A Long Overdue Victory on Public Broadcasting

Ever since it was created in 1967 as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Republicans have spoken of cutting off federal funding for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. In 1969, Richard Nixon proposed slashing its budget, but the effort was thwarted with the help of an emotional plea from Fred Rogers at a Senate committee hearing. In the decades since, conservatives have lamented the growing bias at NPR and PBS, whose content local stations purchase with taxpayer grants through the corporation. But for all this time, Republicans have proven unwilling to withstand overwrought attacks about wanting to kill Big Bird. That is, until now.

It is easy to look at the passage of a recissions bill totaling $9 billion of spending cuts and complain that it won’t make a dent in the debt, which is approaching $37 trillion. But such complaints should not prevent us from appreciating what it means for Republicans, under the leadership of President Trump, to finally follow through on cutting off federal funding for these broadcasters.

When LBJ signed the law that created public broadcasting, he stated that its lofty goal was to  “enrich man’s spirit” by providing support for quality educational and cultural content. Such endeavors are well beyond any sensible notion of the role of the federal government, even if the CPB had lived up to these ambitions and proven free from bias. But it has not.

PBS and NPR have consistently peddled content that advanced a progressive worldview, reporting on news and history with bias, and attempting to brainwash children with woke propaganda (for instance, PBS Kids content advises parents to talk to their kids about “white privilege”).

The defenses that have been offered by PBS are absurd. PBS CEO Paula Kerger claimed that without the broadcaster, farmers would have trouble getting weather reports for their crops. Others have cited the fact that our founder, William F. Buckley, had a show on PBS for decades, but that ended in 1999.

The current CEO of NPR, Katherine Maher, still insists that the organization is “non-partisan” despite former producer Uri Berliner’s finding that when he worked there, he looked up the voter registration of employees in the D.C. office, and Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 87 to zero. There’s also its history of double standards, such as covering the Russian collusion story relentlessly while proudly refusing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story.

But focusing on partisan bias is a bit of a diversion, because the primary bias is ideological. Maher herself should understand the distinction. Before joining NPR, she once blasted then–Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton not from the center, but for “erasing the language of non-binary people” by using the terms “boy” and “girl.”

The public radio broadcaster used to have staff read the Declaration of Independence on air every July 4th. In 2022, they broke that tradition in favor of having a discussion about equality, and then went back and added trigger warnings to its archived past readings, saying the nation’s founding document “contains offensive language about Native Americans.”

As we argued last year when calling for the defunding of NPR, these broadcasters have every right to operate as left-wing propaganda outlets, but they are not entitled to pursue this goal with taxpayer money. Cutting off their federal funding is long overdue, and we hope, enduring.

The Editors comprise the senior editorial staff of the National Review magazine and website.

Reprinted with permission from National Review by The Editors.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.