Late Wednesday night, it was revealed that Federal Communications Commissioner Meredith Atwell Baker was leaving her post to become one of Comcast’s head lobbyists. This comes just four months after she voted to approve that company’s massive takeover of NBC-Universal.

Public broadcasting has survived another bruising round of attacks, thanks to the enormous outcry from all corners of the country and across the political spectrum. Thanks, in other words, to you.

As we gathered in Boston earlier this month with 2,500 other media reform advocates at the National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR), the White House and Congress were on the verge of a possible government shutdown. The last minute deal our lawmakers struck included roughly $40 billion in cuts to an array of vital programs, but NPR and PBS were taken off the table. After hearing from millions of Americans, lawmakers got the message.

Americans radically overestimate the amount of federal funding that goes to NPR and PBS, but still have overwhelming support for that funding.

This weekend, Talking Points Memo reported on a new CNN survey assessing Americans' understanding and perceptions of the U.S. budget and government spending. The poll comes just days before a potential government shut down as the House and Senate battle over spending cuts for the rest of 2011.

The House just passed a preposterous bill designed to attack NPR and dismantle America’s public media system piece by piece. The bill, H.R. 1076, cuts NPR off from all federal funding and prohibits local public radio stations from using federal funds to buy radio programming, or pay dues to NPR.

As the debate over this bill stretched on throughout almost the entire day, proponents of the bill repeated two talking points over and over again. Let’s fact check those claims.

Fiction: Cutting NPR funding is what the American taxpayers want.