‘Defund NPR’: Congressman Leads the Charge against Left-Wing National Public Radio

Updated: 04/30/2024 10:03 AM EDT

After numerous exposes of National Public Radio’s endemic left-wing bias, the House of Representatives may take on the battle to defund NPR.

Intermittent calls to deprive public broadcasting of its half-billion-dollar tax subsidy have renewed in recent weeks, as longtime editor Uri Berliner revealed NPR’s Washington bureau employed 87 Democrats and zero Republicans. NPR suspended Berliner after The Free Press published his op-ed earlier this month, and he subsequently resigned. In the interim, Manhattan Institute scholar Christopher Rufo collected numerous social media messages showing Katherine Maher, who became NPR’s CEO in March, expressing far-left viewpoints out of sync with the majority of taxpayers.

In July 2020, Maher chided people who thought of fleeing Donald Trump’s America, flagellating herself for having “cis white mobility privilege.” In the 2016 presidential campaign, she took Hillary Clinton to task for acknowledging the gender binary. “I do wish Hillary wouldn’t use the language of ‘boy and girl’ — it’s erasing language for non-binary people,” Maher tweeted.

Her worldview is founded on the denial of universal truths. “There are many different truths,” asserted Maher in a TED Talk delivered while she was executive director of the Wikipedia Foundation. “I’m certain that the truth exists for you, and probably for the person sitting next to you. But this may not be the same truth. … So, we all have different truths.”

Maher’s ascension accents, but does not change, public broadcasting’s political or cultural biases. NPR and its parent, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, have had a reliably liberal bent since CPB’s formation in 1967. At times, NPR has featured anti-Christian rhetoric. In 2014, Peter Sagal, the host of NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” mocked Jesus’s crucifixion. Commenting on a church ad campaign showing a woman taking a “selfie” with Jesus, Sagal asked, “Why didn’t Jesus just offer to take the picture Himself? His hands were occupied.”

NPR’s abortion coverage reflects its secular progressive commitments. In 2018, “Morning Edition” reporter Rachel Martin derisively called the nation’s largest pro-life event “the so-called March for Life.” She later apologized for the breech. But a biased view of abortion became codified into official policy in 2019, when NPR issued an official “Guidance Reminder” explaining why journalists should never use the phrase “the unborn” in its abortion coverage:

“The term ‘unborn’ implies that there is a baby inside a pregnant woman, not a fetus. Babies are not babies until they are born. They’re fetuses. Incorrectly calling a fetus a ‘baby’ or ‘the unborn’ is part of the strategy used by antiabortion groups to shift language/legality/public opinion.”

In fact, embryology textbooks universally declare that human life begins at the moment of fertilization/conception.

The same document told reporters not to use the terms “partial birth abortion,” “late-term abortion,” “pro-abortion rights,” or “abortion clinics.”

The Trump years saw NPR seemingly minimizing mob violence. During the Black Lives Matter riots in the summer of 2020, NPR offered glowing coverage to the book “In Defense of Looting,” written by Vicky Osterweil, a man who identifies as a woman. Similarly, Mara Liasson compared Antifa rioters to U.S. troops leading the Allied invasion of Vichy France on D-Day.

In a startling confluence of events, NPR ran a story hailing transgender activists who practice shooting “to defend themselves from hate groups” just one month before a trans-identifying shooter opened fire at Nashville’s Covenant School, killing three children and three staffers. (Leaked pages from the mass murderer’s writings show Audrey Hale was motivated by themes regularly discussed on NPR: that white, middle-class Christians are festooned with “privilege.”)

While NPR refused to cover Hunter Biden’s laptop in the days before the 2020 presidential election, it has published an abundance of niche, left-wing content. Berliner highlighted NPR stories implying that bird names are racist or claiming that “Asians serve[d] as this sort of mask for white privilege” in the 2023 Supreme Court case that (mostly) struck down race-conscious Affirmative Action in college admissions.

National Public Radio broke down the wall between journalism and activism in July 2021, when NPR rescinded a longstanding rule that journalists should not take part in “marches, rallies and public events,” nor advocate for “controversial” or “polarizing” issues. The new policy says, “NPR editorial staff may express support for democratic, civic values,” such as “the right to thrive in society without facing discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, disability, or religion.”

“Is it okay to march in a demonstration and say, ‘Black lives matter’? What about a [Gay] Pride parade? In theory, the answer today is, ‘Yes,’” stated NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride.

That has Republican congressmen ready to take action. “It is bad enough that so many media outlets push their slanted views instead of reporting the news, but it is even more egregious for hardworking taxpayers to be forced to pay for it. National Public Radio has a track record of promoting anti-American narratives on the taxpayer dime,” said Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) in a statement emailed to The Washington Stand. “My legislation would ensure no taxpayer dollars are used to fund the woke, leftist propaganda of National Public Radio.”

Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Mary Miller (R-Ill.), and Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) reintroduced the “No Propaganda Act” earlier this month that would deny all federal funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The “CPB cannot be allowed to keep using your hard-earned tax dollars to push a biased and political agenda,” said Perry. “[R]ecent reports from a whistleblower indicate the CPB is nothing more than a propaganda machine for the Democrat Party,” added Ogles.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting received $525 million in taxpayer funding in 2024 — $80 million more than the CPB’s $445 million budget in 2021. Of that, $119.32 million goes to NPR radio affiliates and programming, according to CPB’s Fiscal Year 2024 Operating Budget.

The late Congressman Phil Crane, former chairman of the American Conservative Union, regularly introduced bills to defund, and abolish, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the 1990s over its biased coverage and dubious constitutionality.