Defund. Rescind. Defund.

Planned Parenthood, Pulitzers, Public Television

May 11, 2025

This week I wrote on Donald Trump’s executive order “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization Of Biased Media.” Public media, of course, will challenge the order in the courts. And they may well win, considering that funding emanates from legislation and can’t be overturned by edict. None of that, however, will change the underlying truth. Public media was concocted by the left, run by the left, and features programming that appeals to the left. That’s a big problem. But it’s not the only one:

Since she brought it up, however, let’s talk about money. Biased or not, NPR is a highly successful venture with millions of affluent consumers who can easily afford to pay for their own content. NPR’s radio shows average around 26 million listeners on over 1,000 stations across the country. It’s podcasts — many of them I find quite entertaining — attract 17 million users. NPR would immediately become one of the top radio and podcast networks in the country if it monetized its business. The same goes for PBS, which has 350-member television stations across the United States, reaching 100 million viewers monthly. That’s twice as many viewers as streaming services such as Hulu or Apple+.
And if NPR and PBS want to remain non-for-profit, they can always ramp up their donations, sponsorships, and grants from foundations. As it stands, somewhere around 8-10% of public media funding comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As Maher explains, this isn’t really a very big number. However you look at it, there’s simply no practical reason taxpayers should have to pony up a half-billion dollars to ensure that upper-middle-class urbanites can watch BBC period-piece melodramas without polluting their eyeballs with down-market fast food commercials.

Read the rest.

ProPublica wins a Pulitzer for political hackery

ProPublica is perhaps the nation’s leading purveyor of Potemkin journalism, which entails dressing up political propaganda with neutral-sounding journalistic verbiage to create the impression that you’ve done genuine reporting. ProPublica, naturally, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in “public service” for “exposing the fatal consequences of abortion bans” last week. I wrote on why the Pulitzers reward for transparent Dem fodder only further destroys its already battered credibility:

Even a cursory reading of ProPublica articles on abortion finds that the central contention is false. Take its piece on Amber Thurman.
In August 2022, the 28-year-old North Carolina woman checked herself into a suburban Atlanta hospital emergency room, complaining of severe pain. She was suffering from an infection caused by the remains of twin fetuses she had aborted by pill five days earlier.
The first thing you’ll notice when reading ProPublica’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters is that they fail to offer a single on-the-record source who maintains that abortion laws slowed or stopped doctors from providing medical help for Thurman. Not one.
Indeed, a reader must plow through to the 57th paragraph of the article to find this throwaway line: “It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C.”
Not clear? Now, that’s a remarkable concession to make deep into a story. The headline, after all, promises to prove that “Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care.”

On this week’s You’re Wrong, Mollie and I discuss also this story, analyze John Fetterman's family drama, weigh in on President Donald Trump's self-deportation policies, and talk about the band Devo.

If Republicans can’t even defund Planned Parenthood, what good are they?

In a meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson this week, Mike Lawler, Jen Kiggans, Brian Fitzpatrick reportedly pressured leadership to drop the idea of defunding Planned Parenthood via reconciliation.

Kiggans has also claimed to be “100%, unapologetically pro-life,” though she prevaricates whenever anyone tries to pin her down on what that means. In a 2022 interview, she boasted about her record of “preventing taxpayer-funded abortions.” Opposing the defunding of Planned Parenthood is in direct conflict with that contention.
Now, I understand that Lawler and Kiggans are in purple districts and fear voter backlash. Remember when virtually every major outlet, pollster, and political expert in the country told us that abortion would become a massive liability for Republicans, putting them in danger of losing a generation of voters? Democrats, whose position on abortion is that there should be zero limitation until birth, shoehorned the issue into the 2024 presidential race at every opportunity. It didn’t work. My own television was inundated with attack ads aimed at Kiggans in 2024, and virtually every one of them falsely accused her of supporting a complete national ban on abortion. Yet, she slightly expanded her win total in a competitive district from 2022. Indeed, virtually every poll on the topic finds that Americans don’t want government funding for abortions.

More.