NPR and PBS used to justify their unjustifiable taxpayer funding by telling people that poor children would be harmed if their educational programming was cut. Then, in 2015, “Sesame Street” got a private deal with HBO, and a stream of educational content came online.

Now, the mantra is that without public broadcasting, there will be no advance warning systems for weather emergencies in hard-to-reach places and that local news coverage will dry up.

The two syllogisms are as follows: 1) Without public media, there is no local coverage, and without local news, there is no democracy, ergo, without public media, there is no democracy. 2) Without public media, there is no warning service, and without warning services, people will die, ergo, without public media, people will die.

The last one sounds like a hostage-taking situation: “Send us money, or people will die!” It’s not true, of course, as I said in my testimony this Wednesday in the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency’s hearing on whether we should cut off public media.

The Democrats on the subcommittee, unaware perhaps of the HBO deal, kept bringing out pictures of Elmo, the Cookie Monster, and Big Bird.

The CEOs of NPR and PBS, Katherine Maher and Paula Kerger, respectively, who were the star witnesses in the hearing, knew better. They brought with them the head of Alaska Public Media, Ed Ulman. Alaska is exhibit A for “hard-to-reach places.”

When I testified, I said that both arguments were hogwash. “Over 98% of Americans today own........

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