Trump Rightly Defunded PBS and NPR’s Long History of Anti-Conservative, Pro-Leftist Content

It was a day that couldn’t come soon enough. Thursday night, President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending taxpayer subsidies for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service—media outlets receiving tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds each year to spread biased propaganda falsely labeled as “news.”

I made the case for defunding in The Daily Signal in January, two days after Trump’s second inauguration—a celebration that included a speech by Elon Musk expressing his love for America and its people with his hand raised in the air in victory in what PBS falsely labeled “a fascist salute.”

PBS and NPR have a long pattern of biased, anti-American, anti-conservative, and pro-woke slants in their stories.

For example, in 2021, NPR declared the Declaration of Independence to be a document with “flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies.” In 2022, NPR scrapped its decades-long Independence Day tradition of reading the Declaration of Independence on air to instead discuss “equality.” NPR also slapped an “editor’s note” warning that the Declaration of Independence is “a document that contains offensive language.”

The radio giant also once reported on the “cousin of diet culture” known as “healthism, which is the idea that we have to be healthy”—claiming healthy living was a negative. 

In a project completely unworthy of taxpayer funding, NPR once assigned three reporters to investigate how the thumbs-up emoji is racist. Similarly, NPR suggested doorway sizes are based on “latent fatphobia” and speculated about “the racial origins of fat phobia.”

And flying in the face of mounds of evidence, NPR laughably claimed there is “limited scientific evidence of physical advantage” between male and female athletes. NPR management also reportedly pressured its editors to nix the term “biological sex” in stories on transgender issues. 

NPR ran an article, complete with cartoon illustration, on “What ‘queer ducks’ can teach teenagers about sexuality in the animal kingdom.”

NPR disparagingly referred to pro-life Americans at the March for Life with the slanted description of “anti-abortion rights activists.”

Meanwhile, PBS devoted a panel to what it “mean[s] to be woke” and “white privilege.” Then-PBS White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor biasedly described a 2020 patriotic speech by Trump at Mount Rushmore as a love letter to “white resentment” that promoted the “myth of America.”

In 2023, PBS’ “Washington Week” roundtable covered up then-President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic claiming Biden was actually “quite acute.”

PBS also produced a documentary advocating for reparations for black people.

NPR and PBS practically maintain zero tolerance policies for non-leftist viewpoints.

For example, in 2020, NPR refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the runup to the presidential election, falsely claiming the assertions that the laptop was Biden’s “don’t amount to much” and the managing editor patronizing its audience with claims that they “don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” This despite the fact that polling showed if the contents of the laptop were more widely known by the American people, the story could have led to a different outcome in the 2020 election. 

When Uri Berliner, a 25-year veteran NPR reporter and editor spoke out about how the network lost America’s trust by favoring liberal slants, NPR suspended him.

Berliner found that registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans 87 to zero in the NPR newsroom.

NPR gave much coverage to the Trump Russian collusion hoax, with Berliner characterizing “[Democratic Rep. Adam] Schiff talking points” as “the drumbeat of NPR news reports.”

If that’s not bad enough, NPR CEO Katherine Maher claimed Trump was “a racist,” posted a photo on X of herself wearing a “Biden for President” campaign hat, serves on the board of a George Soros-funded activist group, and shockingly described “reverence for the truth” as a “distraction.”

In 2023, a study found that congressional Republicans saw 85% negative coverage while congressional Democrats saw 54% positive coverage on PBS’ flagship news program.

According to a 2024 study, PBS news staff used 162 variations of the term “far-right” but only six variations of “far-left.”

Media bias rating agency AllBias—which surveyed nearly 24,000 NPR listeners—found NPR’s bias aligns with “liberal, progressive, or left-wing thought and/or policy agendas.”

NPR repeatedly dismissed the theory that COVID-19 originated in a lab—a conclusion now deemed likely by the FBI, CIA, and Department of Energy.

A 2024 Media Research Center study found that PBS’ coverage of the Republican National Convention was 72% negative while coverage of the Democratic National Convention was 88% positive.

While the Left will howl about these funding cuts, it is important to note that cutting public funding is not the same thing as restricting the First Amendment. Trump is not stopping these outlets from producing content, which is even more heavily subsidized through private donations, including from individuals and foundations.

What Trump is doing is removing taxpayer subsidies for this type of terrible speech, and it’s a welcome change.

Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice and author of ”Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness.”

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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