Republicans on Capitol Hill are aiming to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) over public television and radio’s unabashedly left-wing slant.
Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) introduced the No Propaganda Act last month. Congressmen Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) introduced a companion bill in the House of Representatives at the same time. The bill would simply terminate federal funding for the CPB, which distributes the funds to National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), not eliminate any of them.
“We’re spending half a billion dollars a year … to give to people at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR and [PBS] to participate in opinion journalism, which they’re entitled to do,” Kennedy said on the Senate floor. “But they can’t do it on the taxpayer dime.”
“We’re running a $36 trillion debt,” he said. “It is disgraceful for the American people to have to fund this rot.”
Rotten Eggheads
That “rot” runs deep. Although the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which created the CPB, requires the corporation to maintain a “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature,” the CPB has always been mired in political controversy.
In a sense, the CPB was controversial even before it was created. Early in its existence, the CPB assumed co-ownership of National Educational Television (NET). That Ford Foundation creation was already viewed by many as a left-wing outlet. In hopes of placating conservative critics, the CPB shuttered NET in 1969, replacing it with PBS.
Nevertheless, from the Nixon administration to the present day, the CPB and its subsidiaries have been reliably liberal. When, in the early years of the 21st century, the CPB board tried to inject some balance into the proceedings in keeping with the corporation’s legal mandate, staffers revolted and complained to the media. Congressional Democrats succeeded in forcing then-CPB board chairman Kenneth Tomlinson to resign. They claimed that his programming and recruitment decisions were politically biased — by which they meant not biased in their favor.
In recent years, the political bias of NPR has become so blatant that a senior editor, Uri Berliner, wrote an article bemoaning it. According to The New American:
The 25-year veteran cited three examples of NPR’s leftist bent that show not only its bias but also its unwillingness to correct its mistakes: the hate-Trump Russia Collusion Hoax, the claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop wasn’t a real story, and the insistence that the Covid-19 virus did not leak from a lab.
As if to prove Berliner’s thesis, his bosses suspended him over the article, after which he resigned. Among those bosses was CEO Katherine Maher, a self-described “unalloyed progressive” who worked to get out the vote for former President Joe Biden and considers President Donald Trump a “deranged racist sociopath.”
CCPBS
PBS, too, is unbalanced. Daily Caller reported in 2020 that a local PBS station was airing — and sharing with other stations — a “pro-Beijing documentary produced in conjunction with CGTN, a Chinese-government controlled media outlet that is registered as a foreign agent with the Justice Department.” Its children’s programming, meanwhile, heavily pushes LGBTQ propaganda.
In a press release, Congressman Perry said:
The American taxpayer is footing the bill for a woke media corporation that pretends to be impartial while pushing Chinese propaganda. CPB cannot be allowed to keep using your hard-earned tax dollars to push a biased and political agenda that goes against what’s best for Americans.
Plus, “the folks at PBS and NPR are doing pretty well for themselves,” Kennedy observed in his Senate remarks. “NPR just bought a $201 million office space just up the road from the Capitol.” The network, he noted, pays its on-air hosts up to $532,000 a year and its chief diversity officer — that’s diversity of skin color and gender identity, not opinion — about $320,000 a year.
Kennedy continued:
And you know what? Despite all of this money that the American taxpayers are giving to these left-of-center entities, their viewership has declined because people don’t need them anymore. So why are we giving them money?
That is a very good question. The Constitution does not empower the federal government to fund any kind of media, regardless of its ideology. Indeed, as Kennedy noted, it would be just as “disgraceful” for Washington to force taxpayers to bankroll “right-of-center opinion journalism.”
Defunding Delights
General Michael Flynn, a victim of the Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax that NPR helped to magnify, was ecstatic about Kennedy’s bill. He posted on X Monday:
This is a no-brainer. Must happen. We can no longer have U.S. taxpayer dollars going to left wing propaganda outlets. Have you ever been to NPR HQ? It is the Taj Mahal of media headquarters. SHUT IT (AND PBS) DOWN!!!
Of course, Republicans have tried to defund, or even eliminate, the CPB and associated entities before. But this time may be different. Now the GOP controls both houses of Congress. And Trump, who surely holds no brief for NPR, appears to be serious about slashing spending. Why not save taxpayers some money while sticking it to, in Kennedy’s words, “Big Brother’s propaganda outlet”?
If the opinion of Elon Musk, the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), carries any weight with Trump, the president will undoubtedly sign the bill should it pass Congress. Musk’s one-word X response to Kennedy’s remarks: “Great.”
