Joe Flint
speaker
290 appearances
9 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 5 Mar
Joe Flint’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 4.
Appearances
David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, did say the other week at an industry conference that any deals they did would be more about increasing their content, increasing their market share.
The more toys you have, the more you can bring people into your store.
That's basically the thinking.
Oh, thank you.
It's a fight that's going on on multiple levels. That's our colleague Joe Flint.
So one aspect of the fight is the idea or question of whether the government should continue to help fund public media. So there's been many attempts over the last several decades to end public funding, and Trump has just put it on the forefront. He has pretty much said, I feel that they are biased, hence we shouldn't support them with taxpayer money.
Well, it probably started getting criticized sometime a few days after the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 was signed.
But I think we really began to see a push about funding public media in the 90s. Newt Gingrich wanted to end funding for public media. George W. Bush also at one point made remarks about whether there was a need to fund public media. Mitt Romney, when he was running. The things I like, PBS.
and now Trump.
You may have noticed a pattern here. It seems to be Republicans who want to explore this idea of cutting funding for public media because their idea is, you know, we have so many challenges and so many debts and everything else. Why do we need to fund public media when there's so many options for the consumer out there?
Well, I think it really depends on the particular markets. So you're in D.C., I'm in L.A. We're in big markets. The public stations here and in D.C. don't rely as much on those funds from CPB the way smaller market stations do. But you go out into smaller markets and you might be talking about 15, 20 percent of their funding comes from the corporation.
And so if they lose that money, a lot of these stations, of course, produce their own local content. They're covering town halls. They're covering the markets they're in. They're doing their own TV shows. And so without that funding, they won't be able to make as much or do other services inside a town that they might provide.
Well, in the spring, there was a hearing chaired by Marjorie Taylor Greene to discuss the bias in public media.
And these hearings happen every few years, and they are somewhat predictable. Entertaining, but predictable. You will have Republicans telling us that the political bias of NPR and PBS is outrageous and that they carry a lot of children's content that isn't necessarily appropriate for children, that they are pushing an agenda and a culture that they don't feel should be pushed to their kids.
So these things quickly turn into kind of a lot of broad attacks.
The hearing quickly turned into that sort of thing. One side is attacking them for their politics. The other side is defending Sesame Street.
Well, these things, usually there's hearings, there's lots of talk, but they don't go anywhere. And one of the reasons they don't go anywhere is there are even a lot of Republican lawmakers from rural areas that count heavily on those public media stations. So they also may not be in the biggest rush to get rid of them because they're important to their constituents. We have a president right now
who is very confident in his ability to get what he wants through executive order, through muscling his way through situations. And so he issued in May, early May, an executive order saying that all funding for public media should stop.
I think there's certainly a perception that over the last 20 years, NPR has gotten more liberal. Former NPR employee Yuri Berliner, of course, wrote a piece for the Free Press many months ago outlining, in his view, just how liberal NPR has become over the last decade.
You know, the NPR audience tends to be an urban audience in big cities that are usually democratically run and that a lot of their content is geared towards those folks. There's nothing wrong with that. I think for the administration, their argument is, well, no, but why should we have to fund it?
Showing 241–260 of 290 · page 13 of 15
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