GOP-led Senate votes to cancel $9 billion in funding for foreign aid, NPR and PBS; NBC News, July 16, 2025

Sahil Kapur, Frank Thorp V and Brennan Leach , NBC News; GOP-led Senate votes to cancel $9 billion in funding for foreign aid, NPR and PBS

[Kip Currier: Notice how Trump 2.0 and the GOP (except for a couple of legislators) are going after sources of information: cutting funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Voice of America, PBS, NPR, etc. 

Control the information sources and you can more easily influence and control how people get their information and what they think.

Autocracies restrict access to information; democracies don't.]

[Excerpt]

"The Republican-led Senate Republicans voted Thursday morning to pass a package of spending cuts requested by President Donald Trump, sending it to the House. 

The rescissions package cancels previously approved funding totaling $9 billion for foreign aid and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS. Republicans passed it through a rarely used process to evade the 60-vote threshold and modify a bipartisan spending deal on party lines.

The vote of 51-48 followed a 13-hour series of votes on amendments, with two Republicans joining Democrats in opposition to the final bill: Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska."

If Trump cuts funding to NPR and PBS, rural America will pay a devastating price; The Guardian, June 6, 2024

Margaret Sullivan , The Guardian; If Trump cuts funding to NPR and PBS, rural America will pay a devastating price

"With the sharp decline of the local newspaper business over the past 20 years, many parts of America have turned into what experts refer to as “news deserts”. These are places that have almost no sources of credible local reporting.

As local newspapers have shuttered or withered – at a rate of more than two every week – news deserts have grown. The effects are sobering. People who live in news deserts become more polarized in their political views and less engaged in their communities.

One of the foundations of democracy itself – truth – begins to disappear. People turn to social media for information and lies flow freely with nothing to serve as a reality check.

Right now, many small and rural communities that are on the brink of becoming news deserts do still have access to public media – particularly to National Public Radio’s network of member radio stations, which employ dedicated local reporters.

But the Trump administration’s new effort targeting public radio and television is a serious threat...

Voters – especially those in rural areas, small towns and red states – should let their elected representatives know that they need public radio and television to continue. That public media may even be their lifeline."

Parks, libraries, museums: here’s why Trump is attacking America’s best-loved institutions; The Guardian, June 2, 2025

Margaret Sullivan , The Guardian; Parks, libraries, museums: here’s why Trump is attacking America’s best-loved institutions

"Why would any politician – especially one as hungry for adulation as Donald Trump – go after such cherished parts of America?

It seems counterintuitive, but this is all a part of a broad plan that the great 20th century political thinker Hannah Arendt would have understood all too well.

Take away natural beauty, free access to books and support for the arts, and you end up with a less enlightened, more ignorant and less engaged public. That’s a public much more easily manipulated.

“A people that can no longer believe in anything cannot make up its mind,” said Arendt, a student of authoritarianism, in 1973. Eventually, such a public “is deprived … of its ability to think and judge”, and with people like that, “you can then do what you please”.

That’s what Trump and company are counting on."

SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF FAKE NEWS; New Yorker, 11/30/16

Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker; SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF FAKE NEWS:

"What we are now calling fake news—misinformation that people fall for—is nothing new. Thousands of years ago, in the Republic, Plato offered up a hellish vision of people who mistake shadows cast on a wall for reality. In the Iliad, the Trojans fell for a fake horse. Shakespeare loved misinformation: in “Twelfth Night,” Viola disguises herself as a man and wins the love of another woman; in “The Tempest,” Caliban mistakes Stephano for a god. And, in recent years, the Nobel committee has awarded several economics prizes to work on “information asymmetry,” “cognitive bias,” and other ways in which the human propensity toward misperception distorts the workings of the world.

What is new is the premise of the conversation about fake news that has blossomed since Election Day: that it’s realistic to expect our country to be a genuine mass democracy, in which people vote on the basis of facts and truth, as provided to them by the press."