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It was standing room only at Wednesday’s House subcommittee hearing on the public broadcasters NPR and PBS.
Titled “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable,” the hearing, held by the DOGE subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, comes as various Republican lawmakers have spent the past few weeks making a rallying cry out of their calls to pull federal funding from the broadcasters over perceived liberal bias.
Some Republicans argue that taxpayers shouldn’t be helping fund news outlets that they disagree with. Democratic lawmakers say the broadcasters provide crucial services, especially to rural communities around the country.
Press freedom groups, meanwhile, say the hearing is taking place in the context of a broader campaign against the media in the United States in the form of lawsuits, government investigations, and hostile rhetoric from officials.
“This fits into the broader pattern that we’ve been observing since Trump became president of using the government as a tool to harm the media in any way,” said Clayton Weimers, the head of the US office of Reporters Without Borders.
Throughout the hearing, NPR CEO Katherine Maher and PBS CEO Paula A. Kerger defended their organizations’ work as they fielded questions from Republicans that sometimes took previous shows and articles out of context. Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, were united in their support of public broadcasting.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican and the subcommittee’s chair, began the hearing by recounting how she—and her three children—grew up watching PBS. Her tone quickly shifted.
“NPR and PBS have increasingly become radical, left-wing echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy, white, urban liberals and progressives who generally look down on and judge rural America,” Greene said in her opening statement, claiming that the broadcasters are “brainwashing and trans-ing” children.
In his opening statement, Representative Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, said he was “sad” to see that the committee “has now stooped to the lowest levels of partisanship and political theater.”
“If shame was still a thing, then this hearing would be shameful,” Lynch added.
Throughout the hearing, Republican lawmakers cited how the broadcasters handle coverage of everything from transgender people and race to the Hunter Biden laptop controversy and the COVID-19 pandemic as evidence of their alleged liberal bias.
Maher and Kerger defended the broadcasters. “I do not believe we are politically biased,” Maher said at one point. “We are a nonpartisan organization.”
Kerger highlighted PBS’s educational programming for kids, which she said especially benefits children whose families cannot afford pre-kindergarten. “I strongly believe that the programming we offer to prepare children for the future is the most essential work that we do today,” she said.
Representative James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky, said he relied on public radio for the news when he worked on a farm decades ago. “It was a great service,” Comer said.
But he said he thinks public media has changed since then. “I don’t even recognize the station anymore,” Comer said about NPR.
Maher said that in her one year as CEO, NPR had worked to “beef up our editorial standards,” which appeared to confuse Comer, who thought she was referring to the newspaper opinion articles known as editorials. (The term editorial is often confusing to non-journalists.)
Greene, among others, claimed that most Americans no longer trust PBS and NPR. But a 2024 survey by the British market research firm YouGov found that out of fifty-two news outlets, PBS was the third most trusted among Americans. NPR ranked seventeenth.
Public media has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades. A 2017 national survey from Rasmussen Reports found that just 21 percent of Americans—including less than a third of Republicans—supported cutting federal support of public broadcasting.
Lynch accused his Republican colleagues of being afraid of sticking up to Trump. “They would rather post up against Big Bird,” Lynch said, referencing the character on the long-running PBS children’s show Sesame Street.
Trump on Tuesday told reporters at the White House that NPR and PBS are a “waste of money” and that he “would love to” defund them.
But the funding bill passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump earlier this month already allocated $535 million for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that disburses federal funds to NPR, PBS, and their local stations. Congress budgets money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB, two years in advance in an effort to shield public media from political pressure. That means the recent bill funds the CPB through 2027.
NPR receives most of its annual operating budget from corporate underwriting spots and station programming fees; only about 1 percent comes directly from federal sources. NPR member stations, however, receive about 8 to 10 percent of their revenue from the CPB. Meanwhile, PBS receives 16 percent of its funds from the CPB.
That funding disproportionately benefits news stations in rural parts of the country.
“We are more than nice to have. We are essential, especially in remote and rural places where commercial broadcasting cannot succeed,” Ed Ulman, president of Alaska Public Media, testified at the hearing.
Kerger and Maher agreed that losing federal funding would be devastating, especially for stations that serve rural communities where commercial media typically don’t operate because it isn’t lucrative.
Many small and medium-size PBS stations would no longer exist without federal funding, Kerger said. “This would be an existential moment for them,” Kerger said.
NPR and PBS stations also serve as an important component of the emergency broadcasting system for the country.
In times of crisis, public media is sometimes the only source of news for certain populations, Maher said. She cited how, after an extreme hurricane devastated Asheville, North Carolina, in September, Blue Ridge Public Radio was the only source of news for about two weeks.
“When everything else goes down, public radio is there,” Maher said.
Wednesday’s hearing comes as both NPR and PBS are facing investigations from the Federal Communications Commission into their underwriting announcements.
Public broadcasting stations are not allowed to run commercials, so they run corporate underwriting spots, which are like commercials but don’t include a “call to action” encouraging listeners to do things like buy a certain product. Both NPR and PBS have denied wrongdoing.
Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat, said she was concerned that the targeting of NPR and PBS fits a pattern of recent assaults against the media.
“It should not be surprising that the president is doing everything possible to make it more difficult for the media to hold him accountable and for the public to be informed,” Crockett said.
Although most lawmakers had left the committee room before the hearing concluded, the seats remained full with Hill staffers, journalists, and members of the public.
The hearing ended the same way it began: with Greene denouncing PBS for featuring a drag queen.
“We will be calling for the complete and total defund and dismantling of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” Greene said. “We believe that you all can hate on us on your own dime.”
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