Turbo-Dopey Authoritarianism

     The thing about rule by edict is, it'll make your head spin.  Take news about the news -- four days ago, the White House put Federal funding for PBS and NPR in the crosshairs, by telling the independent Corporation for Public Broadcasting (of which the President is, literally, by statute, not their boss) to stop sending them money, and by telling the affiliate stations they cannot use their CPB funding to pay "membership fees" or individual programming fees to the networks.

     The first is no big deal; NPR, long in the culture-wars spotlight, has spent decades weaning themselves from Federal largesse, receiving just 1% of their budget from that source.  PBS counts on the Feds for somewhere north of 10%  of their funding.  But the second strikes deep: the smallest NPR and PBS affiliates rely on CPB money to stay on the air -- and their network membership fees are among their largest single expenses.  New York City and Indianapolis will have plenty of NPR and PBS on their air; Bushwhack, Alaska and Back-of-Beyond, Montana may end up with 24/7 polka music or nothing but static.  Many of the small-town and rural stations have only one or two people on staff, and spend a lot of time "riding the network" with nobody at the controls.  Don't like what you hear?  Spin the dial; you'll tune back during local bad weather or natural disaster.

     And here's the kicker, in two parts:
     1. The EO is titled, "ENDING TAXPAYER SUBSIDIZATION OF BIASED MEDIA" and complains "...that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens."  I don't know if any news media manage a hundred percent unbiased objectivity, but those two give it an honest try, and differentiate between news and opinion.  The Ad Fontes chart puts both of them not too far from the middle politically and rates them high on accuracy; NPR's News Now podcast, which consists of nothing but the same five-minute hourly newscasts you hear on the radio, comes in nearly at top dead center.
     2. Five days ago, the Trump Administration launched "White House Wire," a Federally-funded, White House run website devoted to positive coverage of Mr. Trump and his Executive Branch, modeled on news and opinion sites: it is wall-to-wall taxpayer-subsidized biased media.  How does the PBS/NPR EO put it?  Oh, yes, "At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage." Y'don't say?  But websites are different?  I doubt that.

     Do one or do the other, and it's pretty much politics as usual.  In a free society, the correct comeback to speech you don't like is to speak up yourself; through most of my life, Republicans have chafed at having to foot some of the bill for Sesame Street and All Things Considered and tried to skip out without paying.   But doing both at the same time?  Mr. Trump and his gang have not just murdered irony and left it bleeding out in a gutter, they are enthusiastically violating the corpse and sharing selfies of the process.