More than 50 years after NPR and PBS first hit the airwaves, the two public broadcasters with hundreds of member stations face millions in budget cuts after Republican senators voted to claw back previously appropriated funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds public media like NPR and PBS.
The House cleared the measure after midnight Friday, sending it to President Donald Trump for his signature.
Republicans have framed the spending cuts bill as part of an effort to target purported “waste, fraud and abuse” in government-funded programs. GOP lawmakers have accused NPR and PBS of having a liberal bias, and in March, Republicans claimed that they were “anti-American airwaves.”
That’s the point
They’re trying to spread more misinformation by axing legimitate sources and distributers of information.
There’s no real way out. Use the fediverse, talk to your neighbours, try to build community. Try to not consume government-sponsored “news”, as from now on, they will mostly be disinformation campaigns.
Liberal bias because Public broadcasting can’t lie by law when it comes to the news, knowledge and telling the truth they’re considered liberal bias. Idiocracy, 1984 and Handmaids tale are all happening.
Don’t forget brave new world.
Honestly I think the big thing is we’re every day spiraling to Fahrenheit 451. Sure the government at top is doing it now, but these have been calls from the people for years. Beatty’s speech, the villain monologue, feels more and more pertinent.
Oddly, I’ve never read Fahrenheit 451.
Read the speech. Spot on. And i love the writing style. Found the pace of my internal audio sped up and down with the way he spoke. Reminded me of Harrison bergeron in a way.
Will definitely read the book.
Yep.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (it almost seems obvious, if not completely insane):
All the media we have been presented in our lives, has been propaganda and prophecy.
Behavior modifications and warnings and desensitization of what the future was to be, now is.
Some of it dumbed down the masses and washed their minds free of thought - hello marvel cinematic universe, fast and furious, reality TV, Facebook, idiocracy, etc
Some sent signals through the fray - Vonnegut, Bradbury, pkdick, Asimov, Huxley, Orwell, idiocracy, etc. But especially SciFi/speculative fiction writers.
On the whole, it seems all the dystopian futures have merged.
I sometimes half jokingly comment to myself 'I wish people would stop writing our future like this. Maybe someone could write us a happy future."
Or maybe it’s our collective consciousness fulfilling its collectively accepted belief that the future can only be what we’ve been exposed to.
After all,
“One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years.”
Thought Bernard Marx, who was a specialist on hypnopædia.
“Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth.”
Fahrenheit 451 is probably my most read book, but then again I grew up in a house where there was a Bradbury book laying around almost always within arms reach. I’ve always said when Bradbury writes, it’s almost poetry, and creates that pacing like where you say the internal audio speeds up and slows down. Of what I’ve called the “dystopian trilogy” of 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451, it seems that one is the least read and I feel is definitely one more people should read because it really looks less on the government and more on the people themselves… and it’s frankly frightening.
But, I feel often Bradbury was an optimist. Unlike many, while Fahrenheit 451 is one of the dystopian novels, it does have hope written into it as well.
Complete aside, my dad was a firefighter, and as I said, I was raised on Bradbury due to him. There’s an artist who made clay dragons, many were incense burners. I saw one where it’s a dragon reading a book, and the incense would come out from its nostrils and pour over the book. I said I’d need to get one for my dad that had Fahrenheit 451 as the book, the artist hadn’t read it before. The next week she had read it, and made one of these dragons where it’s wearing a fire helmet with the 451 on the shield, and the book he’s reading is Dante’s Inferno, and instead of the smoke coming from the nostrils, the hole is hidden by the book so the pages would look like they’re smoking. She caught the feeling of the book with that one, so that’s one of those that has been most prominently on display at my dad’s house since I got it.
but at least we’re not gattaca yet
There are stations in Alaska that got over half their budget from the corporation for public broadcasting that are the only way to get tsunami alerts to a lot of people living on islands up there. If they go dark and nobody dies it will only be through incredible luck.
