Mike Pesca talks NPR Funding on The 21st Show
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today on The Gist. We play back Mikes appearance on the 21st Show where they discuss NPR and its funding. It originally aired on Monday July 28th.
Produced by Corey Wara
Production Coordinator Ashley Khan
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Mike. It's Saturday. It's the Saturday show. And earlier this week, in fact, Monday I was on WILL, Illinois Public Radio show called The 21st, because you know, they're the 21st date, as you know. And they were talking about themselves, NPR and public radio funding. And before, and this |
| 0:23.0 | was based on a substack post that I wrote for Peska Profundities, which is the more long-formsister |
| 0:30.4 | brother publication to the gist list, which I ask you all to subscribe to, Mike pesca.com. |
| 0:36.8 | And this Peska profundities piece where I talked |
| 0:39.4 | about certain allegations, a bias against NPR. I used a little chat GPT, admittedly a conceit. |
| 0:46.0 | But we got to the question, you know, how biased are these particular stories over many years of |
| 0:51.4 | NPR? And my theory then, which I talked about on the show, and you've |
| 0:55.8 | heard me talk about it here, is that NPR has engaged in a lot of coverage and a lot of |
| 1:00.7 | emphasis that most of the country would not identify with or benefit from or might in many cases |
| 1:07.4 | find off-putting. And I've also talked about some of the coverage that doesn't |
| 1:11.3 | comport with the best practices of journalism, let's say. Do this mean NPR should lose funding? |
| 1:17.1 | I hope I get this point across in the show. I don't think that NPR should lose funding. I don't |
| 1:21.3 | think PBS should lose funding, especially given the fact that we're in an age when the administration |
| 1:27.1 | is certainly attacking |
| 1:29.4 | the media, the news media, the First Amendment. |
| 1:32.4 | I think the best First Amendment stance is not to defund a bona fide news organization, |
| 1:39.0 | two bona fide news organizations. |
| 1:40.7 | In fact, if you consider that NPR as many stations, many bonafide news organizations |
| 1:46.3 | that on net do a great job. However, if the thesis is that NPR is solely the victim of dishonest critics |
| 1:56.7 | who never liked it in the first place, that's not entirely valid. So that's why WILL wanted to |
| 2:03.8 | have me on. And we're not going to play the first half of that, but there were local station heads |
| 2:09.7 | of the Quad Cities PBS broadcaster, the local, I think normal Illinois. There was a caller from |
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