jauntywundrkind 3 hours ago

The rural focus seems weird, a mis-direction. Sure yes, they'll feel a lot of damage from this, stations will close, but there's so many people everywhere going to be impacted by this.

What feels most notable to me is that there has been so much media consolidation already. David (son of Larry) Ellison's Skydance buying CBS removes on more not hard right/hard plutocrat aligned media empire. The ongoing Warner Brothers / Discovery mega-conglomrate (also encompassing HBO, DC, Turner) being run by plutocrat friendly David Zaslav. Rumbles of Bezos trying to buy Conde Master. LA Times, WaPo, NYT all having very plutocrat friendly operators now.

Having the government paying kind of regular boring human people to go make programs and radio is a threat to the consolidated media, a threat to the large sweeping faction of very rich people who've been gobbling up the press.

I care for sure about rural people & their access to media, their local stations. Local stations are amazing, local journalism is especially amazing & ghastly absent, super hard to fund today. The government de-participating in enriching democracy by supporting independent media, that's the incredibly woe begotten (for all) sadness I feel about this news.

jmclnx 4 hours ago

I wonder when "Radio Free Europe (EU)" becomes a thing in the US :)

throwawaysleep 5 hours ago

Rural services should be the first cut as they voted for this, so clearly don’t want them.

  • kacesensitive 4 hours ago

    Yeah, it’s grim irony. A lot of rural communities consistently vote for politicians who campaign on dismantling these very programs (public broadcasting, Medicaid, rural hospital funding, even USPS). Then act surprised when the services vanish.

  • paulwilsondev 4 hours ago

    As a person that lives in subrubia and has property in the sticks, I can assure you that NPR or PBS losing funding is no loss. I have a weather radio specifically for NOAA alerts. I could not care less about NPR and PBS losing any funding.

    • rovr138 4 hours ago

      ‘In my sample size of one’

      And that one, it doesn’t experience the ‘thing’ all the time, in every condition.

  • SonOfKyuss 5 hours ago

    But this is also what the folks behind this want. Rural America is easier to radicalize when they aren’t exposed to all that woke empathy crap on Sesame Street or facts-based reporting from NPR. If PBS news hour sounded like Fox News, they wouldn’t have cut their funding

    • kacesensitive 4 hours ago

      My grandparents think NPR is leftist propaganda and PBS has a "trans agenda" whatever that means. They're too far gone.

      • akudha 4 hours ago

        This is depressing. What is "trans agenda" and why do they think it affects them? Do they even know a single trans person in real life, assuming that is what they are scared of? I honestly do not understand any of this at all.

        • kacesensitive 3 hours ago

          Well they know my wife but not that she's trans lmao they live less than an hour away and we never really see them due to the comments they make. Just not worth putting her through that.

    • throwawaysleep 4 hours ago

      They already vote that way, making it irrelevant. The play now is to make sure no young people continue to live in rural communities.

      Have a bipartisan concensus that rural communities should largely be separated from services.

      • SonOfKyuss 4 hours ago

        You sort of touched on it, but yes this isn’t about changing the minds of adults, it’s about keeping the kids in those areas from questioning what they are being told by those around them

    • jeffbee 4 hours ago

      PBS News Hour has, perversely, spent the last five years incinerating its credibility among thinking people in an attempt to curry favor with their enemies. This apparently did not work.

    • readthenotes1 3 hours ago

      Fact based reporting, like the Hunter Biden laptop story isn't a story, or Pres Biden is fully mentally competent, or firing a coworker for calling out a progressive bias in the newsroom?

      We can do with less of that, I think.

  • guywithahat 4 hours ago

    I don't think they ever really did. I always understood it as a way to push left-wing politics on rural areas.

paulwilsondev 4 hours ago

cry me a river when they get corporate money and have advertisements on NPR

  • tyronehed 4 hours ago

    So, you oppose their desire to diversify their funding? NPR gets 10% of their funding from tax dollars. Who you are harming is small rural public radio stations in red areas.