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FIVE Reasons to Defund 'Public' Broadcasting
Now that Republicans have control of Congress and the White House and Trump’s “government efficiency” czars are looking hard at slicing the funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), it bears repeating: “public broadcasting” is not serving the public. It serves a narrow slice of America, an audience of wealthy liberal elites.
A recent survey of NPR listeners found only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. Those people should pay for all of it. Republicans who are routinely attacked by National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service shouldn’t have to pay for any of it.
There are at least five solid reasons to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
1. It’s a duplicative waste of taxpayer money. They call the CPB “a private corporation funded by the American people.” But PBS and NPR demonstrate all the “efficiencies” of a public-private partnership. Start with the number of stations PBS and NPR have next to other networks. ABC has 248, CBS has 251, and NBC has 235. PBS has 345. In the Washington D.C. market alone there are three PBS stations: WETA in Virginia, WHUT (Howard University Television) in D.C., and Maryland Public Television out of Annapolis. This overlap repeats in many large cities, including New York City and Los Angeles.
But that pales in comparison to the number of radio stations airing National Public Radio programming: it’s 1,085 stations. The state of New York has 73, California has 61, and Alaska has 52. Legislators in every state and congressional district are likely to have “public” stations lobbying them for funding. By contrast, the largest private radio station owner in America is I-Heart, with 868 AM and FM stations.
In Boston, there’s even programming duplication on WBUR-FM and WGBH-FM. Both stations run NPR’s newscasts Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and both run the business-news show Marketplace from American Public Media at the same time. Both stations run the BBC World Service overnight. Why should we pay for both?
A CPB grants list from Fiscal Year 2021 shows WBUR received about $2.6 million in federal support, and WGBH radio grants totaled $1.36 million. With all this money sloshing around, imagine being a private radio station in Boston. Throughout its history, public broadcasters have participated in unfair competition with privately owned radio and TV stations. Anyone who tours tax-funded public stations will often notice their facilities are more lavish, with more state-of-the-art technology than private stations.
Public broadcasters claim the vast majority of their funding has nothing to do with government. Defenders of NPR claim the network only receives two percent of its money from Washington. That’s simply untrue. The vast majority of NPR stations receive “community service grants” from CPB, and then turn around and send money back to D.C. for “programming costs” for the nationally distributed shows.
If only two percent of the budget came from taxpayers, then logically, it would be easy to replace with private contributions. But CPB’s own chart of revenues for both TV and radio asserts that in Fiscal Year 2022 federal, state, and local “tax-based” funding added up to 36.6 percent. According to CPB’s math, federal funding in 2022 made up about $535 milllion (16.9 percent) and state and local funding was $589 million (18.7 percent).
2. It’s unnecessary in a sea of media choices. The original rationale for “public broadcasting” was a scarcity of programming when most people only received three networks on their TV sets. This rationale had already evaporated 30 years ago, when House Speaker Newt Gingrich proposed zeroing out CPB. Even today, PBS and NPR still claim they have a mission to help “unserved and underserved communities and audiences.” Who is still “unserved”?
Audiences today have seemingly endless outlets for information – from broadcast to cable to streaming on the internet – with the list lengthening as technology continues to evolve. There are numerous places you can find a serious one-hour documentary beyond the legacy outlets – Acorn TV, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Britbox, Disney Plus, Discovery Plus, Fubo TV, Google Play, HBO Max, Hulu, Netflix, Paramount Plus, Peacock, Philo, Pluto TV, Rumble, Shudder, Sling TV, Tubi, Vudu, and YouTube.
As always, documentarians would love to have the “brand” of PBS, the “public service” halo. Trump-trashing PBS omnipresence Ken Burns could make any of the streamers very happy, but the secret of his “iconic” success is planted firmly in the “public” realm. The “public” branding makes it easier for him to sell a $80 coffee-table book of historic photographs.
When conservatives make documentaries, whether they are sober and serious or more satirical like Matt Walsh’s Am I Racist?, no one imagines they would be federally supported…or aired on “public” broadcasting. Instead, PBS promotes a never-ending stream of long-winded leftist documentaries in its series Frontline. On January 30, 2024, they aired an almost two-and-a-half hour anti-Trump film titled “Democracy on Trial.”
Narrator Will Lyman set the stage: “For the first time in American history, a president charged with crimes in office.” Special counsel Jack Smith was touted as “thorough and methodical. He's fairly aggressive, but not reckless-aggressive. He's a very formidable opponent for Trump's lawyers.”
They made much of Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the Pelosi-picked January 6 Committee, growing up during Jim Crow and who “saw parallels” between that era and what the Trump partisans attempted on January 6. It “affected him profoundly.”
By contrast, a 2023 program on Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife set up leftist academic Randall Kennedy to denounce Thomas as “one of the great beneficiaries in American life of affirmative action” and describe the Thomases as “the It couple of the far right.”
Many left-wing documentaries air on the series Independent Lens, funded by the “Independent Television Service,” a PBS offshoot that subsidizes documentaries, overwhelmingly on the Left. They claim they “help inform civil discourse essential to American society.” Translation: they essentially inform you the Left is always right. Their documentaries often don’t allow an opposing point of view.
In 2017, it was the badly named film Real Boy, about a girl named Rachael who wants to be a boy named Bennett, and her goal in this film was “top surgery,” known in less euphemistic terms as breast amputation. The “balance” in this film was Rachael’s mother Suzy, who was described as “frustratingly apprehensive.” Inevitably, as a PBS documentary would, it shows how Suzy comes around to support the amputation, because you must “love them through it.”
“Public” broadcasting benefits from its branding – being non-commercial causes people to assume virtue, and even assume it’s more civil and nonpartisan than it is. They give them Emmys or Oscars or DuPont-Columbia awards.
3. Where does “public” broadcasting end and “private” begin? New technologies make old models obsolete. On June 6, 2024, weeks after a raft of controversy over NPR editor Uri Berliner quitting and revealing all the bias within the public radio newsrooms the CPB Board adopted a list of “goals and objectives” going forward. The mission now is to “support the collaborative development and distribution of trusted noncommercial content and services with particular attention to the needs and interests of children,” as well as other “underserved” audiences.
When they define “underserved,” PBS still touts itself as the primary game in town for children’s “educational” programming, even if there are many places to go. That patina of “educational television” protects all of public television from conservative critiques.
But we’ve come a long way from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. In 2021, the PBS show Let’s Learn out of New York station WNET featured drag queen/activist “Lil Miss Hot Mess” singing his song “The Hips On the Drag Queen Go Swish Swish Swish” (to the tune of “The Wheels On The Bus Go Round and Round”). He has a children’s book by the same name. PBS took Drag Queen Story Hour from the library to national television. He told the virtual audience of little ones, “I think we might have some drag queens in training on our hands!” They consider this “trusted noncommercial content” for children aged 3 to 8.
Since the Nixon years, PBS defenders have claimed Republicans were out to defund Big Bird on Sesame Street, but the Sesame Workshop left the PBS nest for HBO in 2015. HBO keeps the new episodes to itself for nine months before PBS re-airs them. CNN reported who wanted this deal: “HBO was interested right away when Sesame Workshop called.” There’s nothing about Sesame Workshop today that says “non-commercial.”
For example, there are two Sesame Place amusement parks (in Philadelphia and San Diego) and four other Sesame-themed sections at other amusement parks. On the list of Sesame Street products for sale are aprons, blenders, backpacks, bubble machines, cookbooks, fruit and veggies smoothie pouches, mealtime sets, straw bottles, snack cups, and toys like the “Chicken Dance Elmo Animated Plush.” Sesame Workshop does not donate back to PBS with all of this affiliated revenue. The same held true when shows like Barney & Friends and Teletubbies were massively popular at toy stores. Today, PBS runs a website called the “PBS Kids Marketplace” where you can buy all your swag from their kiddie shows, including Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Rosie’s Rules, and Sid the Science Kid.
4. It blatantly violates its own promise of ideological balance and diversity. In their June goals statement, the CPB board pledged to “promote efforts that ensure fact-based journalism that promotes a symphony of ideological viewpoints,” as well as “promote an inclusive public media workforce that reflects the backgrounds, experiences, and ideological points of view of the American people.”
If this is a goal, CPB has been failing for as long as it has existed. Public broadcasting has always ignored the language of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 to follow a “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” In governing reality, the CPB has traditionally acted as a “heat shield” to protect PBS and NPR from any evaluation of their bias.
PBS and NPR have been intensely one-sided liberal bubbles from the beginning, quickly becoming enthusiastic backers of impeaching Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal. They aired the congressional Watergate hearings live during the day, and repeated them at night. They aired the Iran-Contra hearings live to ruin Ronald Reagan. NPR led the crusade to ruin the Clarence Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court with Anita Hill’s unproven claims of sexual harassment. PBS aired that live. They didn’t miss a minute of live coverage, in daytime or prime time, of the Pelosi-picked January 6 committee to crumble Donald Trump.
Both PBS and NPR repeat the leftist media’s resistance to an opposing side on contentious issues like climate change and transgender ideology. Our study of seven months of PBS News Hour found they gave over 90 percent of the air time to the Left on gender ideology stories.
NPR displayed its take in 2022 by interviewing transgender Biden HHS appointee Adm. Rachel Levine to argue “There is no argument about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care. There is no argument.” NPR reporter Selena Simmons-Duffin underlined: “Gender-affirming care is not harmful. It’s lifesaving, she explains.” No dissent was allowed.
It’s easily measured that PBS is a sandbox for leftist propagandists in that they perpetually warn their viewers of a dangerous “far right” controlling the Republican Party, and when the words “far left” come up, they’re a pale afterthought. MRC analysts studied the labels used by anchors, reporters and contributors on the “PBS News Hour” regarding American politics from June 1, 2023 to November 30, 2024. The difference in labeling was stark: 162 labels for a “far right,” and only six for a “far left.”
NPR does this, too. On January 18, 2023, the NPR interview show Fresh Air headlined their show, “How will the hard-right Republicans in Congress wield their newfound power?” Gross began: “Now that Kevin McCarthy has assumed his new role as speaker of the House, a position he won after making concessions to the far right of his party, what can we expect?” Between host Terry Gross and her guest, New York Times reporter Catie Edmondson, they labeled the House Republicans as “far right” or “hard right” 32 times in a 44-minute interview. Democrats apparently don’t have an extreme.
5. Public broadcasting engages in election interference against Republicans. A glaring Exhibit A is the New York Post series on Hunter Biden’s laptop in October of 2020. Most of the so-called “mainstream media” tried to dismiss this story – falsely – as Russian disinformation. But NPR stood out. NPR’s Public Editor Kelly McBride quoted Terence Samuel, NPR’s Managing Editor for News. “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” He dismissed the Post stories as a “politically driven event.”
Instead of seeking to investigate the Biden family’s influence-peddling, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast a story titled “Experts Say Attack On Hunter Biden's Addiction Deepens Stigma For Millions.” There wasn’t one word in it about Hunter Biden’s business practices involving his father, which was the point of the Post stories.
On the PBS show Washington Week with The Atlantic in 2023, the roundtable of liberal journalists attacked Republicans for questioning Biden’s mental state. Mark Leibovich said “it’s lying, it’s saying he’s senile, saying he’s demented, saying he’s out of it.” Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg agreed: “Mentally, he’s quite acute.”
The pattern continues. When the House Oversight Committee had a hearing in March where Hunter Biden was supposed to appear, NPR’s “All Things Considered” wouldn’t consider a feature story on it. NPR covered the Pelosi-picked House January 6 Committee live for every minute, and then ignored the Biden impeachment inquiry. Their “news judgment” looks like whatever helps Democrats is news.
MRC analysts watched every minute of the live primetime coverage of the Republican and Democrat conventions in 2024. The GOP gathering received 72 percent negative commentary, and only 28 percent positive. Then the Democrat convention commentary was 88 percent positive, and only 12 percent negative.
Some of the negativity was fierce. PBS anchor Amna Nawaz introduced the second night of the Republican meeting with this: “We have seen though, we should note, Republican rhetoric veer into outright racism, echoing some white supremacist notions as well.”
Meanwhile, her co-anchor Geoff Bennett celebrated socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on the first night with the Democrats: “Her elevation and evolution I think has been so striking because she has found a way to blend populism and pragmatism and blend protest and power, and she got one of the most raucous receptions when she took the stage tonight.”
PBS White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez took to the campaign trail in the closing weeks of the 2024 campaign to encourage getting out the vote for Kamala Harris and the Democrats in crucial swing states. In a series of “news” reports, Barron-Lopez offered encouraging words for Democrats about their “potential momentum” to “go blue” in four of the seven swing states of North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia. Trump won them all.
When Harris lost, Barron-Lopez went on CNN and complained “there is an entire right-wing media ecosystem that doesn’t exist on the left and it does not exist in the center or mainstream.” This is what PBS calls “fact-based journalism.”
Conclusion
PBS and NPR leaders sound cocky when faced with new calls for defunding. “We start with a good base of support among Republicans as well as Democrats,” said Pat Butler, outgoing leader of the lobbying group America’s Public Television Stations.
These lobbyists were pleased with the last proposal out of the Senate Appropriations Committee proposing level funding of $535 million for CPB for Fiscal Year 2027 – as well as another $60 million for “public media stations’ interconnection system” in Fiscal 2025. Unlike most other federal agencies, CPB have received advance appropriations that provide them with funding two years ahead of time, which they tout as “protecting our programming from political influence.”
The New York Times recently touted this protective lag as one of “two crucial advantages” for PBS and NPR stations. After all, if the Democrats take back one or both houses of Congress in 2026, funding could continue without any interruption. The other presumed advantage is their assumption that “public” stations are a crucial part of “emergency alert systems” – as if private radio and TV stations can’t provide such alerts?
Congress should move aggressively to strip CPB funding and should no longer be qualified as noncommercial education stations (NCE stations), since they are neither non-commercial or educational. They are leftist propaganda operations. They love abusing their taxpayer support to advance the politicians and programs they favor, and any attempt to rein them in or monitor their programming is described as “interference in editorial independence.”
From the MRC Archives:
Tim Graham's House testimony on National Public Radio, May 2024.
Special Report on Reasons to Defund Public Broadcasting, 2011.
Tim Graham's House testimony on PBS fundraising scandals, July 1999.
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