With Vice President JD Vance’s tie-breaking vote, the US Senate advanced a bill aiming to strip the American public broadcast stations PBS and NPR of $1.1 billion in federal funding.
Doing away with government funding to public broadcasters has been a conservative rallying cry in the US for years. One, because of the liberal bias of their programming; and two, for the sake of reducing wasteful government spending—the latter efforts were amplified by Elon Musk’s DOGE at the start of President Trump’s second term.
The bill cancelling $1.1 billion in federal funds to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—and an additional $8.3 billion in foreign aid—has not passed yet; it has only been moved forward for debate on the floor. Since it is being submitted through the rescission process, it does not need to pass the 60-vote filibuster-proof threshold to pass: it only needs to get to 51 votes. If the bill does manage to get through the hurdles in the upper chamber, it is more likely to pass in the House, where GOP representatives have been pushing for more spending cuts already.
The move, however, has received backlash from Democrats. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has posted a strange, overproduced video on X on the matter. In it, he draws comparisons with the current Trump administration and the authoritarian regimes of the 20th century—in the most predictable way possible.
However, in this case, it is falling flatter than usual, as these regimes—such as the Soviet Union under Stalin and Nazi Germany under Hitler—were investing heavily in public media, turning it into their state-run propaganda machine. In fact, depriving public media of government funds is the least authoritarian thing a leader can do…
There are a number of other faux pas Reich committed in his cute little video.
He started it with a segment talking to Elmo, the best-known character on the PBS children’s show Sesame Street. However, just a day before, the official X account for Elmo was hacked and started to post violently antisemitic posts. Most of the comments reminded Mr Reich—who is a professor at Berkley University, by the way—of that.
'Depriving public media of government funds is the least authoritarian thing a leader can do…'
Also, at the very beginning, he shows a brief snippet of a Sesame Street episode in which President Trump is mocked as a puppet in a trash can. The fact that the creators of a publicly funded children’s show thought it appropriate to engage in ‘political satire’ does little to help their case against accusations of political bias from the right—one of the main arguments used to justify defunding the operation.
Reich's video on X has a community note attached as well. He claims that Sesame Street is getting cancelled if PBS gets its government funding cut. In reality, as the community note points out, the streaming giant Netflix has purchased the broadcast rights of the show and will be including it in its catalogue. If need be, the company would certainly be able to finance the protection of the puppet show as well.
So, of the umpteenth piece accusing Trump of fascism, this one happens to be one of the more entertaining ones by Professor Reich—but also one of the more absurd.
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