Corporation for Public Broadcasting Statement Regarding Executive Order

> The US is so weird right now.

You think the US is weird? Wait until you hear about what Lincoln did in his time, ha! Even weirder than that thing about committing high treason to create a kingless country with a sovereign elected by the gentile masses of all people! And all that just for "unjust" taxes for wars made and won in their own territories, tsk. There's a good reason why they call it the American "experiment"; because experiments are weird.

> You have a President who is ordering the defunding of tons of groups (universities, media, aid, institutes) while not clearly having that authority and often doing so for what he views as ideological crimes.

> Also arresting and trying to deport people for things that are not clearly crimes (newspaper op-eds, etc) and without due process.

But in all seriousness, I don't see how the end of funding is weirder than the end of it, especially given the history of the the country. I don't see how the status quo is somehow more legitimate. The President is the only elected official of the government. Congress passes laws, and the judiciary can only issue judgements and have no power over the purse nor the sword. The president has the authority to decide where the money goes and how it is attributed and how the laws are executed. The same goes for the non-citizens who reside in the US under the privilege of a visa or other executive permissions; the legal precedents about this are quite clear that the President has broad authority to decide who gets to stay or not. "Due process" defers to the question to which process is due, in the case of illegal aliens there is none except what the executive decide what is due, except for the determination of the illegal alien status in itself.

A lot of Canadians seem to think the CBC is overly biased but that the BBC is less biased, but the BBC is actually more biased than the CBC.

A lot of Canadians also think the CBC is too expensive but it is less expensive than the BBC and public media in most of the EU. The British government pays BBC $100/person/year. The Canadian government pays CBC $29/person/year.

I really dislike this line of argument that goes like "everything is the same as everything else so why don't you oppose this?".

Okay, but Fox News is obviously fundamentally different because it's a private entertainment program. That's why it's bought out and influenced by the ultra-wealthy. It's a propaganda program for capitalists. You can't just say that's "the same" as a neutrally-funded public program.

You can't "sell", so to speak, public services. That's why republican generally oppose it - they can't give a slice to their cronies so they don't want it. The problem with things like SS, which the right has attacked and attempted to dismantle the second it was written into law, isn't that it's "unfair", it's that it's not private. If you actually look at the proposals for dismantling SS, they all involve privatizing it, aka stealing it and handing out slices to their cronies.

Things like PBS and NPR getting public funds and being allowed to exist is a problem to the right because it means it can't be bought and controlled like Huff Post or Fox can.

Giving an interview isn't "lending credit" to. By that logic, the best media would be one that repeatedly tries to hide the truth, because showing the truth must be giving credence to it. This is a kind of doublespeak - freedom is censorship.

Part of whole, unbiased programming is giving interviews to people on the edges, to extremists. If you don't do that, you're intentionally augmenting the story. People do this with the right all the time. They'll purposefully ignore the extremists, which in turn creates an image that such groups are completely rational. For example, news did this constantly with covid denialists like Qanon. They seem just like skeptics of the government... when you ignore the jewish space lasers and 5G covid vaccine. And then that backfired when Qanon attempted a coup. Um, oops!