Fred Rogers

The Friday primetime lineups of CNN and MSNBC did not handle the news that President Trump signed an executive order forbidding taxpayer money for PBS and NPR well, as they portrayed the news as an assault on everything from democracy, science, the military, farmers, and even the country itself.

If it had started to seem that CNN couldn’t stoop any lower, they proved that wrong Thursday. That afternoon, the network exploited the memory of one of American television’s most beloved figures as a plug for the taxpayer-subsidized left-wing propaganda machines PBS and NPR as the Trump administration threatened to pull the plug on their funds.

The Washington Times took up the issue today of how PBS and NPR stations exploit their own airwaves to lobby against Republican budget-cut proposals. Reporter Seth McLaughlin and Stephen Dinan reported that spokesmen for PBS superstations WGBH in Boston and WETA in Washington “said their appeals never told their audiences which way to lobby Congress, but only to call and let their feelings be…