Blaze News investigates: Sparing taxpayers from funding leftist propaganda

National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service are kept afloat with the help of taxpayer dollars. NPR has gone so far as to claim that "federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR."

The media outfits' unmistakable ideological bias and imbalanced coverage in recent decades have prompted a steady stream of calls to defund both organizations or perhaps even to close the fountainhead of most of their taxpayer funding, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — a move that would require lawmakers to revisit the Communications Act of 1934 and its amendments.

Following the re-election of President Donald Trump, who has characterized NPR as a scam and whose first administration sought to cut funding for the CPB, there has been mounting pressure both to ascertain whether NPR, PBS, and their respective member stations have violated federal bylaws and to spare American taxpayers from having to bankroll leftist propaganda.

Blaze News reviewed the media outfits' recent history of partisan hackery and reached out to a top critic of public broadcasting as well as to lawmakers involved in holding the taxpayer-funded media outfits accountable. It appears that to ensure no partisan media outfit is subsidized at taxpayers' expense, the government may have to get out of the business of public broadcasting altogether.

Funding

NPR, a beneficiary of National Endowment for the Arts grants, claims that less than 1% of its annual operating budget comes in the form of grants directly from the CPB — which has an operating budget of $545 million for fiscal year 2025 — and other federal sources.

The outfit, which operates as a syndicator to a network of well over 1,000 public radio stations, has acknowledged, however, that multitudes of public radio stations that receive grants directly from the CPB use the funds to "pay NPR and other public radio producers for their programming."

According to consolidated financial statements, the organization secured over $96.1 million in "core and other programming fees" in 2023, $93.2 million in 2022, $90.4 million in in 2021, and $92.5 million in 2020.

"These station programming fees are one of NPR's primary sources of revenue," noted the media outfit. "The loss of federal funding would undermine the stations' ability to pay NPR for programming, thereby weakening the institution."

Like NPR, public TV stations that receive CPB funding pay significant programming dues to PBS.

According to the public TV broadcaster, its flagship "News Hour" program, for instance, receives roughly 35% of its "annual funding/budget from CPB and PBS via national programming funds — a combination of CPB appropriation funds and annual programming dues paid to PBS by stations re-allocated to programs like ours."

A spokesman for PBS, which has over 330 member television stations, recently indicated that the organization receives 16% of its funding directly from the federal government each year.

Propaganda

While neither NPR nor PBS has done a good job hiding its political leanings, Uri Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning senior business editor who worked at NPR for 25 years, helped shine a spotlight last year on just how slanted public broadcasting has become, slamming NPR specifically in an opinion piece for mindlessly advancing Democratic propaganda and altogether giving up on journalistic independence.

Berliner, the son of an LGBT activist and a grandson of Holocaust victims, made clear at the outset he was no rightist, characterizing himself instead as something akin to the stereotypical NPR listener, "an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag-carrying coastal elite."

While acknowledging the media outfit’s long-standing "liberal bent," Berliner noted that NPR had effectively transformed into a Democratic propaganda machine, working vigorously to "damage or topple Trump's presidency," in part by "hitch[ing] our wagon to Trump's most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff," and amplifying the Russia collusion hoax.

Berliner — who discovered that 87% of NPR’s Washington, D.C., editors and reporters were registered Democrats and that none were registered as Republicans — hammered NPR further for gaslighting Americans about the likely origins of COVID-19, for turning a blind eye to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and its characterization of the damning story as a "pure distraction," and over its obsession with race.

While NPR's objectivity had been criticized for decades, Berliner suggested that "independent journalism" at the company really began to slip under former CEO John Lansing, who apparently used George Floyd's death as an excuse to center race and identity in everything the company did while eliminating any remaining "viewpoint diversity."

Berliner indicated that things worsened under the current CEO, Katherine Maher, a longtime BLM supporter who previously helped transform Wikipedia into a repository of leftist propaganda, publicly stated, "Donald Trump is a racist," and suggested that "our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done."

After Maher said that Berliner had been "profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning" for daring to question the neutrality and integrity of taxpayer-funded propagandists, NPR suspended him. The journalist resigned shortly thereafter.

PBS may not have a Berliner-caliber whistleblower to call its own, but it is certainly no better.

The Media Research Center conducted a study from June 1, 2023, to Nov. 30, 2024, analyzing political labels used by anchors, reporters, and contributors on PBS' "News Hour." PBS staff apparently threw around the term "far right" or some variation thereof 162 times but used the term "far left" only six times.

Reporters reflexively deemed social conservatives and Trump-adjacent Republicans as "extreme" or "extremists."

'I understand the importance of nonpartisan, balanced media coverage.'

While numerous reporters and guests liberally applied the "fascist" label to Trump or his polices, PBS reportedly clamped down on characterizations of failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris and other Democrats as Marxists or communists, writing them off as "slurs."

In another study published last year, the MRC tallied every comment made by PBS journalists during the Republican and Democratic national conventions. Of the 191 minutes of PBS commentary on the Republican National Convention, 72% of opinionated comments were reportedly negative and only 28% were positive.

For instance, when it came to the RNC, "News Hour" co-anchor Amna Nawaz exhibited no pretense of neutrality, accusing Republicans of "echoing some white supremacist notions" and veering "into outright racism."

The DNC coverage was a different story altogether. Not only did PBS air more speeches and footage from the Democratic convention than for the Republican convention, the co-anchors salivated over the speakers.

Geoff Bennett said that the "elevation and evolution" of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was "so striking because she has found a way to blend populism and pragmatism and blend protest and power."

Not to be outdone by her co-anchor's fawning over AOC, Nawaz stated, "We know we're hearing a lot of this messaging around the joyful warriors that are Harris and Walz, which is really a stark contrast to what we saw on the Republican side."

Defunding

There have been numerous efforts in recent years to defund NPR, defund PBS, and/or shutter the CPB.

Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), for instance, took aim at both NPR and PBS with a bill in March 2023 titled the No Partisan Radio and Partisan Broadcasting Services Act. By the following year, the bill had 13 co-sponsors but did not go the distance.

Jackson noted that whereas at the time of the media outfits' initial receipt of federal funds, the understanding was that their content "would remain unbiased and benefit every American," it has become "obvious that NPR and PBS have abandoned their founding principles."

Following Berliner's suspension, Republican lawmakers narrowed their focus and pushed multiple bills aimed specifically at kneecapping NPR.

Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.), for instance, introduced the Defund NPR Act of 2024, a piece of legislation co-sponsored by 16 other Republicans that would have prohibited federal funding to NPR or to any successor organization.

"As a former newspaper owner and publisher, I understand the importance of nonpartisan, balanced media coverage and have seen firsthand the left-wing bias in our news media," Tenney said at the time. "NPR is using American taxpayer dollars to manipulate the news and lie to the American people on behalf of a political agenda."

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, tried something different in December, introducing the No Propaganda Act, which would amend the Communications Act of 1934 to prohibit federal funding for the CPB. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) introduced a corresponding bill in the House.

Kennedy cast doubt on whether the over $15 billion already blown by Congress on the CPB has actually gone toward satisfying the organization's stated goal of educating, informing, fostering curiosity, and promoting civil discourse essential to American society, suggesting that instead it has merely bankrolled "Big Brother's propaganda outlet."

"The Corporation for Public Broadcasting refuses to provide Louisianans and Americans with fair, unbiased content," said Kennedy. "It wastes taxpayer dollars on slanted coverage to advance a leftist political agenda."

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has long written about the need to defund public broadcasting, emphasized to Blaze News that given the option of whether to defund the propaganda outfits or to defund the CPB altogether, the latter choice is optimal, although he'd personally seek to go farther.

Gonzalez, who indicated that no attempt at mending could justify keeping taxpayers on the hook for public broadcasting, said that Kennedy "going after the CPB is the right approach."

"I would prefer dissolving it," continued Gonzalez. "You can defund the CPB, but that only delays the problem. That's not a permanent solution."

'For my own part, I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS.'

While Gonzalez anticipates that the liberal media will continue to circle the wagons and gripe over the potential loss of taxpayer cash to fellow travelers, he suggested that those open to defunding public broadcasting should not lose sight of NPR's and PBS' long-standing efforts to antagonize at least half the population..

"My liberal friends say, 'Look, this is important. We need more journalism, not less journalism.' I don’t, first of all, think [NPR and PBS] are going to go away, but if they go away, I don’t care," said Gonzalez. "Second of all, you have to know what they're doing."

Gonzalez noted that NPR and PBS "gave up any attempt at appearing impartial or objective in any way," adding that in the case of NPR, the choice of Maher as CEO was a crystal-clear message that things won't soon change for the better.

"Maher, on the record, is calling Trump racist. She was an enthusiastic supporter of Kamala Harris," said Gonzalez. "She's on the record as saying the First Amendment and our obsession with truth is getting in the way of consensus. Well, gee — that's the CEO of NPR. Anything else you need to know?"

Neither NPR nor PBS responded to Blaze News' request for comment by deadline.

Comeuppance

There is clearly blood in the water.

The Federal Communications Commission has public broadcasting in its sights, as does the new House Oversight Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee, which is chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).

On Jan. 29, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced that the commission's enforcement bureau was opening an investigation into the airing of NPR and PBS programming across their various broadcast member stations.

Carr expressed concern that the two media outfits might be in violation of federal law by airing commercials. While apparently concerned that NPR and PBS member stations might be testing the boundaries of their federal noncommercial authorizations, Carr made no secret that the investigation could furnish lawmakers with further justification to pull the plug on the whole project.

"Congress is actively considering whether to stop requiring taxpayers to subsidize NPR and PBS programming," wrote Carr. "For my own part, I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS, given the changes in the media marketplace since the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967."

'We shouldn't be taxing the American people to fund radically left-wing propaganda.'

"To the extent that these taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for-profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements, then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars," added Carr.

On Feb. 3, Greene invited the CEOs from NPR and PBS to testify at a hearing in March regarding their biased news coverage. Both Katherine Maher and Paula Kerger were notified that the hearing constitutes an opportunity to explain why they feel they deserve to continue receiving federal funds.

The subcommittee said in a release, "NPR and PBS have repeatedly undermined public trust by ignoring stories that were damaging to the Biden administration, dismissing genuine calls for balanced reporting, and pushing partisan coverage. As stewards of tax dollars, NPR and PBS have an obligation to provide objective and accurate coverage that serves all Americans."

When asked about the perceived need to defund NPR and PBS and the significance of doing so, a spokesman for Greene told Blaze News that the congresswoman "is looking forward to the hearing and questioning the heads of these publicly funded media outlets, and her letters speak for themselves."

In Greene's letters to the CEOs of the liberal media outfits, she noted on both occasions that as organizations that receive federal funds through their member stations, they should provide reporting that serves "the entire public, not just a narrow slice of like-minded individuals and ideological interest groups."

When asked about the prospect of defunding NPR and PBS or dissolving the CPB altogether, Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas), a member of the DOGE subcommittee, told Blaze News in a statement, "I fully support defunding these organizations and am exploring legislative options to ensure public funds are spent responsibly."

"We shouldn't be taxing the American people to fund radically left-wing propaganda," continued Gill. "Nothing about NPR or PBS is neutral, and taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to bankroll news organizations that hate them and everything they stand for."

While NPR appears set in its ways, PBS — having seen the writing on the wall — appears eager to placate some of its harshest critics by doing the bare minimum: its lawful obligation.

A PBS spokesman confirmed to the Hollywood Reporter on Feb. 10 that the organization had shuttered its race-obsessed DEI office in order to comply with President Donald Trump's executive order "ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preference."

"The staff members who served in that office are leaving PBS. We will continue to adhere to our mission and values. PBS will continue to reflect all of America and remain a welcoming place for everyone," the spokesman said in a statement.

While it was apparently easy to shutter the DEI office and kick to the curb Cecilia Loving, the organization's senior vice president of DEI, eliminating political bias at PBS and NPR would be a herculean feat with no promise of a lasting solution.

When condemning the use of taxpayer funds for public broadcasting during the first Trump administration, Mike Gonzalez appealed to Thomas Jefferson to help make his point, quoting the third president as saying, "To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagations of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.

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