President Donald Trump’s recent executive order halting funding for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) has elicited cries of “censorship” and accusations of First Amendment violations from the liberal establishment. But a quick review of those networks’ programming quickly reveals that they are hardly the “unbiased, nonpartisan” news sources they claim to be. Here are 10 examples of PBS and NPR betraying the public trust and exposing why they don’t deserve taxpayer dollars.
Following Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, NPR aggressively promoted the narrative that Trump was the beneficiary of covert support from the Russian government – a repeatedly debunked conspiracy theory known as “Russiagate.” As recently as last September, NPR was still propping up the “Russian interference” hoax.
In other words, Americans’ own tax dollars were used to peddle a fake Democrat narrative and mislead the public.
Discrediting the Hunter Biden Laptop Scandal
Like the rest of the corporate media, NPR and PBS dutifully repeated the Democrat Party line that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation” ahead of the 2020 election. NPR’s Managing Editor Terence Samuels specifically stated in a post on X, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.” The network also alleged that there were “red flags” on the veracity of the story.
Of course, we now know that not only was the laptop story completely legitimate, NPR, PBS, and the rest of the legacy media also had all the evidence they needed to know it was a real story. During a recent hearing held by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, NPR CEO Katherine Maher admitted, “NPR acknowledges that we were mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner.”
Post-election polling shows that 79 percent of Americans believe Trump would have won the 2020 election had the story gotten more coverage.
Falsely Smearing the COVID-19 Lab Leak Theory
During the COVID-19 pandemic, NPR repeatedly sought to silence and discredit the theory that the virus had originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, calling it a politically motivated conspiracy theory. In April of 2020, NPR published an article titled “Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory Of Pandemic Emergence” asserting that “scientists dismiss the idea that the coronavirus pandemic was caused by the accident in a lab.”
Now, multiple federal agencies, including the CIA, FBI, and Department of Energy have stated that COVID indeed most likely originated in a lab. But NPR has offered no apology for smearing so-called “COVID conspiracy theorists” in 2020.
Cover Up of Joe Biden’s Cognitive Decline
Like the rest of the corporate media, NPR and PBS participated in the media’s cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline throughout his presidency.
As questions began to arise regarding Joe Biden’s mental state during the 2024 campaign, PBS host Jeff Goldberg stated of Joe Biden, “Mentally, he’s quite acute.” Another NPR piece in February 2024 suggested that Biden’s repeated gaffes were “signs of normal aging – or may be nothing.”
Peddling Transgender Ideology
Both PBS and NPR have actively promoted left-wing transgender ideology, including to American children. In 2017, PBS released a documentary titled “Real Boy” about a trans teenager celebrating “changing gender identity.” PBS also aired a “children’s program” titled “Lil’ Miss Hot Mess” that featured a drag queen skit that sought to promote the book “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish.”
NPR, meanwhile, published a story about “queer animals” in 2024 stating that “some deer are nonbinary,” as well as that “banana slugs are hermaphrodites.” NPR also sought to “educate” the entire nation about a “whole community of genderqueer dinosaur enthusiasts” and “trans-ceratops.” They went as far as saying that there was “limited scientific evidence of physical advantage” between male and female athletes in a March 2023 piece.
Hosting A “BLM Sesame Street Town Hall”
Following the death of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, PBS launched a new initiative with CNN titled “Coming Together: Standing Up To Racism – A CNN/Sesame Street Town Hall For Kids and Families.”
The program ostensibly sought to “teach” kids and families about racism and the ongoing “protests.” However, its content played out more like a propaganda movie for BLM, avoiding any criticism of the movement that was then burning American cities to the ground.
During the program, for instance, Elmo’s dad, Louie, said that the “protests” were justified because “racism is a huge problem in our country,” further stating that, “Not all streets are like Sesame Street… What we are seeing is people saying ‘enough is enough.’ They want to end racism.”
NPR’s Declaration of Independence Stunt
In 2022, rather than engage in their Fourth of July tradition of publicly reading the Declaration of Independence, NPR decided instead to hold a discussion related to “equality” focusing on the issue of abortion and claiming that Trump was attacking people’s rights. A year prior, NPR stated that the Declaration of Independence had “flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies.”
Carrying Water for the Slavery Reparations Movement
As part of PBS’s “ReFramed America” series, the network released a documentary titled “The Cost of Inheritance” that claims to explore the issue of slavery reparations and its “complexity.” Despite appearing as an educational resource, the program displays a clear pro-reparations bias by amplifying arguments in favor of reparations.
PBS has since created and aired other programs that have only offered the pro-reparations side of the debate, including “The Big Paycheck,” which celebrates the “passage of the first tax-funded reparations bill for Black Americans” in Illinois.
Disparaging March for Life
While covering the March For Life in 2020, NPR released a piece titled “President Trump Faces Friendly Crowd At March For Life” that spoke disparagingly of the people in attendance. Throughout the piece, the pro-life attendees are called “Anti-Abortion rights activists” and portrayed as anti-woman.
Discriminating Against Conservatives in the Newsroom
In April of 2024, 25-year NPR veteran reporter Uri Berliner wrote an article for the Free Press exposing the left-wing bias of the organization. Titled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” Uri disclosed that registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans 87 to 0 in NPR’s newsroom, precluding any ideological diversity within the organization. “Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find… the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population,” Uri wrote.
These are only some of the most notable examples on the long list of instances in which NPR and PBS displayed their one-sided progressive bias. The Trump administration is now taking a long-overdue step to stop American taxpayer funding of these two very clearly left-wing media networks.
Hunter Oswald is a Research Fellow for The American Spectator. He is an alum of Grove City College, where he graduated Cum Laude with a B.A. in Political Science. You can follow him on X @HunterOswald8.
Read the full article here
