The left-wing propaganda machine you've been forced to fund for decades just lost 70 years of its archives.
Now a PBS station is begging a court to save the data it couldn't bother to protect.
What a Denver data giant is refusing to hand back will make you furious.
A Taxpayer-Funded Network That Can't Even Keep the Lights On
Nine PBS – the St. Louis public television station broadcasting since 1954 – stored 50 terabytes of archival footage with a Colorado cloud storage company called Open Source Storage.
In March of this year, Nine PBS tried to renew its contract.
Open Source Storage never responded.
The station lost access to its data.
When Nine PBS looked deeper, the company's website was gone and it was listed as delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State.
Fifty terabytes of material – documentaries, broadcasts, 70 years of regional television history – vanished into a legal black hole because somebody decided cloud storage from a no-name company was good enough.
This is what government-funded media looks like when the cameras aren't rolling.
The Shell Game That Swallowed Your Archives
It gets worse.
Open Source Storage had actually been outsourcing Nine PBS's data to Iron Mountain – a legitimate, operational data storage company with a Denver facility.
Iron Mountain has the files right now.
Iron Mountain is refusing to release them.
The company's position is that its contract was with OSS, not with Nine PBS – so Nine PBS gets nothing.
The court sided with Nine PBS and ordered OSS to facilitate the data transfer.
Iron Mountain still hasn't complied.
Then somebody named James Tramel showed up and said he'd acquired OSS's assets and would make things right.
Nine PBS paused its lawsuit.
Tramel went silent.
An auto-reply said he was no longer affiliated with OSS.
When Nine PBS finally reached him by phone, Tramel said he had "been defrauded" into buying the company and that ownership had reverted back to the original owners.
Fifty terabytes of real footage, real history – stuck between a company that vanished and a corporation that won't let go.
Why This Is Exactly What Trump Warned You About
Russell Vought, the head of Trump's Office of Management and Budget, called it exactly right: PBS has been giving Americans "leftist news for decades" on the taxpayer's dime.
Trump pulled the plug.
Congress rescinded $1.1 billion in CPB funding in July 2025, shutting down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the first time in its 58-year history.
Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said it plainly at a House hearing this year: public broadcasting has become an echo chamber for "wealthy, white, urban liberals" who look down on the rest of the country.
She wasn't wrong.
The Heritage Foundation's Michael Gonzalez went further, telling lawmakers that PBS and NPR have spent years showing open contempt for conservative viewpoints while treating taxpayer funding as a permanent entitlement they never had to earn.
Senator Marsha Blackburn introduced the FAIR Act to make the defunding permanent, calling out PBS for pushing "left-wing propaganda" while collecting checks signed by farmers, truckers, and factory workers who never watch a minute of it.
Those are the same taxpayers who just found out how Nine PBS handled the archives their money paid for.
They Took Your Money and Couldn't Keep Their Own Files
A basic 3-2-1 backup strategy – one that any competent IT department runs – keeps three copies of data, on two different media, with one stored offsite.
Nine PBS had none of that.
They handed 70 years of publicly funded content to a single small vendor, signed a contract, and apparently never looked back.
When the vendor vanished, so did the archives.
Meanwhile, PBS CEO Paula Kerger – who earns over $1 million a year, according to the network's own tax filings – was busy telling CNN she couldn't "make sense" of accusations that PBS has a liberal bias.
She had plenty of time to go on CNN.
She apparently had no time to make sure Nine PBS's servers were backed up.
Trump defunded PBS because it spent decades lying to you with your own money.
Turns out it couldn't even manage that money competently.
The files are still sitting in Iron Mountain's Denver facility – owned by American taxpayers, held hostage by corporate legalese, managed by an institution that just proved it doesn't deserve a dime of public funding.
Sources:
- Neo Anderson, "PBS station loses 50 terabytes with 70 years of archival footage after data-storage company shuts down," Not the Bee, August 16, 2026.
- "Nine PBS Loses Access to 70 Years of Data After Contracted Cloud Storage Vendor Goes Defunct," Tom's Hardware, August 2026.
- Clay Waters, "PBS News Hour Segment Defends Its Taxpayer Funding, Dismisses ANY Criticism of Bias," NewsBusters, April 18, 2025.
- "Hearing Wrap Up: DOGE Subcommittee Holds NPR and PBS Executives Accountable for Leftist Propaganda Funded by Taxpayer Dollars," House Oversight Committee, 2025.
- "Blackburn Introduces Bill to End Taxpayer Funding for NPR and PBS," Office of Senator Marsha Blackburn, June 11, 2025.
- "Congress Signs Off on Trump's Request to Rescind $1 Billion in Funding for Public Broadcasting," Poynter, July 2025.
- "PBS CEO Denies Liberal Bias as Trump Proposes $1 Billion Funding Cut," Fox News, July 16, 2025.
- "Waste of the Day: NPR's Trickle-Up Economics," RealClearInvestigations, May 13, 2025.
