PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor is quick to remind everyone that she is a political hack, which is normal for members of the national media. The reason she stands out is that, unlike CNN’s Jim Acosta or Jake Tapper, taxpayers are footing the bill for her partisanship.
Alcindor, on the taxpayer dime, is just as partisan and ridiculous as most of her media colleagues. An ostensible reporter, she adds her own commentary to her coverage as “context.” She said that President Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore, which highlighted people such as Frederick Douglass, Jesse Owens, and the Tuskegee Airmen, was a showcase of “white resentment.”
Alcindor is an extremely online troll moonlighting as a reporter, which doesn’t make her much different from some of the other White House correspondents who act out for attention. But taxpayers aren’t being forced to fund those activist reporters. And PBS isn’t the only partisan outlet playing this game.
National Public Radio has frequently tipped the scale for abortion advocates in its coverage of the issue, and it smeared a black female driver being assaulted as just one of the “right-wing extremists … turning cars into weapons.” PBS and NPR receive taxpayer funds through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is appropriated around $450 million annually, despite previous GOP attempts to defund it entirely.
Proponents of funding these outlets try to play both sides of the argument: Taxpayer funding is somehow both a minor part of the funding for PBS and NPR (so what’s the big deal, they say), but also it is somehow crucial to them being able to operate (so they must be funded!). When they’re not arguing out of both sides of their mouth, public broadcasting advocates trot out Sesame Street characters to try and gin up sympathy from audiences over them being “fired.”
Alcindor should be free to be a political hack pretending to be a news reporter, but there’s no reason the rest of us should be forced to pay for it. At least if the New York Times wants to pit its news coverage against the pro-life movement, pro-life subscribers can opt out, which they can’t do with NPR. We don’t expect taxpayers to fund CNN or Fox News, and there’s no reason NPR and PBS should get treated differently.
