The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) are back in the news again, and the news isn’t good.

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order slashing public subsidies to PBS and NPR and alleging “bias” in their programming and reporting.

Trump’s order instructed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other federal agencies “to cease Federal funding for NPR and PBS” and required them to work to root out indirect public financing sources for the news organizations.

In a Truth Social post announcing the signing, the White House said the outlets “receive millions from taxpayers to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.”

The Executive Order called the government’s funding of PBS and NPR “outdated and unnecessary ” and “corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”

“Neither PBS nor NPR presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens,” the White House continued. “The CPB Board shall cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding.”

The executive order was not unexpected. PBS and NPR receive roughly $500 million in public money through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and have been preparing for the possibility of stiff cuts since Trump’s election.

Republicans and conservatives, dating back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, have consistently complained about the biased, leftist programming and reporting of PBS and NPR.

So have some PBS and NPR staffers—specifically, NPR whistleblower Uri Berliner, who resigned last year following his suspension for scolding the radio network’s blatant left-wing bias on the online news site The Free Press.

It was a big step for Berliner, who boasted an illustrious 25-year career with NPR as an award-winning business editor and reporter.

In his article entitled, “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” Berliner wrote that among editorial staff at NPR’s Washington, DC, headquarters, he counted 87 registered Democrats and no Republicans.

“When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile,” Berliner wrote. “It was worse. They reacted with profound indifference.

“I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues,” he wrote. “But the messages were of the ‘oh wow, that’s weird’ variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.

“An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America,” Berliner wrote. “A calculated emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation has fed the absence of viewpoint diversity.”

As I wrote at the time, Berliner’s revelations shocked many in broadcast journalism.

Not me.

For the past two decades, I have watched NPR slide further and further into the socialist bog. The skid to the left began in earnest during the George W. Bush presidency and turned into a full-blown leftist avalanche during Donald Trump’s presidency. I can’t recall one positive or neutral story that NPR broadcast about President Trump during his tenure in Washington.

I have a markedly intimate knowledge of NPR. In the late 1990s, as a senior writer at the Chicago Tribune, I was a commentator on World View, a weekly news/information show produced by WBEZ, NPR’s Chicago affiliate.

Later, when I was the Dean of the College of Media at the University of Illinois, PBS and NPR’s local affiliate, WILL-AM-FM-TV-Internet, was a unit of my College, along with the Departments of Journalism, Advertising, Cinema, and Media Studies, and the Institute of Communications Research.

During that time (2003-2010), we strived to keep NPR’s local news coverage impartial and our talk radio shows as balanced as possible. As Dean, I often guest-hosted our local talk radio shows and interacted with callers from as far away as Chicago to the north and St. Louis to the south.

The conversations sometimes got animated and even a bit fiery, but everybody got to talk no matter where they were on the political spectrum. We never censored speech and were proud to provide a forum for opinions from the left and the right.

I can’t say the same for the national feeds we got from NPR in Washington, Boston, and elsewhere.

Those were often slanted to the left, and some of our conservative listeners not only knew it, but they wrote letters to me about it.

I suspect the same happened at NPR’s national headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Perhaps that’s why Berliner decided to speak out.

You would have thought that NPR and PBS would have taken Berliner’s criticisms to heart or at least investigated his allegations of bias.

You would have been wrong. They ignored his disparagements.

President Trump didn’t. So now, PBS and NPR are in the president’s crosshairs.

Paula Kerger, president and CEO of PBS, called  Trump’s executive order “blatantly unlawful,” said it “threatens our ability to serve the American public with educational programming, as we have for the past 50-plus years.”

Kerger is not alone in her pique. Patricia Harrison, the president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), insists Trump has no actual say in the funding.

“CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority,” Harrison said. “Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.”

Trump clearly disagrees with Harrison’s assessment. He argues that “Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage.

“No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the Government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize.”

A White House fact sheet on the order suggested that the left-leaning networks’ output acts as a “significant in-kind contribution to the Democratic party and its political cause,” therefore violating the CPB’s legal mandate to be “nonpolitical in nature.”

“The CPB fails to abide by these principles to the extent it subsidizes NPR and PBS,” the order stated. “Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter. What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”

A recent Pew Research Survey found that 70% of NPR’s audience is consistently or primarily liberal, 21% Mixed, and just 9% consistently or mostly conservative. NPR’s website says its 1,000 member stations pull in 28.7 million weekly on-air listeners and adds that 98.5% of the U.S. population lives within the listening area of a station carrying NPR programming.

NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered are among America’s most-listened-to news radio shows, the survey found.

I don’t dispute that, but NPR’s news coverage is the problem.

NPR has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the now-debunked story that former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19 to the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020. NPR’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict is also skewed against Israel.

NPR is viewed by the public as a government entity, possibly because it was established when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. That act created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and National Public Radio (NPR).

As I pointed out in my post last year, the NPR website says it is a “nonprofit organization that produces and distributes news, talk, cultural programming, music, and entertainment programs, including the premier news magazines Morning Edition and All Things Considered across broadcast and digital platforms.”

It all sounds good except for the part that’s conveniently omitted in that statement. NPR should acknowledge that it also functions as an arm of the Democratic Party, especially its demonstrably leftist wing.

For that reason, NPR and PBS news broadcasts should include a warning that the “news” they produce is suffused with leftist propaganda.

I won’t be holding my breath.

–30–

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