The House DOGE subcommittee held a Wednesday hearing on NPR and PBS, both of which Trump would like to dismantle. Trump said on Tuesday he'd "love" to shut them down. The heads of both networks testified for their usefulness against a GOP that pointed out the massive budget deficit in addition to the the well-documented biased programming exhibited on both state-funded networks. Conditions must be placed on the networks, but if they can be remade, both NPR and PBS serve a useful purpose that the marketplace has abandoned: local news, cultural and educational content.
"I would love to do that," Trump said when asked about shutting down the networks. "I think it's very unfair. It's been very biased. The whole group, I mean, a whole group of them and frankly, there's plenty of — look at all the media you have right now. There's plenty of coverage."
"It was from a different age," he went on, "and they spent more money than any other network of its type ever conceived, so the kind of money being wasted is a very biased view. You know that better than anybody and I'd be honored to see it end. We're well covered. Look at all the people that we have here today. We're well covered and don't need it and it's a waste of money. I don't even know what DOGE's recommendation is. I assume their recommendation is to close them up."
Trump is right: PBS and NPR are from a different age. Back when there were only three networks, each for profit, each obsessed with ratings for news shows and entertainment, PBS offered a respite. Educational shows for children, documentaries, news broadcasts that were able to go more in-depth without worrying about commercial breaks, the airing of less popular shows (like Dr. Who), cultural offerings, and local content were what populated the PBS affiliates. NPR affiliates, too, offered local content, in-depth interviews, and music that wasn't available on top 40 stations.
Both networks were trusted by the public, and both networks have given up that trust in favor of partisan hacksmanship in which they espouse a far-left set of views and beliefs. As GOP House members questioned the two CEOs on Wednesday, that bias was on full display. Two Reps from Texas, Brandon Gill and Pat Fallon, laid bare some of the more egregious examples of leadership and editorial practice.
Fallon pointed out that in 2023, "PBS had a program, Washington Week with The Atlantic, and when President Biden's mental acuity was questioned, one of the reporters claimed the GOP was lying, another reporter, Jeffrey Goldberg... described Biden as 'mentally acute.'" There were no alternative opinions presented. In 2023, when it became apparent that Biden was not mentally acute, many stated the obvious: that the media—including PBS—had been entirely complicit in that cover-up.
NPR had been complicit in a different cover-up relating to the Biden family. In 2020, NPR not only refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story, which became known as the "laptop from Hell," but said it was fake. In the time since, NPR has apologized, and the CEO testifying on Wednesday apologized further, saying that while she wasn't in charge at the time, she and others at the network knew that this had been a major blunder.
Gill took aim at the apparent bias of the NPR CEO herself. "A lot of your thinking as expressed by your public statements is deeply infused with economic and cultural Marxism," he said. He brought up her tweets in favor of reparations, those on white privilege, and others that, on the left, are indicators of being a "good person," i.e. someone who follows along with leftist dictates.
All of this is inexcusable. The inaccuracies driven by bias and the portrayal of only one side of any given political or cultural issue must come to an end. But can there be a place for PBS and NPR? Both take federal funds, but in so doing, they reach into communities that don't have a great deal of offerings. Podcasts are great, but they are not typically locality-specific. Local newspapers have long since been bought up by big conglomerates and shut down. NPR and PBS work with local affiliates, and while they bring in membership funding and local revenue, not every community out there has the ability to throw in. These private-public partnership networks are useful.
If they are shut down, it will be because Congress determines that they are unsalvageable, that the rot is too deep, and that the only way to save the land is to torch the building. And the only ones PBS, NPR, and their audiences will have to blame are the executives and producers who bought so hard into the woke mindset that they killed the entity they now wish to preserve. Many who want to keep NPR and PBS extant operate on nostalgia, which will only get the networks so far. If they're going to keep their funding, stay afloat, and serve their audiences, they must, to borrow a leftist term, do better.
