Students of Chinese history know that successive dynasties fell through the centuries when the population perceived that the rulers had “lost the Mandate of Heaven”. After that, all was lost, and final collapse was a matter of when, not if. The Qing, the Ming, the Tang. Public broadcasting in the United States — National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service — appears to have arrived at this point.
All the Republican presidents who have followed LBJ, signer of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, have complained of Left-wing bias in the system. But with Houdini-like skill, public broadcasting has always managed to evade elimination.
Until now, that is. The old arguments once that staved off termination seem to have dried up, while evidence of five decades of progressive bias has been collected and curated. Then there is Trump and Elon Musk, with their zeal for cutting back the permanent state — precisely that part of the state whose views and desires are platformed by American state media.
The threat that taxpayer-funded journalism represented was clear from the start. A young lawyer in the Nixon White House anticipated the danger and wrote in a 1971 memo that “we are confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences — that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system”.
That young lawyer was none other than Antonin Scalia. The future Supreme Court justice argued that eliminating the creature that the act had created, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, CPB), wouldn’t be easy. It would be “politically difficult in view of the strong educational support and the generally favourable public image which CPB has developed”, he prophetically predicted.
Public broadcasting’s educational component — seen only at PBS; NPR can’t rely on that argument — has repeatedly saved public broadcasting. In 1969, when President Nixon tried to slash funding by half, public-broadcasting executives sent Fred Rogers to a Senate subcommittee hearing to militate against it. That is, Mr. Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood fame, a children’s show that would become a staple at PBS.
Rogers tugged at the heartstrings of the lawmakers, speaking earnestly about children’s emotional well-being and how TV programming could help. The chairman of the committee, Sen. John O. Pastore, began the hearing as an open skeptic. But by the hearing’s end, Pastore was telling Rogers, “Looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars”.
In 2025, however, “for the children” appears to have lost much of its lustre, and there is good reason for it.
First, PBS licensed its signature children’s show, Sesame Street, to HBO in 2015 for five years. Last year, HBO announced it wouldn’t renew the license, though it would keep episodes from the Sesame archive available on its streaming platform, Max.
The argument used against Mitt Romney in 2012 — that public-broadcasting critics want to murder Big Bird — no longer works. Indeed, when Paula Kerger, PBS’s CEO, testified before the House on 26 March, 2025, she mentioned Sesame Street precisely zero times. Nearly all the Democrats defending PBS funding had arrived at the hearing armed with posters of Big Bird, Elmo, and Bert and Ernie. They seemed unaware of the HBO deal, and the fact that PBS has cut back on children’s programming to attract grownups.
That is one of the reasons public broadcasting has lost the mandate of heaven. Another is that, in our internet age, there is a profusion of media channels, websites, and video channels that not only produce an unending stream of educational content, but also news and entertainment. Today, the United States boasts some 15,000 commercial AM and FM stations, more than 425 satellite-radio channels, and 4 million registered podcasts, with half a billion worldwide listeners.
But what seals the deal is the political bias. On this front, NPR and PBS have violated the public trust and have, therefore, forsaken their claim on the public money.
Uri Berliner, a liberal journalist who worked at NPR for 25 years, admitted as much in a 2024 essay. NPR, he said, had become a place that now offers only “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the US population. … An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America”.
As with many things, it was Trump’s election in 2016 that sent NPR, liberal from its creation in the Seventies, irreparably off the rails. “His election”, Berliner wrote, “was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair”. Tough, “straightforward coverage” of Trump “veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency”.
“NPR inaugurated the first Trump administration by tying its fortunes to the false claim that Team Trump colluded with the Kremlin.”
As Berliner put it, NPR inaugurated the first Trump administration by tying its fortunes to the false claim that Team Trump colluded with the Kremlin. By Berliner’s count, the broadcaster granted no fewer than 26 largely uncritical interviews to Adam Schiff, the top Democrat making this claim. Schiff used this platform to spread another thing we now know was simply not true: that he had evidence of this “collusion”.
But when special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report concluded that no such collusion took place, NPR refused to admit error. It never went back to Schiff and demanded he account for the disjunction between his claims and reality. What Americans got instead was literal radio silence.
Not only did NPR remain unchastened by this error — it kept digging. When the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, NPR flatly refused to cover it. NPR’s managing editor responded to complaints by saying: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
Ah, yes, “pure distraction”: the fact, amply documented in the files and subsequently confirmed by other outlets, that Hunter arranged a 2015 meeting between his father, then the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, and executives from Burisma, the shady Ukrainian energy firm that was paying Hunter some $80,000 a month to serve on its board.
On 26 March, NPR CEO offered lawmakers several answers that strained credulity, as when she told Rep. Jim Jordan, “I’ve never seen any instance of political bias” at NPR. This, even as she conceded that NPR’s decision to suppress the Hunter Files had been a journalistic mistake.
In the pandemic, too, NPR again hitched its wagon firmly to the preferred progressive narrative — that the virus had a natural origin. At the time, the outlet trashed as “racist and xenophobic” the possibility that the virus had leaked from a lab in the Chinese that is home to one of China’s premier virology labs. Today, several US intelligence agencies conclude with varying degrees of confidence that Covid escaped from a lab.
Yet it was in the wake of George Floyd’s death in May 2020 that NPR and PBS did the greatest disservice to their listeners and viewers, let alone taxpayers. Without asking for evidence, they accepted the view that America is an oppressive society gripped by systemic racism, and that this calls for a systemic overhaul of American order.
NPR, or PBS, for that matter, could have acted to save the country from much of the damaging, self-inflicted hysteria that followed — simply by doing their job. Berliner observed: “We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way. But the message from the top [at NPR] was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.”
The bias at NPR and PBS is also easy to quantify. The conservative-leaning Media Research Center has been doing tallies of it for years, and the results demonstrate Berliner’s allegations. The PBS NewsHour, for example, routinely books many more liberals than conservatives. Over a four-month period from November 2022 to February 2023, MRC found that liberal Democratic guests outnumbered conservative Republican guests 3.7 to 1. When elected officials and political appointees were removed from the guest count, the disparity was even more striking, reaching 5.7 to 1.
MRC analysts also examined weeknight editions of the NewsHour from 3 January, 2023, through 2 May, 2023, finding that, by a 5-to-1 margin, NewsHour promoted controversies involving congressional Republicans over those involving Democrats. Congressional Republicans faced 85% negative coverage, compared to 54% positive coverage of congressional Democrats, the analysis showed. NewsHour correspondents branded Republicans as extremists (“far right”, “hard right”, etc.) 20 times during this period. Not once were hard-Left Democrats so identified.
An MRC analysis also found that during last year’s political convention, PBS treated the Republican convention to 72% negative and 28% positive commentary. By contrast, the Democratic convention played with a home field advantage: it received 12% negative coverage, versus 88% positive commentary.
What we have at NPR and PBS is what Juan Williams — another NPR veteran-turned-critic, fired in 2010 — has called “an insulated cadre of people who think they’re right, and they have a hard time with people who are different”. According to Berliner, the NPR Washington bureau has 87 registered Democrats on staff, and zero Republicans. Fast forward a dozen years, and you find that conservatives have voted with their feet. In 2023, pollsters found that only 11% of NPR listeners described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, while a whopping 67% of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal.
The mandate has been lost. The CPB receives some $535 million from taxpayers every year. But this time, Trump has mounted an offensive that attacks that money from different perspectives. There is, for example, his 1 May executive order that President Trump titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of the Biased Media”. Trump has also zeroed out any spending on the CPB in this year’s budget, while his Federal Communications Commission is investigating whether these outlets are violating the noncommercial clause in the Communications Act by taking commercial sponsorships.
At least one of these approaches will work. Neither Fred Rogers nor Big Bird can save them now.
