In a colorful commentary for the Los Angeles Times, Matt K. Lewis argued that callousness is a central feature of the second Trump administration, particularly its policies of deportation and bureaucratic cutbacks. “Once you normalize cruelty,” Lewis concluded in the piece, “the hammer eventually swings for everyone. Even the ones who thought they were swinging it.”

President Donald Trump is not a libertarian, but some of his policies for downsizing the federal government certainly fall in the libertarian column. This is true, for instance, of the administration’s drive to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which helps to fund PBS and NPR. Scholars at the Cato Institute have called on Congress for decades to stop subsidizing the CPB. With enough political momentum behind them, perhaps Congress can get it done this time.

A certainty of the media marketplace is that if there is content consumers truly want, money to produce and support that content will somehow show up.  

Supporters of public broadcasting outlets PBS and NPR should start pondering how much demand there really is for the content those entities produce. If there is sufficient demand, funding mechanisms will emerge to keep them functioning, even without taxpayer dollars provided by the government. And if the demand is not there, then PBS and NPR should disappear. 

“This is NPR.”

Unfortunately for National Public Radio, that proved all too true this week. In one of the most cringeworthy appearances in Congress, Katherine Maher imploded in a House hearing on the public funding of the liberal radio outlet.

By the end of her series of contradictions and admissions, Maher had made the definitive case for ending public funding for NPR and state-subsidized media.

President Donald Trump requested that Congress defund NPR and PBS. Taxpayer relief from the burden of having to fund two liberal media outlets that disdain half the country is overdue.

Recently the heads of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service testified in a politically charged congressional subcommittee hearing amid the latest Republican effort to defund U.S. public media.

Right-wing media jumped to defend four recent executive orders signed by President Donald Trump to bolster the dying coal industry, telling viewers that reviving what they often incorrectly called “clean coal” would make the country more competitive with China and allow the U.S. to dominate the AI “arms race” by ensuring an abundant supply of reliable energy. Conservative outlets are also framing Trump as an ally to coal miners — even as the administration eliminates trusted resources to protect their health and safety.

A Russian court on Tuesday convicted four journalists of extremism for working for an anti-corruption group founded by the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny and sentenced them to 5 1/2 years in prison each.

Antonina Favorskaya, Kostantin Gabov, Sergey Karelin and Artyom Kriger were found guilty of involvement with a group that had been labeled as extremist. All four had maintained their innocence, arguing they were being prosecuted for doing their jobs as journalists.

The chief executives of NPR and PBS faced questions in a March 26 congressional hearing as Congress considers legislation that would prohibit federal funding for the public broadcasters.

Mainstream media outlets are scraping the bottom of the barrel in their attempts to portray the Trump administration’s enforcement of the Immigration and Nationality Act as racist and immoral. The corporate newspapers and the “Big News” online outlets are awash in sob stories about migrants who are now facing deportation because they broke American laws.