{"id":7699,"date":"2025-03-26T18:30:17","date_gmt":"2025-03-26T18:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/public-media-ceos-defend-their-coverage-and-fight-for-funding\/"},"modified":"2025-03-26T18:30:17","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T18:30:17","slug":"public-media-ceos-defend-their-coverage-and-fight-for-funding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/public-media-ceos-defend-their-coverage-and-fight-for-funding\/","title":{"rendered":"Public media CEOs defend their coverage \u2014 and fight for funding"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The GOP\u2019s crusade against public media entered new territory Wednesday, as leaders of NPR and PBS testified before House Republicans keen on defunding their organizations.<\/p>\n

In a hearing before the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, Katherine Maher and Paula Kerger \u2014 the CEOs of NPR and PBS, respectively \u2014 defended their federal funding, responding to Republican concerns about their coverage and emphasizing the value of their services to local communities.<\/p>\n

But Republicans were unimpressed, repeatedly accusing them of peddling misinformation and political bias. And their criticism comes at a high-stakes moment for both media organizations, with President Donald Trump saying just yesterday he would \u201clove\u201d to deprive NPR and PBS of government assistance and new FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr investigating the outlets for violating rules around advertising.<\/p>\n

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who chairs the so-called DOGE Subcommittee, told reporters following the hearing that defunding the organizations was \u201cwidely supported\u201d within the House Republican Conference.<\/p>\n

During the hearing, she singled out a drag queen who appeared on a PBS-affiliated program as a \u201cchild predator\u201d and a \u201cmonster.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNPR and PBS have increasingly become radical left-wing echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy, white, urban liberals and progressives who generally look down on and judge rural America,\u201d Greene said. \u201cFor far too long, federal taxpayers have been forced to fund biased news. This needs to come to an end. And it needs to come to an end now.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chair of the full Oversight Committee, took the opportunity to air his own personal grievances over how NPR covered his handling of an impeachment investigation into then-President Joe Biden.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think you\u2019ve abused the privilege that you had with receiving federal funds,\u201d Comer said.<\/p>\n

If lawmakers were to halt funding through the congressional appropriations process to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes resources to NPR and PBS, the decision would be a major blow to local stations that depend on that money. It\u2019s not currently clear whether Republicans have the votes to do this; in the past, efforts to restrict appropriations for public media have fallen short.<\/p>\n

The return of the Trump era, however, has scrambled expectations for what the executive branch can and cannot do when it comes to federal funding, daring lawsuits against its unilateral actions to shift or withhold money Congress has already approved. The administration also last week moved to shutter the U.S.-funded outlets Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.<\/p>\n

At times, the PBS and NPR leaders appeared to be repentant. Maher said NPR was \u201cmistaken\u201d for failing to aggressively cover the saga around the laptop that Biden\u2019s son, Hunter Biden, allegedly left at a Delaware repair shop. Kerger pointed to the PBS program Firing Line with political commentator Margaret Hoover, which is a reboot of the show with conservative writer William F. Buckley, to show the ideological range in programming.<\/p>\n

Democrats came to Maher and Kerger\u2019s defense, extolling the virtues of public media by highlighting beloved characters from children\u2019s education television hallmarks like Sesame Street. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) called to \u201cfire Elon Musk and save Elmo.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m sad to see that this once proud committee, the principal investigative committee in the House of Representatives, has now stooped to the lowest levels of partisanship and political theater to hold a hearing to go after the likes of Elmo and Cookie Monster and Arthur the Aardvark,\u201d said Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), \u201call for the unforgivable sin of teaching the alphabet to low-income families\u2019 children and providing accessible local news and program.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The GOP\u2019s crusade against public media entered new territory Wednesday, as leaders of NPR and PBS testified before House Republicans keen on defunding their organizations. In a hearing before the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, Katherine Maher and Paula Kerger \u2014 the CEOs of NPR and PBS, respectively \u2014 defended their federal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}