Republicans have for decades floated legislation to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the congressionally created entity that bankrolls NPR.
Donald Trump also pledged to defund NPR on the campaign trail, calling it a “LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE.” His new FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, may have found a way to kneecap it.
Carr, the Free Beacon‘s Chuck Ross reports, is zeroing in on the Communications Act, a 1934 law that sets rules for the content publicly funded stations like NPR can air. Under the law, NPR can run sponsored messages, but they can’t be overly promotional or make “calls to action.” NPR itself, meanwhile, says its “sponsor messages”—those are what regular people call commercials—can’t include “health claims.”
Those guidelines don’t seem to square with many of the “sponsor messages” actually running on the network, including one that ran Monday promoting a nerve relief drug from pharma giant Procter & Gamble. The spot states that the drug, Nervive, is “designed to reduce occasional nerve aches, weaknesses, and discomfort in hands or feet due to aging.” It’s one of hundreds of advertiser deals that brought NPR more than $100 million in revenue in 2023. That number dwarfs the $7 million or so in taxpayer funding the network brought in.
Carr ordered an investigation into those ads last week, arguing that taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook “to support a for profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements.” The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau, the unit tasked with enforcing the Communications Act, is leading the probe. Its investigations “may result in negotiated settlements or enforcement actions that include monetary penalties or injunctive directives,” according to its website.
NPR president Katherine Maher, best known for tweets that shrugged off widespread looting and property damage committed in the name of “racial justice,” says she’s “confident any review of our programming and underwriting practices will confirm NPR’s adherence to these rules.” We’ll be following the showdown closely.
Finally, a two state solution we can get behind. Donald Trump expanded—to put it mildly—on his call to resettle residents of the Gaza Strip during his Tuesday evening joint press conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He laid out “ambitious plans to resettle Gaza’s population, ‘take over’ the war-torn strip, clear out ‘unexploded bombs and other weapons from the site,’ and spearhead ‘economic development,'” our Adam Kredo reports. “A rebuilt Gaza, Trump said, could be ‘the Riviera of the Middle East.'”
Trump said the strip “has been a symbol of death and destruction for decades” and “should not go through a process of rebuilding and occupation” by the same people who have “lived a miserable existence there.” Instead, he said, the United States “will take over” through “a long-term ownership position” and lead the rebuilding process.
“It just can’t go back. If you go back, it’s going to end up the same way it has for 100 years,” Trump said of Gaza. “We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal, and I don’t want to be cute, I don’t want to be a wise guy, but the Riviera of the Middle East—this could be something that could be so magnificent.”
Gazan resettlement plans were long considered taboo in Israel but briefly went mainstream after Oct. 7. Following criticism from the United States and Europe, however, a group of Israeli officials came out against such plans last January.
Now, Trump is taking a different approach, and Netanyahu responded positively during the Tuesday press conference.
“I believe, Mr. President, that your willingness to puncture conventional thinking, thinking that has failed time and time again, your willingness to think outside the box with fresh ideas, will help us achieve all of these goals,” Netanyahu said. “I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again, you are the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.”
Make Gaza Great Again! More about the press conference here.
Hamas’s terror patrons in Gaza, Iran, raked in $140 billion in illicit oil profits under the Biden administration, which took a lax approach to enforcing the sanctions that crippled the Islamic Republic during Trump’s first term. But the gravy train is coming to a halt.
Trump, Kredo reports, signed an order on Tuesday restoring the “maximum pressure” approach he applied to Iran during his first administration. The order aims to drive Iran’s oil exports to zero, with the Treasury Department “responsible for enforcing sanctions on Tehran’s fleet of oil tankers, while the State Department will nix a series of sanctions waivers that made it easier for Iran to access cash.”
Trump described the measures as “very tough,” vowed to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and revealed that he’s “left instructions” on how to “obliterate” Iran should it assassinate him. “There won’t be anything left,” he said.
In Chicago, Barack Obama is still trying to build the monstrous eyesore that is his presidential library, and it’s not going well. It took Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush less than five years to build their presidential libraries. Obama’s is supposed to be completed in 2026, nearly a decade after he left office. What gives?
The Left’s obsession with DEI has something to do with it, our Andrew Stiles reports.
The Obama Foundation waited years to break ground on the project due to environmental assessments. Then it insisted on abiding by “an array of gender and racial quotas,” publishing “bizarre pie charts with titles such as, ‘Workforce Hours Summary by Race.'” The latest setback is an $800 million racial discrimination suit filed by one of the black-owned subcontractors that helped it meet those racial quotas. That firm, II in One, argues it was singled out by the company overseeing the build, Thornton Tomasetti, which allegedly committed discriminatory actions that “directly undermined the Obama Foundation’s DEI Goals.” It’s a shame both sides can’t lose.
Thornton Tomasetti denies the allegations, arguing that the issue is not racism but rather a “questionably qualified subcontractor team” that blames “their own shortcomings on the design team.” They’re so close to getting it.
Away from the Beacon:
- Ken Martin’s “new DNC” is spending its time promoting clips from self-described “pragmatic progressive” Jasmine Crockett calling Trump’s ancestors colonizers and dismissing “mediocre white boys.” The center-left Welcome PAC responds: “Who is this for?”
- 24,000 federal workers have already taken the Trump administration’s buyout option, which expires on Thursday. Another 1,400 at USAID—nearly all of its D.C. staff—are on leave. Progress!
- Biden FTC chair Lina Khan is out with an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that it’s China, not the United States, that boasts a corporate environment with “enough competition.”
- J.B. Pritzker, the Illinois governor and billionaire Hyatt hotel heir from Palo Alto who attended Milton Academy, Duke, and Northwestern, says Republicans “have no idea what average working Americans are going through” and thinks Democrats’ “policies are not off.” Preach, brother!
Original News Source – Washington Free Beacon
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