NPR CEO Katherine Maher traveled over to Comedy Central and The Daily Show on Tuesday to ring the alarm bells over what could happen should NPR lose its federal money. Maher painted a nightmarish scenario where people go without news, Sesame Street gets shut down, and political polarization increases because, according to her, public media is the “foundational infrastructure” that holds the country together.
Host Jordan Klepper began by wondering, “The criticism from the right is, what do we need public funds to go towards NPR for? What is that argument? People are getting their news from all sorts of people. Most people get their news from the TikTok feed from their neighbor. So, why do they need their taxes to go to a place like NPR?”
Maher began her defense by claiming those TikTokers need to get their news from somewhere, so it might as well be…
