NPR, PBS defend programming as GOP looks to slash funds

Benjamin Weiss

WASHINGTON (CN) — The chief executives of two of the country’s largest public broadcasting organizations made their case to Congress on Wednesday for why they should continue receiving federal funding, defending their programming against sweeping claims of political bias leveled by Republican lawmakers.

Public access news organizations, particularly National Public Radio, have for months been the subject of scrutiny from GOP lawmakers, the Donald Trump administration and other conservative figures who have argued that NPR and other federally funded outlets have used taxpayer dollars to produce left-leaning news coverage and other programming.

That criticism has led some lawmakers, such as Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, to suggest that Congress should stop appropriating cash for public broadcasting services.

“For far too long, federal taxpayers have been forced to fund biased news,” she said during opening remarks Wednesday morning in a hearing held by the House Committee on Oversight. “This needs to come to an end, and it needs to come to an end now.”

But NPR's CEO Katherine Maher, invited to testify, pushed back on the idea that her organization exhibited any bias at all. Maher, who joined the outlet last year, told lawmakers that while she has no editorial control over what the organization chooses to cover, she had spearheaded changes to its leadership and editorial standards and reassured the committee that NPR had taken “significant steps in the right direction.”

“I believe Americans voted for a transformative administration, and it is our responsibility to cover that transformation fairly with integrity and tenacity,” she said.

Maher, alongside Paula Kerger — CEO of the Public Broadcasting Service — also sought to put a finer point on how public news organizations use government funds. They pointed out that the bulk of federal cash appropriated to public broadcasting is spent maintaining local radio and television stations across the country. And for every dollar of federal appropriations that is spent, Maher and Kerger added, local stations raise $7 in community donations.

“This is one of the best, most successful examples of a public-private partnership,” Kerger told lawmakers.

The public broadcasting heads also positioned their programming as geared toward Americans of all stripes and as broadly beneficial, especially for children. Kerger testified that PBS content has helped “tens of millions” of children and that research demonstrates that its programming helps children develop essential skills.

Maher pointed to polling data which she argued shows that a majority of Americans trust public broadcasting.

But the public media executives’ appeals proved unconvincing for Republicans on the Oversight Committee, who doubled down on their claims that NPR and PBS have become bastions of liberal political thought.

Kentucky Representative James Comer, who chairs the House panel, accused NPR of publishing “disinformation,” pointing to the outlet’s coverage of a host of issues such as the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, the congressional investigation into accusations of collusion between President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government as well as the Republican-led probe into Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

“I’ve lost confidence in public radio,” said the congressman. “I don’t think they should get a penny of federal funds.”

Maher took a somewhat conciliatory approach to Comer’s questioning, telling the lawmaker that she recognized his concerns and that she had taken steps as CEO of NPR to “beef up” its editorial standards, such as hiring more editors who represent a range of points of view.

She also conceded that her organization was “mistaken” in its coverage of Republicans’ Hunter Biden investigation and the controversy surrounding the contents of a laptop belonging to the son of former President Joe Biden.

Regarding the origins of Covid-19, Maher did not disparage NPR’s pandemic-era reporting but said that the organization acknowledged that new evidence from the CIA suggesting that the virus leaked from a virology lab in China was “worthy of coverage.”

But Maher rejected claims from Republicans that NPR is politically biased.

“I have never seen any instance of political bias determining editorial decisions,” she told Ohio Representative Jim Jordan. “I do not believe we are politically biased — we are a nonpartisan organization.”

Jordan, along with several other GOP lawmakers on the Oversight Committee, pressed Maher on the contents of a 2024 column published by former NPR senior editor Uri Berliner, who accused his former organization of abandoning an “open-minded, curious culture” in favor of “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”

The Ohio congressman seized on Berliner’s claims that he found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions at NPR’s Washington headquarters and no Republicans — holding that figure up as a “concerning” indicator of bias at the organization.

Maher said that the public radio service does not track the voter registrations of its employees but added that she was not heading up NPR at the time Berliner conducted the survey he wrote about.

While Republicans worked to paint public broadcasting as hopelessly partisan, Democrats on the Oversight Committee slammed their colleagues for attempting to slash funding for programs which they argued provided vital services to Americans, especially those in rural areas.

Freshman Washington Representative Emily Randall, citing constituents in her own rural district which includes Olympic National Park, argued that “broadly accessible” public radio is important for Americans who do not have consistent internet access and who depend on public media for services such as weather reports and emergency communications.

“I think we have a lot of problems in this country that we should be tackling for regular Americans who are struggling to afford to live, to afford housing, to afford health care,” Randall said. “I think talking about defunding public broadcasting and public media is an egregious misuse of our time here.”

Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett framed Republicans’ scrutiny on public media as an assault on free speech.

“They don’t care about public safety, they don’t care about emergency management, and they don’t care about free speech,” Crockett fumed. “The idea that you want to shut down everybody that is not Fox News is bullshit. We need to stop playing, because that is what y’all are doing here.”

Meanwhile, Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C’s nonvoting congresswoman, asked Kerger to explain what Americans would lose if PBS stations were defunded and taken off the air.

“The reason that we are here, and the reason that we are arguing so passionately for funding … is that many of our smaller and medium-sized stations would not exist without federal appropriations,” Kerger replied. She pointed to a PBS station operating in rural Cookeville, Tennessee, which she said receives half of its budget from the federal government — and which she worried would be one of many local stations to close if public broadcasting was defunded.

“This would be an existential moment for them,” Kerger told lawmakers. “That’s why I think this is so important.”