Cheers & Jeers for Restricting Fed Funds for CPB
Plus, awards for The Watchdog, a database of narrative enforcement grants, anatomy of a takedown, and Musk’s motivation to fight censorship
A photo like this one was denied a Pulitzer, but another taken in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, received one, as explained in a May 5 essay by Steve Sailer titled “No Vibe Shift Visible in the Pulitzer: Evan Vucci, who took the news photo of the decade, is denied his Pulitzer. A black and white photo of Joe Biden walking away from a podium in a beautiful, classical room took the White House Correspondents’ Association Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage by Visual Journalists.
Twitter was being run at a very far left basis. When I felt the censorship walls closing in, I was like, ‘OK, I’ve got to do something and the thing I could do is acquire twitter and make it a bastion of free speech and that’s what we’re trying to do with Twitter.’—Elon Musk
On May 1, two days after a horse named Journalism came in second to one named Sovereignty in the Kentucky Derby, President Trump signed an executive Order “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media.” The order stated, “Unlike 1967, when the (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options. Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”
Predictably, the order was met by cheers from some and jeers from others. Reactions included the following:
Running in the Mud: Journalism lost, but journalism hasn’t yet; Jon Alsop for Columbia Journalism Review 250505
‘“It was never intended that we sort of become the media darling of the Kentucky Derby, but we will certainly take all the good energy and vibes coming Journalism’s way,’ Aron Wellman, the management partner of the ownership group of Journalism (the horse), told Balistone. ‘In this day and age, when freedom of speech and journalistic integrity is, quite frankly, under attack, it’s pretty poignant that a horse named Journalism is receiving so much hype and attention.”’ Alsop seemed to focus more on President Trump than on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in this essay.
‘Keep the Government Out’: NPR’s Katherine Maher Continues to Make the Case for Defunding NPR; Jonathan Turley on jonathanturley.org 250506
“Not to be outdone, Maher seemed to return to CBS to build her case further against her state-sponsored media outlet.” Objecting to President Donald Trump’s criticism of NPR, Maher said that, from her perspective, the First Amendment is intended to keep government out of media. “Precisely. … This is the same CEO who attacked a respected senior editor who tried to get NPR to acknowledge its bias and restore greater balance on the staff. Uri Berliner had watched NPR become an echo chamber for the far left with a virtual purging of all conservatives and Republicans from the newsroom”
The Cost of Arrogance: NPR’s Undoing is a Cautionary Tale for Media; Jonathan Turley on jonathanturley.org 250505
“The undoing of American journalism began in ‘J-schools,’ where young reporters were taught that the touchstones of neutrality and objectivity were no longer viable. … The result has been a transformation of American journalism into a type of echo chamber that amplifies liberal and often partisan Democratic talking points. … The public were treated as clay to shaped by an enlightened media in what they would see and hear. It was insulting and alienating. … The response of the public itself has been deafening. Readers and viewers have left mainstream media in a mass exodus. Despite falling revenues and ratings, most of the media outlets seem entirely clueless or, at least, unyielding. Even as media outlets plummet in revenue, editors and reporters continue to saw at the branch upon which they are sitting. … One (NPR) editor finally had enough. Uri Berliner went public, pointing out that NPR’s Washington headquarters has 87 registered Democrats among its editors and zero Republicans. NPR and its CEO, Katherine Maher, were dismissive and frankly arrogant. They attacked Berliner, who ultimately resigned in disgust. … Some of us oppose NPR’s funding as a form of state-sponsored media—a fundamental contradiction with principles of freedom of speech and the press. … NPR will now have to choose between sustaining its bias or expanding its audience. It certainly has every right to be a left-leaning outlet (as do right-leaning outlets), but it has to sustain itself in the marketplace. … American journalism will either re-embrace greater neutrality or continue toward insolvency and irrelevancy.”
No, State Media and Democracy Don’t Go ‘Hand-in-Hand.’ Just the Opposite: In the age of digital censorship, state media is just as likely to be a threat to democracy as a boon to it; Matt Taibbi for Racket News 250504
Taibbi quoted an essay titled “Cuts to PBS, NPR Part of Authoritarian Playbook,” calling it “either satire or written by someone consciously ignoring the history of state media.” He continued, “Yes Car Talk and the MacNeil/Lehrer report were cool, but outlets like Neues Deustchland, Tele Zaire, and Tung Padewat more often went ‘hand in hand’ with fingernail factories or firing squads than democracy. It’s bizarre to see Americans trying to whitewash this.”
NPR Should Be Axed Because it’s Anti-Thought, Not Anti-Trump: NPR is a small part of a vast subsidized, groupthink bureaucracy, which needs to be cut; Matt Taibbi for Racket News 250503
“That NPR is a wasteland of mindless convention and pseudo-intellectual gibberish isn’t a reason to kill it, though. It has to go because it’s already begun to be remade in the image of state media of the more infamous kind, in which the people running it (like Kathleen Maher or COO Ryan Merkley) sound and act more like political officers than journalists. It’s a free country and media outlets can have one point of view, even relentlessly, but those places can’t be publicly-funded. We’re not trying to build a monoculture. Or are we?”
Awards for The Watchdog
Speaking of the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a post by The Curious Watchdog about long-time NPR editor Uri Berliner’s friendly criticism of the broadcaster received second in the personal blog category of the National Federation of Press Women’s annual communications contest. Published in May 2024, the winning essay was titled “The Skunk at the Garden Party: NPR provides cautionary tale about viewpoint diversity.
The Watchdog received third place in the same category for a January 2024 post titled “A Deplorable and an Elitist Walk into a Bar’: And a debate silenced in 2020 opens up.” It focused on the differing views between Francis Collins, who was director of the National Institutes of Health during the Covid lockdowns, and now current NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, both of whom are physicians.
A database of narrative enforcement grants
Do Your Own Research: Liber-net’s Misinfo Grant Database: A conversation with Andrew Lowenthal about what the database shows and its limitations. Plus, one bizarre grant for barbers and hairstylists; Greg Collard for Racket News (Library) 250505
The database developed by Twitter Files journalist Andrew Lowenthal “breaks down government grants in the mis/disinformation space going back to 2010. It gives the amounts, of course, but also descriptions and commentary about the grants with links to official information on USAspending.gov, plus a ratings system of one to five flags for each grant. Roughly 100 of 867 grants since 2016 have at least four flags.”
Anatomy of a viscous attempted takedown
Triggered by the WaPo: I have developed a rather deep-seated reflex to certain types of reporters, Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, for Who is Robert Malone? 250507
Malone tells, through personal experience, about how the process works whereby “the current foot-soldier caste of narrative enforcers employed by the censorship-industrial complex” quote each other and introduce irrelevant information in order to write stories that make it appear that Malone is spreading misinformation. Their specific topic was the deaths of two Texas girls that Malone, a credentialed and accomplished physician, attributed to pneumonia, while the narrative enforcers, with virtually no medical or scientific knowledge, attributed the deaths to measles. Malone wrote, “Salhorta labeled me as a ‘vaccine skeptic’ in her headline, and implied that I was somehow at fault for not speaking to the father prior to publication. Why should Malone get the scoop? Well, perhaps because he is a licensed physician with a reputation for being an honest broker of truth willing to speak and write against approved medical narratives? Perhaps a better question would be why would a medical whistleblower want to contact the ‘Texas Tribune’ or the Washington Post.”
What was Musk Thinking?
The Curious Watchdog was interested to hear Elon Musk talk about how he became a free speech warrior when he was on the May 3, 2025, episode of My View with Lara Trump.
Trump asked Musk, “When did Elon Musk finally say, ‘You know what? I feel like something is really grossly wrong with what’s going on in this country?’”
Musk, who had been an Obama supporter and expected Biden to govern as a moderate Democrat, said:
I started having concerns about three years ago; I just had an uneasy feeling, like something doesn’t feel right here. The censorship was becoming ridiculous. I had the most interacted-with account on Twitter before the acquisition, so I was very finely attuned to what the algorithm was showing me or not showing me and who got suspended or didn’t get suspended.
Twitter was being run at a very far left basis. When I felt the censorship walls closing in, I was like, ‘OK, I’ve got to do something and the thing I could do is acquire twitter and make it a bastion of free speech and that’s what we’re trying to do with Twitter.’
No one on the left has been suspended, but we did unsuspend people on the right, and let the marketplace of ideas win.
And then once we unlocked Twitter from being censored, then we started to see what was really going on.
And then I became increasingly concerned. I’m like, ‘Wait a second I’ve seen videos of people streaming across the border on Twitter, now X.’ I was like, ‘Is this real?’
And so I thought, ‘I’ll go to the border myself.’ So, I went to Eagle Pass, Texas, and—sure enough—people were streaming across the border. And I was like, ‘So, is there any vetting of these people?’
No, the Biden administration is letting them all in.
And I said, ‘Could some of these people have criminal affiliations? They literally have the criminal affiliation tattooed on their face.’
The left is kind to the criminals and cruel to the victims, which is not empathy at the end of the day.
But if you’re in a high-trust system and you’re bringing in low-trust, untrustworthy individuals, now you have a fundamental breakdown of the system … a recipe for disaster.