In a hearing that hit on Sesame Street and Hunter Biden’s laptop, Republicans grilled the heads of PBS and NPR on Wednesday, accusing them of media bias.
“NPR 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,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene, chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee.
“It’s up to Congress to determine if Americans are going to continue to provide … taxpayer funds to continue to pursue their progressive, or rather, communist agenda,” Greene said.
She concluded the hearing by calling for the “complete and total defunding and dismantling of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”
Democrats were not tickled by the attacks on the broadcasters that gave us Elmo, Mr. Rogers and Terry Gross. “I’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, Cookie Monster and Arthur the aardvark, all for the unforgivable sin of teaching the alphabet to low-income families children and providing accessible local news,” said Rep. Stephen F. Lynch of Massachusetts.
They also seized on the extra media attention at Wednesday’s hearing to excoriate President Donald Trump’s administration over the accidental leak of military attack plans to an editor at The Atlantic via Signal, an open-source, encrypted messaging app.
“As former chairman of our subcommittee on national security, I recall a time when just the potential for a security breach that could expose American troops and intelligence personnel to unnecessary danger would immediately trigger hearings and bring this committee to a lather on both sides, but you can bet we won’t be touching this issue,” Lynch said. “They would rather post up against Big Bird than deal with that issue.”
Democrats swung at Elon Musk and the DOGE subcommittee’s namesake Department of Government Efficiency, arguing that Republicans had no interest in actual efficiency.
“The total funding for public broadcasting is just one-sixth the amount that Elon Musk’s companies make off of the government every single year, but you will not see Elon Musk being grilled by this committee,” said Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, as an aide held a poster reading “Fire Elon, Save Elmo.”
“I’ve seen a lot, but pointing the finger at Elmo to cover for Elon Musk might be a new low,” he added.
Katherine Maher, NPR’s CEO, responded to Greene’s attacks with the equanimity of a radio DJ queuing up Johannes Brahms, while taking subtle digs at the administration. “Americans are smart and curious, and they want us to cover issues that matter, from the price of eggs to national security,” she said.
Greene pressed Maher on her past statements critical of Trump. Maher, in response, emphasized that NPR maintains a full firewall preventing managers from interfering in editorial decisions, and stated that she regrets making those tweets several years ago.
Maher conceded to the GOP critics that the network had made some reporting mistakes in the past, saying NPR should have covered the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively. She also acknowledged she was “concerned” by criticism, levied by former NPR editor Uri Berliner, that most editors at the network’s D.C. headquarters were registered Democrats.
Greene excoriated a drag queen once shown reading a children’s book on “Let’s Learn” — a program produced by WNET alongside the New York City Department of Education.
PBS head Paula Kerger testified that “the drag queen was actually not on any of our kids shows” and was “mistakenly put on our website by our New York City station.”
Congress funds public media through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which received $535 million in the current fiscal year. While NPR itself gets about 1 percent of its annual operating budget directly from the federal government, that figure is around 10 percent for individual member stations. PBS gets around 16 percent of its funds from the government. Around 70 percent of CPB’s funds go directly to local member stations, which often are the only local news outlets in rural areas.
Democrats called Alaska Public Media President Ed Ulman to testify to the outlet’s importance in the vast rural state. “Our radio station hosts Alaska’s only statewide call-in programs,” he said, adding that cutting federal funds would be devastating for stations like his. “We reach across Alaska with these essential free services through a statewide network consisting of four TV channels and one radio station.”
Republicans argued that the spread of high-speed internet and satellite radio militated against the need to subsidize public media. Maher noted how local NPR stations are often the only local media available, particularly during major natural disasters. “In Asheville, North Carolina, recently, Blue Ridge Public Radio was the only news information source available for nearly two weeks as people struggled with outages of water and electricity, and certainly outages of cell phones and internet.”
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