Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) bashed NPR and PBS for their rampant bias and disturbing lobbying tactics as the end of federal funding for the networks becomes more and more imminent.
During a Tuesday interview on MRC UnCensored, Schmitt specifically called out Democrats for using the Texas floods in a bid to justify federal funding to public radio. “The Democrats’ willingness to weaponize this and politicize it within hours is just really sick. And I think speaks to how… what terrible position that they're in.” He added that the left is “glomming on to anything to try to score political points, and they should be ashamed of themselves.”
MRC UnCensored host and Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider brought up the reality of how NPR responded to the flooding. Texas Public Radio took over ten hours to notify its Facebook followers of the flash flood warnings issued by the National Weather Service. Schneider noted that during those 10 hours, TPR asked its followers to lobby the Senate and help preserve its federal funding. "Texas Public Radio delivers what others don't," the outlet bragged in a post, even citing “emergency alerts that keep our community safe.”
Schmitt pointed out the absurdity of TPR’s brazen post attempting to establish its dominance over other news outlets. “This is not how that information really gets out there. Nothing touches the FEMA emergency response system… and there’s a lot of other stations that do this too that aren’t federally funded,” he said. “I just think it’s it’s kind of a sad state of affairs where you've got, you know, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting using taxpayer money to lobby for more taxpayer-funded dollars, for their–wokeness. It's ridiculous.”
Schneider went on to address that the obvious ideological bias at PBS and NPR violates the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Schneider noted that the law “requires NPR and PBS to maintain strict adherence to objectivity and balance of all programming of a controversial nature. [PBS and NPR] break the law every day.”
He added that NPR was also propping up leftist legacy media at great financial cost:
“But the law also says that they need to have diverse sources of programming, so they’ll have plenty of say, for-profit programming from the New York Times, Vox, and other left-wing places like the Atlantic. But why do they not have Ben Shapiro on Daily Wire? Why–do the NPR stations not broadcast that? There's plenty of right-of-center content that they could get for free instead of having to pay millions of dollars in licensing fees to Boston, in New York and LA.”
[Read More: PBS’ Unpatriotic, Leftist, and Critical Race Theory Tinged Approach to Juneteenth]
On June 12, the House of Representatives approved a rescission package to cut $9.4 billion in previously approved funding, including $1.1 billion for one of NPR and PBS’s funding sources, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The rescission package, with some changes, passed in the U.S. Senate on July 16. During the interview, Schmitt expressed optimism that the rescission package would be passed by the July 18 deadline.
Schneider also lauded the Trump administration for rooting out government censorship initiatives, based on evidence uncovered in an MRC report. He noted that a third of the 57 censorship initiatives identified across 93 departments were no more. Schmitt condemned these censorship efforts many of which tried to get around the First Amendment and “outsource” censorship to private organizations.
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
