PBS News Weekend broadcast its final show on January 11–12, 2026. The program — produced by WETA in the Washington, D.C. area and funded largely by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) — signed off after Congress passed a rescissions package pulling $1.1 billion in federal funds from the CPB. President Donald J. Trump had already issued an executive order in May 2025 directing a halt to CPB funding, and when Congress followed through, the math was simple: no money, no show. The CPB itself completed its wind-down by January 2026 after its official sunset on September 30, 2025.
I’ll say it plainly — this is good news. Not just symbolically. Strategically good news for anyone who cares about the right to keep and bear arms.
The War for the Second Amendment Is Fought on Many Fronts
People sometimes think the fight for the Second Amendment lives entirely in federal courtrooms. And yes, the courts matter enormously — I spend most of my professional life there. But the courts are one front of many. The legislative chambers are a front. Law enforcement policy is a front. And the media is absolutely a front, because the media shapes what ordinary Americans believe about guns, gun owners, and the Second Amendment before a single lawsuit is ever filed.
That is why the disappearance of PBS News Weekend matters. And the dissolution of the CPB — the federal entity that funneled taxpayer money to PBS, NPR, and roughly 1,500 local public media stations — matters even more. We are talking about billions of dollars transferred from working Americans across the country into a media apparatus that, in my view, spent decades advancing an anti-gun, anti-American narrative. That pipeline is now closed.
How the Mainstream Media Plays the Game
The mechanism is straightforward once you see it. The first tool is story selection. Ask yourself: when did you last see a major network newscast cover a defensive gun use? Almost never. The one notable exception — the Trayvon Martin case out of Florida — was covered wall-to-wall, and the framing was relentlessly anti-gun and anti-self-defense. Meanwhile, the hundreds of thousands of documented defensive gun uses each year get no airtime. Zero. That silence is editorial policy, not oversight.
The second tool is slant. When a story involving guns does make the cut, the booking is rigged. The anti-gun side gets polished, media-trained advocates. The pro-rights side gets the least-prepared voice they can find. The segment runs four minutes; the anti-gun guest gets three. You know the formula.
And the third tool — the one people miss — is funding. The money flows from taxpayers in the middle of the country to Washington, D.C., where it gets distributed to journalists who function, in practice, as communications staff for the progressive left. Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune helped end that arrangement. President Trump signed it into law. The Overton window just moved.
The Obituary Test
A recent article in the New York Post by T. Becket Adams crystallized exactly what I’ve been arguing. Adams compared how mainstream outlets eulogized conservatives versus left-wing figures, including outright dictators.
When Scott Adams — the Dilbert creator and conservative commentator — died of metastatic prostate cancer on January 13, 2026, the New York Times led with his “racist comments.” The subhead leaned into the same framing. That was the lede on a man’s life.
Compare that to these:
- Yasser Arafat, architect of modern terrorism, died in 2004. The New York Times headline: “Yasir Arafat, Father and Leader of Palestinian Nationalism, Dies at 75.” No mention of terrorism in the headline.
- Hugo Chávez, who destroyed Venezuela through socialism, died in 2013. The Times called him “a polarizing figure who led a movement.” A movement. That’s it.
- Fidel Castro, who enslaved Cuba for decades, died in 2016. “Cuban Revolutionary Who Defied U.S., Dies at 90.” Revolutionary. Heroic framing for a communist dictator.
- Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, founder and leader of ISIS, killed in a U.S. Special Operations raid in Syria in October 2019. The Washington Post’s original obituary called him an “austere religious scholar at the helm of Islamic State.” That headline became a national punchline — and a perfect summary of how far editorial capture had gone.
This is not accidental. This is the operating bias of a media ecosystem that, until now, received federal subsidies from the American taxpayer. No more.
What Comes Next
The Bari Weiss appointment as editor-in-chief of CBS News in October 2025 — after Paramount acquired The Free Press — signals that some legacy outlets recognize the audience has moved. Channels like The Four Boxes Diner, independent voices on X, and a growing ecosystem of alternative media have spent years filling the void left by a mainstream press that refused to cover the Second Amendment honestly. The Gundie Awards, now in their seventh year, exist precisely because that ecosystem is real and growing.
The closure of PBS News Weekend and the dissolution of the CPB do not end media bias. But they remove a taxpayer-funded institutional pillar of it. Every domino that falls matters. This one fell in the right direction.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.