is American. Whether Trump is doing those things in this fashion is left for history to decide.  We need our leadership to be more mature and omniscient, patient, and respectful. I’m not sure we’re getting that, but I’m not convinced public funds should be used to impugn a sitting president either.
So where does that leave us?, Simply here. Is it preferrable to have a government with no media, or media with no government? Its an incredibly personal choice and a virtually impossible scenario. But it does create compelling thought, and that’s Beside the Point.
Chuck Vandenberg is editor/co-owner of Pen City Current and can be reached at Charles.V@PenCityCurrent.com.