The Ladies Club

CPB, PBS, & NPR

by G. Murphy Donovan (May 2025)

 

The number one challenge to disinformation in the United States is the First Amendment. (sic) —Katherine Maher, NPR CEO

 

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, including television and radio affiliates PBS and NPR, is arguably the largest state controlled media conglomerate in the world. Between them, PBS and NPR have 1,400 stations covering all 50 states in US, reaching parts of Canada and Mexico too. The CPB has blanket coverage in America, and then some.

The matrons of mass media in Washington DC are happy to gloat before Congress about their reach, influence, and politics.

Whilst apologists will claim that CPB and subordinates are independent, private, impartial, objective, and non-profit, none of these perennial claims are true. Indeed, on the funding issue alone, ample evidence suggests that CPB both profits and benefits from multiple and redundant revenues streams not available to commercial competitors.

“Exact figures for “deep-pocket” contributions (major donors vs. corporations) are hard to split since public media often groups them as “private support.” Foundations like the Open Society Foundation (OSF) or Carnegie Corporation are recurring heavy hitters.” (GROK)

Indeed, both OSF and Carnegie are left leaning examples of institutional lobbies for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs on a global scale.

George Soros, alone, funds Open Society operations in 120 countries to the tune of 32 billion dollars since 1993. Albeit, none of the Soros globalist or far left largess reaches his Hungarian homeland, where Soros is considered a subversive—or a criminal.

Beyond donors and sponsors, tax free streams for public broadcasting include local charitable donations, content sales, domestic and foreign content exchanges, and state/federal/municipal tax monies; all of which percolate in obscurity behind “charity” or “non-profit” confidentiality screens under the national CPB tent.

In short, moneyed shills with a political agenda know what buttons to push in order to sell a political narrative to PBS or NPR matrons.

Federal tax contributions to CPB alone now amount to 500 million dollars plus per annum. And yes, public broadcasting affiliates also have commercial advertisers in spite of claims to the contrary. In CPB speak, a foreign advertiser, Viking Cruise Lines for example, is called a “donor.” Clearly, those cruise ship adverts are aimed at setting sails and sales with the aged and affluent PBS “cue tip” demographic, albeit just another target audience.

Win/win as they say at RAND Corporation.

Affluent geriatrics and widows, including creepy foreigners like George Soros, are the dark angels of public and state controlled broadcasting wherever the pretense of “public service” is fashionable.

State financed media is a “service” in the same sense that “public servants” work for voters or taxpayers.

Taxpayers have little to say about what constitutes the “public interest” in CPB entertainment or political programming. Indeed, all those Euro or BBC soap operas and costume dramas featured on PBS might lead us to believe that the past is not so much prologue as it is a fantasy fix for EU nostalgia buffs. The matrons at CPB are a romantic lot with a yen for the good old days of promiscuous princesses, randy royals, manly cops, imperial colonials, and even Jack the Ripper. Lucy Worsley takes a bow here.

And lest you think “public” media is all altruism and volunteers; listen to what GROK has to say:

 

Corporate underwriting often comes with “sponsorship credits” (those polite on-air mentions), but critics argue it can influence programming, especially when tied to sensitive topics like climate or health. Foundations and major donors, while less visible, can also shape content through targeted grants.

 

Alas, a “targeted grant,” again, is CPB speak for politically motivated influence peddling. Most of PBS and NPR public service or political content is in fact a parade of pity parties for very select victim demographics on the political Left; racial minorities, gender benders, liberal women, Islamists, and the “global south” in general are favorites; in short, the usual suspects au gauche.

At the moment, America public broadcasting is caught in a mendacity pitfall of its own making. On the public service side, PBS is running several dated Holocaust documentaries; while simultaneously, on the “news” side, providing daily pro-Hamas and/or Islamofascist pandering. Pro-Islam is the new anti-Semitism at the UN and EU.

CPB, like BBC, does not recognize the Holocaust and the contemporary Moslem jihad against Israel as chapters in the same perennial anti-Semitic book.

Any distinction between the political fascism of the 20th Century and contemporary Islamic religious fascism today is a distinction without a difference. If anything, anti-Semitism has been mainstreamed, especially by the state funded schoolhouse and state funded media in Europe and America.

BBC double dippers like Christiane Amanpour appear daily on BBC and PBS, most recently (04/24/2025) using Holocaust survivors to suggest a parallel between contemporary nationalists (Trump, Meloni, Orban, Wilders) and the Hitler era. Such innuendoes are a symptom of the Islamophilia that makes the merger, of the EU Left and the Islamic Right, the worst kept secret in Europe.

Adding insult to injury, European and American public media seem to be in a constant state of genuflection, wanting to apologize for, and make reparations for every real or imagined indignity ever visited on every dysfunctional Third World tribe or country.

The woke logic of public media now dictates that success must carry all the deficits of global failure; an indefinite burden of aid and reparations that America, especially, must carry to offset global national incontinence.

Or to put it in Trump vernacular: “America is getting ripped off.”

Indeed, once upon a time, when George III ruled the waves, recall that America was one of those colonial victims. Alas, Americans don’t need to apologize for much, if anything. For the most part, Americans made the best of bad lots left in the Americas by Dutch, British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish; rapacious European colonials all.

Much of the pathology in the Moslem world and Global South today are self-inflicted wounds.

After years in repose; jihad, anti-Semitism, and  Islamofascism are fashionable again. Withal, public broadcasting mavens in the America, Europe, and the Commonwealth would have you believe that two billion Muslims are being victimized by eight million Israelis.

Beyond victimology and anti-Semitism, the most consistent thread in CPB political programming these days is an obsession with Donald J. Trump. Whilst the world may spin out of orbit, no mention of, or quote from Trump on PBS or NPR will appear without adjectival caveats such as “false, unverified, or unproven.”

CPB, like liberal state controlled legacy networks in the Commonwealth and Europe, cannot report on anything Trump says or does without negative or judgmental editorial baggage. If Trump is given to rhetorical hyperbole, that fact is always old and redundant news.

Almost all reporting on Republicans or Trump today is a muddle of facts and leftist bravo sierra, at CPB and BBC. Pundits call it “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” To their credit, CPB, PBS, and NPR, speak with one voice about their favorite bete noire. Trump is a fraud, a villain, and/or a threat—especially to the domestic DEI crowd and the global Left.

Albeit, Trump the villain, like any one of a dozen shopworn slurs, is old news too. Invective may be a fact, but it’s still not an argument.

And whilst we are on the subject of redundant news, we would be remiss to not to give CPB, PBS, and NPR a short arm inspection.

All public broadcasting CEOs and the vast majority of top executive posts, from vice-presidents on down to urban station executives are mostly liberal women; Democrats all, we may assume, if urban locals follow the federal model. Gender and political party affiliation appear to be the keys to the Beltway public broadcasting sorority.

The public airway is a liberal, dare we say far-left, girl’s club. None of this, of course is news to capitol cognoscenti, the DC deep state inside the Beltway.

The politics of public broadcasting executives are a foregone conclusion, a political monoculture that now has its federal funding in blowback peril.

Indeed, with MAGA Trump and DOGE Musk, the Beltway media goose is starting to look like a dead rabbit.

Of course there is a simple and elegant fix for the public broadcasting dilemma. As with public education, Washington could give so-called “public” broadcasting back the public, indeed back to the states where Beltway ideological bias and fiduciary corruption would be less likely to poison the well.

So, good luck with that, ladies.

 

Table of Contents

 

G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of Intelligence and National security. Follow him on X.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast