All things considered, National Public Radio represents the left wing of American journalism. Conservatives, of course, have known that for years. It took a veteran NPR editor with an ax to grind and some resurfaced tweets to drive home the point that the “Fresh Air” of public radio stinks with leftist bias.
So the question is: Why is the American taxpayer paying for this Pravda?
Some lawmakers are saying enough is enough.
U.S. Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., is introducing a bill to defund NPR. The bill’s draft, exclusively provided to The Federalist, prohibits federal funds in general from going to the radio network. The bill specifically bars federal funds from being used for payment of dues to NPR and for “the acquisition of radio programs (including programs to be distributed or disseminated over the internet) by or for the use of radio broadcast station…”
No grants. No loans. No cooperative agreements. No direct appropriations of federal funds.
Done.
“Too many media outlets push their slanted agenda instead of reporting the news. National Public Radio has a track record of promoting an anti-American narrative on the taxpayer dime, while suppressing dissenting viewpoints,” Good said in a statement to The Federalist. “My legislation would ensure no taxpayer dollars are used to fund the woke, leftist propaganda of National Public Radio.”
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., is weighing a number of options to sever federal funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which doles out grants to NPR, Fox News reported this week.
“The mainstream media has become obsessed with doing the Left’s bidding and taking down strong conservatives — and NPR has led the pack,” Blackburn said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “It makes no sense that the American people are forced to fund a propagandist left-wing outlet that refuses to represent the voices of half the country. NPR should not receive our tax dollars.”
Leftists at the News Desk
NPR Senior Business Editor Uri Berliner, who was with the network for 25 years resigned this week after he was suspended for a tell-all essay he wrote about the leftist hivemind of NPR.
“An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America,” Berliner wrote in The Free Press last week. “That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.”
Berliner was promptly suspended. So he quit.
It’s long been difficult to say with a straight face that National Public Radio is an objective news outlet, although liberals have ever attempted to. But there’s no hiding Katherine Maher. NPR’s new CEO, who previously led Wikipedia, has said some of the more outlandishly leftist things in her activist past, and they’re coming back to haunt her and the publicly funded radio network she heads.
Beyond calling former President Donald Trump a racist on Twitter, Maher defended looters in the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.
“I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property,” Maher wrote on her Twitter account at the time.
“(Also to be clear, I am not conflating provocateurs with protestors. Instead, saying this should not be the thing anyone sheds tears over. Cheesecakes are insured; the right to be black and breathe is without measure.),” she added in the same thread in which she criticized the “lazy reporting” of journalists covering “extinguished shoe store fires” in the riots.
Maher is a DEI cult pusher, too — which doesn’t bode well for an already identity-obsessed NPR.
“Lots of jokes about leaving the US, and I get it. But as someone with cis white mobility privilege, I’m thinking I’m staying and investing in ridding ourselves of this spectre of tyranny,” Maher declared in July 2020.
Speaking of tyranny, Maher has boasted about previously working with the government in its censorship campaign. She said Wikipedia “took a very active approach to disinformation and misinformation” during the 2020 election.
“We really set up in response to both the pandemic but also in response to the upcoming U.S. election and as a model for future elections outside the U.S. … sort of a clearinghouse of information,” she said in a clip posted this week to X by journalist Christopher Rufo.
It turns out NPR was doing the same before it hired its new censor-in-chief earlier this year. Berliner wrote that the bias gauge exploded after Trump was elected in 2016. While NPR’s public propaganda ministry piled on the bogus Trump-Russian collusion narrative, it kept a stern silence on the Hunter Biden laptop story in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election.
It’s a leftist echo chamber, with no room for dissent because there are no dissenters.
“Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None,” Berliner wrote.
Some of his colleagues have demanded NPR’s leftist CEO take Berliner to task for questioning their journalistic “integrity.”
“We’re writing to urge stronger support for staff who have had their journalistic expertise called into question by one of their own in a public forum,” states a letter signed by 50 NPR employees. New York Times reporter Ben Mullin posted the letter to X. “We also urge more transparency regarding the consequences of making unauthorized public comments that seek to change NPR’s editorial direction.”
‘Out of Kilter with the Country’
NPR defenders like to say the radio network receives minuscule federal funding — a mere 1 percent. They’re lying.
“NPR may receive little direct federal funding, but a good deal of its budget comprises federal funds that flow to it indirectly by federal law,” Howard Husock of the American Enterprise Institute wrote a year ago in an op-ed for The Hill headlined, “The Truth About NPR’s Funding — and its Possible Future.”
Last month, the House and Senate passed an appropriations bill providing $535 million for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for fiscal year 2026, continuing the two-year advance funding mark for public media.
“We appreciate the House and Senate’s affirmation of the great value delivered to the American people through our nation’s public media. Our trusted, nonpartisan, educational and informational content, provided to all Americans for free and commercial free, helps inspire all citizens from our youngest to lifelong learners, and in the process, strengthens our civil society,” said CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison in a press release before the NPR stuff hit the fan.
Now NPR’s value as a “nonpartisan” content provider is under fire more than ever. But we’ve been down this road before. In 2011, Republicans moved to cut federal funds from the CPB after a video showed an NPR fundraiser dissing Tea Party activists and the GOP. They’re killing Big Bird! liberals and their pals in the accomplice media screamed. In fact, Sesame Street came to Capitol Hill for a Dem-orchestrated presser to beg for more tax dollars. Taxpayers are still paying the tab today.
But Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., a vocal proponent of defunding NPR, says the justification for cutting the cord is at an all-time high. He said it will come down to who blinks first in the appropriations battles, whether Democrats are willing to save public broadcasting funding at the expense of another priority.
“For a taxpayer-funded news source to be that out of kilter with the country as a whole is really just inexcusable,” the congressman said.
Berliner isn’t among those calling for Congress to cut NPR’s federal funding.
“I don’t support calls to defund NPR. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism,” he wrote on his X account. “But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.”
All things considered, NPR had a very bad week.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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