Part of this, of course, is strategic. The public broadcasters know that most people view them as pretentious, highbrow snobs, coastal elites who care only about their own, very narrow fixations, yet expect all American taxpayers to fund them. They know that they have a perception problem, which is to say that they know most Americans perceive them as useless, condescending, and tax-sponging. To (belatedly and half-heartedly) counter that perception, the public broadcasters want desperately to convince the public to think of them as “everyman,” as the literal lifeline to America’s heartland, the saviors and defenders of the common folk. It’s a desperate and ridiculous strategy, to be sure, but it is a strategy, nonetheless.

The bigger part of all this, however, is that people like Katherine Maher, Ken Burns, and the rest of public broadcasting’s defenders actually believe what they say. They honestly think that Americans who live in the vast expanses of flyover country between New York and San Francisco are backward, ignorant, and totally unaware of the world around them, especially anything that might be considered “sophisticated” or “enlightened.” They truly and deeply believe that they are the only light that occasionally breaks the deep, profound, and otherwise endless darkness that is “rural” America. Of course, they need PBS and NPR. Without PBS and NPR, well…those people would get all their information from the spinster schoolmarm at the one-room schoolhouse or—Gaia forbid!—from a snake-handling revivalist preacher! And heaven only knows how many dimwitted Dorothys and Totos would be swept off the plains of Kansas every year without public broadcasters to warn them to stay away from funnel clouds, no matter how enticing they may appear!

In other, even deeper and more serious ways, the PR campaign waged on behalf of the public broadcasters mirrors the long-term trend among the nation’s political, educational, and media elites to view those who are unlike them as “lesser than,” as simpletons and “deplorables” who are too stupid to know what they really want and really need and, therefore, have to be told those things by their cultural and intellectual betters. Just as PBS and NPR waged a campaign to save their public funding by appealing to the “hidden” interests of rural people who despise them and who consistently vote for elected officials who want to defund them, so the nation’s ruling class has long bemoaned that rural (as well as suburban and ex-urban) voters are staunchly Republican, even though these voters’ real interests should make them Democrats.

More than two decades ago, the journalist Thomas Frank appealed to his fellow leftists’ sense of self-importance by asking (in a book by the same title), “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Kansans and other rural voters, you see, are too stupid to understand that they shouldn’t be voting for pro-life Republicans who might also cut farm subsidies. Obviously, they should, instead, vote for pro-welfare Democrats, who will take care of them like the Prairie Populists of yesteryear.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/19/pbs-and-npr-to-america-were-here-for-you-dummies/