Defunding PBS and NPR Is Long Overdue

National Review Online

Friday, April 18, 2025

 

President Trump is expected to push for ending $1.1 billion in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the organization that funnels taxpayer money to PBS and NPR.

 

Under the move, he would send a memo to Congress asking them to either rescind the funding, or restore it. The rescission process is not subject to the Senate filibuster, so only a majority of both houses need to concur with the president’s request. House and Senate Republicans should seize the opportunity to cut off the broadcasters.

 

In principle, there is no reason why the federal government should be in the business of funding news and entertainment programming. It does not serve an essential purpose and could easily be financed privately. But if the government is going to be in the broadcasting business, it should at least not be one-sidedly political.

 

Instead, both NPR and PBS have abandoned any pretense of neutrality or balance, regularly pushing left-wing ideology and woke sensibilities in their news coverage and other programming.

 

Uri Berliner, who worked at NPR for 25 years, including as senior editor, has described how this ideology permeated every aspect of the organization. When Berliner searched the voter-registration records of editorial employees in the D.C. newsroom, he found 87 Democrats and zero Republicans. NPR refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story in the run-up to the 2020 election, and its journalists portrayed the lab-leak theory as having been debunked when it had not been. Its CEO, Katherine Maher, under questioning by Republicans at a hearing last month, embarrassed herself to a comical extent as she tried to explain away this record, as well as her own long history of touting progressive causes du jour.

 

NPR, PBS, and their defenders often perform a dishonest dance. They simultaneously dismiss the money contributed by the federal government as a small percentage of their overall budgets while crying that cutting off those funding sources will destroy them. It’s time, at long last, to end this charade. As we noted last year, they have every right to operate as left-wing propaganda outlets. But they are not entitled to pursue this goal with taxpayer money.

 

Successfully ending federal funding for left-wing broadcasting networks would, after Republicans have talked about it for so long with no effect, be a nice feather in the administration’s hat.