One year ago—July 18, 2024, to be exact—my friend and colleague Lou Dobbs passed away. Lou was a conservative media titan whose decades of nightly appearances on CNN and later FOX News Channel (plus his daily Lou Dobbs Financial Report on the Salem Radio Network) influenced millions of Americans to get involved in politics…some for the very first time.
Vilified by so-called mainstream media for his unabashed views on the need for strong control of our borders, fiscal responsibility, and a strong military, Lou developed an intensely loyal following that included a charismatic real estate tycoon from New York City named Donald J. Trump. Lou’s impact on Trump’s stunning 2016 victory prompted our then-45th President to not only single him out by name countless times but also to pipe Lou into White House Cabinet meetings by speakerphone so administration leaders could benefit from his trademark Dobbs candor on the need to return traditional American values to our nation through government policies.
Two events this week brought fond memories of Lou Dobbs rushing back to me.
The first was Congress passing Trump’s $ 9 billion rescission package, which slashed funding for numerous foreign programs formerly overseen by bureaucrats at the United States Agency for International Development — but also finally pulled the plug on taxpayer funding of public broadcasting outlets like NPR and PBS.
(Frequent TOWNHALL readers will recall I have been calling for the defunding of NPR since a column I published in January of 2022)
Following Congress’s rescission vote, U.S. Budget Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) appeared on the Salem Media news program THIS WEEK ON CAPITOL HILL with Tony Perkins to applaud his colleagues. “I was proud of it. We took money away from NPR, which is a left-leaning organization, and PBS, which is pretty woke, so it was a good day.”
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Apart from the astonishingly rare instance of Congress actually slashing funds for ANYTHING, rather than the usual weasel-wording that they “reduced the rate of increase,”—pulling the rug out from under NPR and PBS was especially satisfying for those of us who have watched public broadcasting morph into taxpayer-funded malcontent meetings, tearing down everything good about America.
PBS was once seen as home to innocuous, friendly kids' fare such as Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and Sesame Street. At the same time, NPR attracted effete yuppie eggheads to “news” programs like ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, which always seemed to focus on pro-union stories and odd features about poetry written by convicts in prison.
As Nicole Russell in USA TODAY summed up following this week’s Congressional budget cuts: “NPR, and to a lesser extent PBS, have become a cesspool of liberal bias that taxpayers have been forced to fund… Trump’s cuts can’t happen soon enough.”
Media leftists reacted to the funding cuts in frenzied hysteria, claiming “farmers in Red States” would now be denied emergency weather information only available in rural areas on NPR stations. This presupposes that in 2025, American farmers are clones of the bumbling Mr. Haney on “Green Acres”…befuddled by change and unable to add weather apps on their iPhones. Other voices implied “free speech” is being muzzled by asking NPR—in business since February of 1970—to finally stand on its hind legs financially rather than expecting taxpayers to perpetually fund leftist propaganda beamed out of Washington, D.C.
The second “big media event” was CBS announcing it will finally send Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” into a well-deserved oblivion next May. Colbert is a singularly unfunny man whose TV career began as a bloviating “conservative” parody of FOX News star Bill O’Reilly on the Comedy Central cable channel. He was tapped in 2015 to replace David Letterman as late-night “comedy” show host on the Tiffany Network.
Colbert fairly quickly dropped any pretense of actually entertaining viewers in favor of force-feeding audiences his lefty political views and nonstop Trump bashing. Like fellow late-night TV hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon, Colbert became indistinguishable from nutters like MSNBC anchors Jen Psaki and Lawrence O’Donnell, Joy Behar, or Whoopi Goldberg on “The View” and the literally unhinged Rosie O’Donnell, who believes denigrating President Trump endlessly is a winning schtick. It isn’t.
Using the same playbook as pro-NPR critics, the howls were immediately heard from coast to coast that CBS was “bowing a knee to Donald Trump” and that “muzzling” Stephen Colbert would have a chilling effect on political dissent in the USA. This is laughable. I prefer to see it as a day coming in May 2026 when another unfunny comic is set out to pasture.
Add the NPR cuts and Stephen Colbert being kicked to the curb by CBS to other “broomings” since President Trump began his second term in the Oval Office. Gone—so far—are Joy Reid, Chuck Todd, Norah O’Donnell, Andrea Mitchell, Jim Acosta, and the outrageously biased Terry Moran of ABC News. Not to mention Kari Lake cutting her way through the leftist clubhouse known as Voice of America like a hot knife through butter.
Yes, a lot has happened in the year since Lou Dobbs was called home…and the momentum continues to pick up as once-sacrosanct “journalists” are being called to account for their attempts to mislead, misinform, and outright lie to American radio and TV audiences for years.
I hope that somewhere in Heaven, Lou Dobbs is looking down and smiling as his patriotic vision of the United States is being validated daily by the awesome President he worked so hard to elect.
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