Richard F. Kosich: NPR in the crosshairs

National Public Radio (NPR) filed a lawsuit on Monday, May 26th, challenging the Trump administration’s attempt to end federal funding of public media. They claim the effort is an attack on freedom of speech and therefore violates the First Amendment along with being “textbook retaliation and viewpoint-based discrimination.” 

In the suit, NPR said the administration’s actions run counter to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which prohibits federal agencies from controlling the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). NPR Chief Executive Katherine Maher was also quoted as saying “NPR has a First Amendment right to be free from government attempts to control private speech as well as from retaliation aimed at punishing and chilling protected speech.”

The lawsuit is in response to President Trump’s executive order signed on May 1, instructing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other federal agencies “to cease Federal funding for NPR and PBS.” The White House accused the two media outlets of spreading “radical woke propaganda.” The order also requires that they work to root out “indirect sources” of public financing for the news organizations as well.

“[President Trump] just signed an executive order ENDING the taxpayer subsidization of NPR and PBS – which receive millions from taxpayers to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news,’” the White House posted in a statement on X.

Ending federal funding for public media has long been a pipe dream of conservative Republicans, going back as far as Newt Gingrich and the Republican “revolution” of 1994. The effort never fully stopped. 

“The mainstream media has become obsessed with doing the left’s bidding and taking down strong conservatives — and NPR has led the pack,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said in a statement to Fox News Digital in April 2024. She went on to point out that it made “no sense” that the American people were forced to fund a “propagandist left-wing outlet that refuses to represent the voices of half the country.”

But is NPR really as politically biased as Sen. Blackburn and the White House are claiming, thus justifying the federal subsidy freeze? 

Uri Berliner’s article titled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust” provides some answers to that thorny question from an insider’s perspective, and therefore is as relevant today as when it was first published in The Free Press in April 2024. Berliner, an award-winning, twenty-five year veteran and senior business editor/reporter at NPR, begins his article by freely admitting “NPR has always had a liberal bent” in the past, but it at least attempted to provide some balance in its news coverage. According to Berliner, that all changed with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, which was greeted at NPR with a “mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair,” and only encouraged NPR journalists to find ways to “damage or topple” Trump’s presidency.

Berliner also criticizes NPR’s ideological homogeneity and DEI practices, which he described as NPR’s “North Star” and “overriding mission,” and laments that race and identity “became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.” He also noted the extent to which people at every level of NPR had comfortably coalesced around the “progressive worldview,” and that the newsroom’s myopic obsession with race and identity politics eventually influenced NPR’s news coverage, which he referred to as “almost like an assembly line” of negative stories warning of the “dire threat of Republican policies.” He goes on to describe how the programming over the years — in a desperate attempt to “get Trump” — relentlessly pushed the Russian-collusion story (“the catnip that drove reporting”) yet consciously refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story (i.e., “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories”) while suppressing the Covid-19 Chinese lab leak theory.

Berliner identifies this absence of “viewpoint diversity” as the single “most damaging development at NPR,” and that for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it was “devastating both for its journalism and its business model.” Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, Berliner looked at voter registration data of editorial employees in the D.C. newsroom where NPR is headquartered, and what he found astounded him: “I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None,” he writes. 

His efforts to raise alarms about this later at an all-hands editorial staff meeting on May 3, 2021 was greeted with what Berliner describes as worse than outright hostility. “It was met with profound indifference,” as if the lopsided tally was a “random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.”

In addition to spotlighting NPR’s lack of “viewpoint diversity” in its news coverage and editorial staff, Berliner’s essay brought scrutiny to Maher and her long history of touting progressive causes, scorning free speech and professing her fondness for censorship. For her part, Maher, in the first major test of her new leadership (she began one month before Berliner’s essay was published), promptly retaliated against Berliner by suspending him without pay for the apparent crime of speaking about NPR’s biases aloud, which the NPR brain trust simply couldn’t handle. (Berliner walked away from NPR a few days later — on his own terms). Maher then penned a letter to NPR’s staff where she largely dismissed Berliner’s wake-up call and said that questioning the integrity of NPR’s journalists based on their “identity” was “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful and demeaning.” In other words, instead of viewing the moment as a chance to finally right the ship, Maher doubled down by calling into question Berliner’s integrity.

Maher’s letter to NPR staff, however, suggests not only can her impartiality be questioned, but that she herself is out of touch with reality. For example, she claims in her letter that “We fulfill our mission best when we look and sound like the country we serve,” and insisted her employees “represent America” and that “we succeed through our diversity.” This directly conflicts with the internal demographic research Berliner shared in his Free Press essay, which stated that in 2023 NPR’s audience was only six percent black and seven percent Hispanic (versus 14.4 percent and nineteen percent of the overall U.S. adult population, respectively). This revelation led Berliner to lament that not only does “an open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR,” but that now, predictably, “Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.”

Maher further boasted about NPR’s staff in her letter, saying their presence across America was “foundational to our mission,” and that they “served” and “engaged” audiences that are “as diverse as our nation: urban and rural, liberal and conservative, rich and poor.” Yet for all its talk of “inclusion” and “diverse perspectives,” NPR still hasn’t coherently explained the vast political divide in its editorial newsroom staff that Uri Berliner uncovered and wrote about in his essay cited above. In fact, this heavily partisan skew in NPR’s staff was also reflected in the political leanings of NPR’s audience; by 2023 only eleven percent of listeners described themselves as “very” or “somewhat conservative,” 21 percent as “middle of the road,” and a whopping 67 percent of listeners identified as “very” or “somewhat liberal.” Even Berliner, as liberal as he is, astutely noted at the time in his essay, “We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.” 

Conservatives have long understood NPR’s liberal bias, and Berliner’s essay confirms what we already knew: This is an organization that has lost touch with half the country. They therefore don’t deserve federal tax dollars to fund a supposedly “public” news organization that ostensibly pretends to serve the entire nation, while disregarding half the electorate. President Trump’s executive order therefore is a good start, but likely to be struck down by the courts.

The Republicans’ best chance of codifying into law any proposed spending cuts for NPR and PBS is by supporting Rep. Ronny Jackson’s (R-TX) “No Partisan Radio and Partisan Broadcasting Services Act” (H.R. 2443) or simply the “NPR and PBS Act,” which he introduced on March 27. The bill, if passed, would pull all government funding (both direct and indirect) from both outlets, thus forcing them to compete in the modern-day media landscape instead of being subsidized by the government. Jackson told Fox News Digital that the outlets have “turned into taxpayer-funded propaganda machines for the radical left, pushing Democratic talking points under the fake banner of ‘public media.’” The bill currently has fourteen co-sponsors (all Republicans), so it’s off to a good start, but will need far greater support to have any chance of becoming law.

NPR, in response to such potential cuts, likes to downplay its government funding by claiming “less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget” comes from the CPB, while paradoxically insisting “federal funding is essential” to its core mission. But as Howard Husock of the American Enterprise Institute (and former CPB board member from 2013-2018) has explained for The Hill, this is highly misleading. The one-percent figure refers to direct funding, but a much larger percentage of its revenue comes indirectly from 386 local public radio stations around the country that are licensed by the FCC and which use CPB funds to purchase programming produced by NPR, like “Morning Edition”, “All Things Considered” and “Weekend Edition” (among others). 

In 2021, for example, he notes, “NPR reported $90 million in revenue from ‘contracts from customers,’ a significant portion of its $279 million (budget) and much more than one percent.” He went on to note that “One can think of these funds as federal grants that have been sent from Washington — but returned to it,” and were only exceeded by corporate sponsorships. According to NPR, for example, 38 percent of its revenue comes from corporate sponsorships, while 31 percent comes from “core and other programming fees.” NPR’s own site even admits that “station programming fees comprise a significant portion of NPR’s largest source of revenue. The loss of federal funding would undermine the stations’ ability to pay NPR for programming, thereby weakening the institution.”

The reality is, however, that both NPR and PBS have diverse revenue streams beyond corporate money and programming fees, such as advertising, major foundation grants, and voluntary viewer and listener donations, so neither is likely to perish if they lose federal funding. If NPR wants to run a journalistic enterprise beholden to advancing progressive ideology, as it has every right to, it should do so from these revenue streams — just like every other media organization. But if the government wants to continue subsidizing a “public” news organization from the government coffers, that organization should at least attempt to be balanced by showcasing perspectives more representative of the country as a whole, not as they desire it to be. When it fails to do this, any justification for continuing to support it out of the common treasury is wholly unjustifiable. 

Unfortunately, the funding bill passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump earlier this year included $535 million for the CPB, and since Congress budgets money for CPB two years in advance, the recent bill means public broadcasting is funded through 2027, unless legislation changes that equation. 

So, what does the future hold for NPR and public broadcasting in the current political climate? As Uri Berliner pointed out in his essay published while still an employee at the news organization, “The trajectory for NPR is not promising.” He foresaw two possible paths for NPR: “We can keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we’ve gone wrong.” But as Berliner sardonically pointed out, “News organizations don’t go in for that kind of reckoning.” Still, he felt there was a good reason for NPR to be among the first to mend its ways: “We’re the ones with the word public in our name.” Absent that reckoning, it’s long past time to end the ruse of “listener supported” NPR; it is “taxpayer supported” NPR, and that ought to end. If NPR is still getting funding from the budget after the reconciliation process, the House and Senate GOP were never serious to begin with.

Richard F. Kosich is a Grassroots Manager at Americans for Prosperity, writer and community activist. He’s also a Republican Committeeman for Conshohocken Ward 2, Chair of the Conshohocken Borough Republican Committee (CBRC) and Vice-Chair of the Colonial Republicans/Montgomery County Republican Committee (MCRC) Area 6.