Dang, I haven't seen Democrats this angry since the 19th century when they had their slaves taken away.
There are a couple of big sources of their heightened angst on Friday, one being a mercy killing of perhaps the most unentertaining of late night entertainment TV.
TV’s ongoing problems with late night have come for Stephen Colbert, with CBS announcing Thursday that it plans to end his “Late Show” after the next TV season, citing a “financial decision.”
The maneuver — which ends years of original late-night programming at CBS that started when the network lured David Letterman from NBC in 1993 — comes as the economics of wee-hours TV have begun to accelerate, with media companies growing wary of the high price tags involved in producing the shows while the young viewers they try to attract watch more of them via digital video.
Let's face it: we're loooooong removed from the days of late night programs being appointment television. But hey, for this exercise, let's pretend we're still operating under the successful model revolutionized by the likes of Johnny Carson and David Letterman. Americans likely wouldn't believe it's worth it to stay up late to watch demagogic leftist politicians or disgraced government bureaucrats on what is supposed to be a comedy show.
Despite that, you still have prominent prog U.S. senators insisting that something more sinister may be at the root of Late Show going away.
Just finished taping with Stephen Colbert who announced his show was cancelled.
— Adam Schiff (@SenAdamSchiff) July 17, 2025
If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.
CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump – a deal that looks like bribery.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) July 18, 2025
America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.
Watch and share his message. pic.twitter.com/Rz7HcWFLYM
Look, if Colbert were simply being swapped out for a different host, there might be a tiny seed of truth to the speculations put forth by Sens. Schiff for brains and Fauxcahontas Warren. But the fact of the matter is the entire franchise is going away. If it were still a viable business model, why would the network nuke the show altogether, especially since network TV as a whole is already facing a very uncertain future?
But if this week weren't already dreary enough for progs, their favorite taxpayer subsidized propaganda arm (i.e. National Public Radio) will no longer be sucking on the government teet.
The GOP-controlled Congress canceled $9 billion in federal spending for foreign aid and public broadcasting, following through on President Trump’s efforts to defund the programs and overcoming some resistance among Republican lawmakers.
The House passed the Trump administration’s plan, 216-213 early Friday. Two Republicans voted no with the Democrats: Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mike Turner of Ohio. The Senate had passed it in the early hours of Thursday morning, 51-48, also largely along party lines, with Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joining Democrats in opposition.
There's been clamoring for years to defund NPR, PBS, etc. And whenever that subject was broached, you had public broadcasting's staunched defenders say something along the line of Federal funding being so small that yanking it wouldn't make much of a difference. But now that the proverbial gravy train has been halted, the progs are pivoting to their go-to shrieks of "PEOPLE WILL DIEEEEEEE!!!!!"
Ironically, claims of NPR being essential to providing life-saving information (like during the Kerr County, TX flooding) was superseded by their own self interests.
Rep. Roy: “When the floods were hitting the people that I represent, it took NPR through Texas Public Radio 19 hours to post anything about the flooding on its social media.
— Rep. Chip Roy Press Office (@RepChipRoy) July 17, 2025
What was NPR and TPR doing in the interim? They were playing a program, a DC based program, lobbying… pic.twitter.com/IyZYPFq5SS
Uri Berliner, who was an NPR employee for 2+ decades before being suspended (he eventually resigned) for calling out the company's blatant leftwing bias last year, flat out claimed the organization did this to themselves.
Once fairly evenly divided between liberals, moderates, and conservatives, NPR’s news audience shifted sharply to the left. And by 2023, liberals outnumbered conservatives more than six to one. True to the tote bag cliché, NPR became an accessory for Whole Foods shoppers. Which is sad, because in another era, NPR, and public radio more broadly, developed some of the most creative and entertaining programming anywhere, from Car Talk to This American Life, Planet Money, Radiolab and A Prairie Home Companion.
Thanks in part to this ideological transformation, NPR botched major stories—and damaged its bond with the American people.
To name a couple of prominent examples: It repeatedly insisted that the lab leak theory of Covid had been debunked and it refused to cover Hunter Biden’s laptop. NPR’s reporting on the most contentious issues of the day—climate change, youth gender medicine, and the war in Gaza—leaned on moralizing and emotional certitude more than on rigorous factual analysis.
Embracing the mantras of the Great Awokening, NPR became a caricature of itself with headlines like these:
- Microfeminism: The Next Big Thing in Fighting the Patriarchy
- Which Skin Color Emoji Should You Use? The Answer Can Be More Complex than You Think
- Black Women’s Groups Find Health and Healing on Hikes, But Sometimes Racism, Too
- Bringing Diversity to Maine’s Nearly All-White Lobster Fleet
- Diet Culture Can Hurt Kids. This Author Advises Parents to Reclaim the Word ‘Fat’
- These Drag Artists Know How to Turn Climate Activism into a Joyful Blowout
Inside NPR, rules on the use of language reflected the direction and mindset of the organization. We were told to avoid the term biological sex, warned not to say illegal immigrant (a hurtful label). A racial punctuation hierarchy was imposed; black would be uppercase, white lowercase. NPR adopted the phrase “gender affirming care” to describe childhood medical interventions that can mean sterilization and the surgical removal of genitals. These were not merely style choices. They were tribal signals, ideological markers.
NPR could have addressed these failings. I wrote my essay because I hoped the network might rediscover the values on which its success had been built. NPR could have regained some equilibrium, reclaimed a smidgen of independence, by copping to this reality even a little. It could have taken some visible steps back to the journalism gold standard of neutral impartiality. And it could have done all this prior to Trump’s reelection, so it wouldn’t look like NPR was caving to pressure from his administration.
But NPR did none of these things.
And then there's NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who decries such things as that pesky First Amendment and abject truth as getting in the way of things they like to do.
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says the "the number one challenge" in her fight against disinformation is "the First Amendment in the United States," which makes it "a little bit tricky" to censor "bad information" and "the influence peddlers" who spread it.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 17, 2024
NPR's censor-in-chief. pic.twitter.com/0vY6hIpbmO
NPR’s far-left CEO Katherine Maher: "Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done." pic.twitter.com/yuFCKBjzjT
— Ben Kew (@ben_kew) April 17, 2024
Imagine being the beneficiary of American citizens' hard earned money and then decrying perhaps the most valuable civil liberty they possess. There's no amount of spin that is going to convince me that this was not the absolute correct decision.
One final thought: There's a lot of sorrow being expressed over public media jobs potentially being lost and how that will adversely affect many employees and their families. So people who support the defunding of public media are being lectured that there's a real human element to which we should be sympathetic. But when then presidential candidate Joe Biden touted environmental initiatives which would inevitably lead to job losses in the fossil fuel industries?
FLASHBACK to 2019 when Joe Biden told coal miners to learn to code.
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 7, 2022
“Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!” pic.twitter.com/kAkMlr4ICN
I guess not all employment losses are created equal.
------------------------------------------------------
