The “public broadcasting” elites argue with a straight face that removing any taxpayer subsidies is a violation of the First Amendment. On Monday morning, National Public Radio filed a lawsuit claiming that President Trump’s executive order telling the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to withhold funds from NPR is “a clear violation of the Constitution.”
The lawsuit says Trump’s order violates both “the expressed will of Congress and the First Amendment’s bedrock guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association.”
NPR and PBS refuse to engage in the allegations of 24/7 liberal bias. The White House laid out chapter and verse about the tilt, and NPR CEO Katherine Maher put out a statement accusing Trump of “retaliatory, viewpoint-based discrimination.” Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
In his servile press release of a story, NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik briefly mentioned the Trump White House put out a memo insisting NPR published articles “insist[ing] that COVID-19 did not originate in a lab” and “refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story.” Then came the unintentional humor:
NPR’s Maher rejected such ideological characterizations, pointing to such statements by Trump to argue he was seeking to exact illegal retribution for their news coverage.
“This is retaliatory, viewpoint-based discrimination in violation of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has ruled numerous times over the past 80 years that the government does not have the right to determine what counts as ‘biased,’ Maher said in her statement Tuesday. “NPR will never agree to this infringement of our constitutional rights, or the constitutional rights of our Member stations, and NPR will not compromise our commitment to an independent free press and journalistic integrity.”
These people define aggressive leftist propaganda as journalistic “independence” and “integrity.” Folkenflik claimed Trump’s executive order on CPB is “part of a larger assault on the news media writ large.” Criticizing journalists (and refusing to fund their slanted product” is an “assault on the media.” But it’s “integrity” in action when the news media wage a “larger assault” on Trump and the Republicans, even to the point of lawfare aiming to put them in jail.
These people have a funny definition of what the First Amendment is. These taxpayer-funded networks retaliate against conservatives for daring to win elections after they’ve been smeared as threats to democracy. Our opposition to these partisan “public” networks is the embodiment of democracy and a vibrant display of the First Amendment.
