• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

The House of Representatives voted by a slim margin on Thursday to “claw back” some $9.4 billion, two years of funding for PBS and NPR, the bulk of it for foreign aid programs. 

That’s devastating news for people who work at these public networks and for devoted watchers and listeners.  

As for NPR and PBS, conservatives argue that they are tainted with left-wing bias. 

In announcing the cuts, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise referred to “woke public broadcasting, including NPR and PBS, at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is a business the federal government shouldn't even be in."

That’s worth debating, especially to the extent that PBS and NPR compete for audiences with struggling news media. But as a sometime watcher of PBS News Hour, I have to disagree that it is woke.

Night after night, liberals wait for PBS Newshour reporters to trash the administration. What they get is pretty tepid except when commentators David Brooks (a conservative) and Jonathan Capehart go to work on Trump on Friday night.  

But one has to concede that the public networks are reassuring, almost like chicken soup. It’s not so much what they report, but the calm professionalism they exude. There’s no shouting. 

It’s possible, if you’re bent that way, to see this as an attack on the First Amendment, or as “just one piece of Trump’s broader authoritarian playbook," as Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution – the independent grassroots political action organization, founded by Bernie Sanders – has put it. Or, you can agree with Scalise and with those who also feel the government should be pulling back from Amtrak.  

These reductions may not pass the Senate. But if they do, fans of PBS and NPR have only one recourse: to cough up the dollars to help keep them alive, as they would with any nonprofit news channel. Failing that, we will be headed for a very sad day in the history of public media.