Friday, August 8, 2025
The Briefing with Albert Mohler
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
4.8 • 8.4K Ratings
🗓️ 8 August 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Part I (00:13 – 05:54)
Public Broadcasting Loses Federal Funding: How Did This Happen and Why Does it Matter?
Part II (05:54 – 12:02)
The Rise and Decline of Late Night Television: The Cancellation of the Stephen Colbert Show Indicates Important Cultural Shifts in Entertainment
Part III (12:02 – 18:21)
Is It Wrong for a Prisoner of War to Take a Cyanide Pill to Protect National Secrets? What About If It’s to Protect Civilian Lives? — Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letter from a 12-Year-Old Listener of The Briefing
- Spycraft and Soulcraft on the Front Lines of History: A Conversation with James Olson by Thinking in Public (R. Albert Mohler, Jr. and James Olson)
What Do We Do with the Books of Ministry Leaders Who Have Now Fallen Away from the Faith? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing
Part V (23:04 – 27:35)
Is It Wrong to Applaud During Worship Services? Who is Receiving Praise, God or the Worship Team? — Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letter from a 14-Year-Old Listener of The Briefing
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Friday, August 8, 2025. I'm Albert Moller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. |
| 0:13.7 | Well, national public radio, the public broadcasting service, PBS, NPR, well, they continue, but they're going to have to continue without federal funding. |
| 0:23.9 | In the midst of the massive financial bill that was passed by Republicans just weeks ago, |
| 0:29.8 | one of the details in that bill was the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. |
| 0:35.0 | That was the omnibus funding unit through which the federal government |
| 0:38.8 | had channeled billions of dollars in terms of support for public television. Now, the idea of public |
| 0:44.0 | media really exploded in the 1960s, and there have been precursors to this, but at the federal |
| 0:50.6 | level, it really became a part of the great society under Lyndon Johnson. |
| 0:59.6 | And it came with the idea that culture would be brought to a lot of America, which was described as kind of a desert, largely modeled after the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, |
| 1:05.3 | other European models as well, but the BBC was central. And by the way, the BBC has been a public broadcaster in Britain going all the way back |
| 1:15.5 | to the development of the technologies themselves. |
| 1:17.9 | So the innovation in Britain was commercial media. |
| 1:22.5 | The innovation in the United States was really government media. |
| 1:26.2 | It tells you something about both countries. |
| 1:28.5 | But the BBC was known for a lot of middle brow. That's a very interesting cultural statement. |
| 1:34.2 | Between lowbrow, all that commercial stuff, and highbrow, which is the cultural elites, |
| 1:40.3 | there's middlebrow. And so you did have a lot of really interesting series that were done |
| 1:46.7 | on public television on both sides of the Atlantic. National Public Radio, very well known for |
| 1:53.6 | its news service. Both of them, however, actually attracting in terms of adult eyes and ears, a pretty elite part of the American audience |
| 2:04.2 | and a pretty liberal part of the American audience. Now, I'll tell you, I've paid a lot of attention |
| 2:08.2 | to PBS and NPR for decades because I think they're both very important as barometers of the culture. |
| 2:14.8 | When I am reviewing the news of the day, I'll often go to the NPR top of the hour |
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