Likewise the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year lavished on The New York Times, rewarded with a Pulitzer for unquestioningly printing the leaks and lies fed to it by government officials to spin up the Russiagate hoax .

Same goes for the Associated Press, which raked in more than $600,000 in taxpayer cash over the last year, and well over $10 million from 2021 onward.

Simply put, the American people should not be on the hook for news subscriptions to biased sources, or arguably to any sources at all.

For those in conservative and independent media, these payments to competitors just add insult to injury.

As has been revealed over the last eight years, the feds have leveraged the power of the government — and hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding — to pressure social-media companies to purge disfavored news and views, and crush the business models of the conservative and independent media companies producing them.

Seeking to cancel en masse competing media companies through censorship, shadow-banning and cutting off the ad revenue that is their lifeblood provided a benefit worth many multiples of the funds taxpayers have been doling out to favored media outlets.

The unspoken quid pro qu