Brian Stelter's Asinine Cost-Cutting Suggestion Demonstrates That the Left Never Learns

If you really want to get the left-wing media fired up, target the left-wing media. Leftists have their panties in a wad over DOGE’s efforts to get rid of government waste and leftist initiatives in general, but some of them are really steamed over the suggestion that the government might defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds PBS and NPR.

Witness Brian Stelter of CNN. To borrow a phrase from my friend and colleague Kevin Downey Jr., reasonable people have clown-slapped Stelter so much that he must not have any sense left. On Tuesday, he took to X to make a brazenly stupid statement.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which disburses funds to PBS and NPR stations, gets $535 million a year in federal funding. So any official who seriously wanted to achieve billions in cost savings would start elsewhere – like the $874 billion spent on national defense.
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 4, 2025

I’m not sure what Stelter thinks this will achieve. What happens if we have to defend ourselves as a nation? Do we hold a pledge drive? Do we rely on Big Bird and Elmo for defense? (Give me Super Grover over those two, but I still don’t think he could counter the threats from China or Iran.)

Does Stelter think that NPR announcers will whisper our enemies into submission? Or does he believe that the soldiers from Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary will magically come to life to fight? Stelter’s asininity staggers the imagination — but he kept going!

For some reason, he wasted two X posts on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).

“Thus it's rather revealing that the ‘first target’ of the House DOGE Subcommittee is… NPR and PBS,” Stelter wrote. “By asking the heads of the outlets to testify, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene won't be finding big cost savings, but she'll be scoring cheap political points.”

“No doubt some of Greene's constituents want her to beat up on the media at a hearing – but during Trump's first term he proposed slashing public media funding every year, and Republican lawmakers ignored him, every year,” he continued. “Key Q: Will Congress actually strip the funding this time?”

Stelter tried to make the argument that PBS and NPR demonstrate how federally funded broadcasting benefits liberals and conservatives alike. However, even though documentaries and educational programming are nice, there’s enough evidence that both networks’ news coverage skews far to the left to render Stelter’s argument patently false.

Then Stelter tried to play the “Why aren’t we more like Europe?” card. He posted:

By the way: "Fifteen peer democracies spend an average of $70 per person on public media. In this country, we spend a measly $3 per person." That's counting various state funding sources as well as federal. https://t.co/YPjOd76W8Z
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 4, 2025

I can’t help but wonder if Stelter’s mother never told him that just because everybody else is doing something doesn’t mean that we have to do it. If 15 “peer democracies” (to use that lame phrase) jumped off a bridge, we don’t have to do it. The non-U.S. public media examples I can think of, Canada’s CBC and the UK’s BBC, report from a far-left perspective as well, so nobody can make the argument that our “peer democracies” are fair and balanced just because they fork over more money for their state media.

Leave it to Jonah Goldberg to offer a clown slap that would make KDJ proud.

Or…. They’d start with something that isn’t essential to proper role of government and expressly delineated in the Constitution. Dude this is not a great argument.
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) February 4, 2025

Erick Erickson got in on the clown-slapping action as well:

The left/media sure does b***h about Fox News a lot and deride it as state-sponsored media, but they defend the actual state-sponsored media to the death. Why? Because the left controls it. NPR and PBS are the most reliably progressive outlets in America after MSNBC, but MSNBC exists in the private sector.
My taxpayer dollars go to support NPR lecturing Americans on how Hunter Biden’s laptop is not real and lecturing Americans that they’re ungrateful to Joe Biden and lecturing Americans that Joe Biden is totally fine.
State funded propaganda directed at Americans and controlled by the left should absolutely be cut.
And the idea that we should start with $874 billion from the Defense Department instead of the very easy get of $535 million is absurd. It’s a hot take from inside a dying industry that is slowly committing suicide, while blaming everyone else for the self-inflicted wound.

Possibly the funniest thing about Stelter’s idiotic rant is that he didn’t go after “the children.” He knows that there’s plenty of quality children’s programming out there if PBS only had to rely on “viewers like you.” Instead, he wants to prop up the old saw that PBS and NPR are unbiased sources for news, but he’s not fooling anybody.

Bless his heart. Poor old Brian doesn’t realize that the only successful argument he’s making is that he’s out of touch with what the American people have caught on to about the left-wing media.

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