My Experience with PBS and NPR

May 07, 2025

I have looked to the PBS News Hour for reliable reporting and analysis since its debut as the MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1975. For fifty years the program has carried on without missing a beat. For fifty years the show’s anchor desk has been occupied with distinction by Robert MacNeil, Jim Lehrer, and their successors: Gwen Ifill, Judy Woodruff, and current co-anchors Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett.

NPR has been a valued resource for almost as long. White House Correspondent Tamara Keith and national political correspondent Mara Liasson stand with Bob Edwards, Nina Totenberg, Cokie Roberts, Susan Stamberg, Sylvia Poggioli, and too many more to mention here in another line of distinguished journalists.

Throughout its history public broadcasting has been a public treasure and for much of that time a burr under the conservative saddle, dating back at least to the Reagan era. Charges of liberal bias and calls to defund PBS have been standard fare on the right flank for years. They have grown ever more frenzied in the Trump era. The hysteria ramped up to fever pitch in March when allegations went far beyond mere liberal bias at Marjorie Taylor Greene’s DOGE subcommittee hearing “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.” Taylor Greene ranted about “programs that alienate and attack the majority of Americans” and “activist ‘journalists’ at NPR and PBS” who “hate President Trump and his supporters.” Not to be out-unhinged, Texas congressman Brandon Gill screeched about “blatant bias and radical misinformation” and called for using “every device at our disposal…to withdraw every penny of federal funding from these left-wing propaganda machines.”

Supreme leader Trump was all in on Truth Social, writing in all caps to convey the gravity of the threat posed by PBS and NPR: "REPUBLICANS MUST DEFUND AND TOTALLY DISASSOCIATE THEMSELVES FROM NPR & PBS, THE RADICAL LEFT 'MONSTERS' THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY!"

In that spirit Executive Order 14290 Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media directs the Corporation for Federal Broadcasting Board “and all executive departments and agencies (agencies) to cease Federal funding for NPR and PBS” because it is “outdated and unnecessary” in today’s media landscape with its “abundant, diverse, and innovative news options” and because neither PBS nor NPR “presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”

The order comes in the context of a campaign to suppress viewpoints the regime finds objectionable in the mainstream media, the universities, and cultural institutions.

Since taking office in January for a second term, Trump has ousted leaders, placed staff on administrative leave and cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to artists, libraries, museums, theaters and others, through takeovers of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Trump has also pushed to withhold federal research and education funds from universities and punish law firms unless they agree to eliminate diversity programs and other measures he has found objectionable…
The move against PBS and NPR comes as Trump’s administration has been working to dismantle the U.S. Agency for Global Media, including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which were designed to model independent newsgathering globally in societies that restrict the press. (Bauder, PBS chief slams)

Messaging from the White House is incoherent. On May 2 David Folkenflik at NPR reported that

Trump's newest order appears to envision a continuation of federal subsidies for public radio and television stations—apart from NPR and PBS. It is unclear how that squares with Trump's pledge to ask Congress to rescind all funds already approved for public broadcasting. ( Trump says)

It appears that Folkenflik was mistaken about the scope of the order. Yesterday the News Hour reported

The Department of Education has terminated a federal grant program that helps pay for children's programming that airs on PBS. The Ready to Learn grant has helped to fund shows like "Molly of Denali," "Work It Out Wombats!," and "Lyla in the Loop," among others. It's administered by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which manages federal funding for NPR and PBS, including for this program. (Nawaz, News Wrap: Trump says U.S. will stop bombing Houthi rebels in Yemen).

The blather about liberal bias at PBS ignores shows like Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr, which beginning in 1971 was produced by South Carolina Educational Television and ran on PBS until 1999. The show was relaunched as Firing Line with Margaret Hoover in 2018. Hoover continues Buckley’s practice of interviewing guests spanning the ideological spectrum while coming at it from a conservative perspective. The creativity it takes to paint Buckley or Hoover as a radical left monster lies beyond the capacity of my imagination.

The McLaughlin Group hosted by John McLaughlin aired from 1982 until McLaughlin’s death in 2016 and was revived intermittently between 2018 and 2020. I recall McLaughlin as the somewhat fusty conservative moderator of freewheeling and oft as not unruly discussions of public affairs by a panel made up of two liberals and two conservatives. The show often played as much for entertainment as serious debate, though there was some of the latter. Paleoconservative Pat Buchanan; Fred Barnes, former executive editor of The Weekly Standard; and Rich Lowry, former editor and now editor-in-chief of National Review, served as panelists from the right at various times over the years, while Eleanor Clift and Clarence Page represented the liberal wing in many episodes. Radical left liberal Marxist monsters all, I suppose.

PBS and NPR do not always get it right, no one does. I criticized coverage of the so-called largely peaceful protests of 2020, particularly at my local Oregon Public Broadcasting, when it fell short by emphasizing largely peaceful protesters and police misconduct, overreaction, etc., in a manner that downplayed the extent of violent confrontation, looting, arson, and property destruction that ran into the millions of dollars. I do not recall anyone questioning the intent of Portland protests scheduled to take place under cover of darkness (maybe I missed it). It is not that protesters who went in for violence and property destruction were ignored by OPB, but rather that they were not subject to a level of scrutiny appropriate to the extent of their mischief.

PBS and NPR make a good faith effort to present a range of perspectives about contentious issues. Far from silencing conservative voices, their reporters often fail to push back forcefully and effectively on evasive responses, misstatements, and worse by representatives of what passes for conservatism in the third decade of the 21st century. Late in 2023 I witnessed Judy Woodruff struggle mightily when her fact-checks were stonewalled with repetition of right-wing talking points and misstatements that she had questioned. I note this as an example of challenges faced by responsible journalists everywhere, not to single out Woodruff. Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett try to do better but with limited success. Of course there is only so much they can do when pressing the issue with a blockhead would only bring the interview to a standstill.

Mild-mannered David Brooks offered a spirited defense of the News Hour on last Friday’s Brooks and Capeheart segment:

At its core, the Trump administration is based on one theme, which is, they think progressive elites have destroyed the country, we need to take progressive elites down.
And that's whether they're in museums and sciences and universities, whatever. And so, in some sense, they have some case to be made that the elites have become a little more progressive. But as they go after CPB, I'm reminded of the call I got 23 years ago from Jim Lehrer offering me this job.
And I'm sitting there, of course, in a little league dugout. And Jim said: “You're going to be on the show on Fridays. We want you out and do a lot of reporting. You got to bring something to the game. This is about journalism.”
And I would say, if you think the PBS is biased, compared to who? Name one news organization in America—and I shouldn't be defending us. I get paid by PBS.
But I'm going to do it—who's more straight down the line than we are.
Is it MSNBC? Is it FOX? Is it CNN? Lisa Desjardins, like, one of the great journalists of our time? And so I will defend PBS, A, because I know how good we do in relative terms, but, B, because we travel around the country. We see the local affiliates where they're not doing some ideological thing. They are the voice of their community.
And so that's one of the reasons I'm violating my normal principle of never defending somebody I work for and trying to say, this is how I was hired, to be a journalist. (Nawaz, Brooks and Capehart)

This is wholly consistent with my experience of the News Hour from the McNeil/Lehrer years to Bennett and Nawaz. By the bye, I am totally with Brooks when he gives a shout-out to Lisa Desjardins, whose impressive credentials and numerous awards for her reporting exemplify the caliber of the News Hour team (check out the Desjardins bio sketch at PBS).

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