America's Talking - Trump Calls for Defunding NPR, PBS

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulam, Chief Content Officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. President Donald Trump on Thursday called for defunding national public radio and public broadcasting service to national public media outlets that have received federal tax dollars for years. Trump accuses the outlets of longtime liberal bias. Joining me to discuss this today is Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau chief for the Center Square, Casey, you covered Trump's statements yesterday about defunding NPR and PBS. Tell us more.

Starting point is 00:00:36 Sure. So in the Doge era of the Trump administration where we're seeing, for instance, HHS is firing about 10,000 employees. We saw U.S. aid was mostly shuttered. We've seen threats about, you know, major cuts at the Pentagon and other cuts. NPR and PBS are not exempt. They are kind of the next to possibly go under the knife. Now, Doge and the Trump administration are sort of cutting everything all at once. It's not a one at a time approach. So who knows when any potential cuts could come. To do it most effectively, they would need a measure in Congress to do it.

Starting point is 00:01:12 And I think there's definitely some Republican support for it. And that showed at a hearing this week. So two things happened. There was a hearing where the heads of PBS and NPR had to basically defend their funding, funding to the new House Republican Doge committee, which is led by Georgia's Marjorie Taylor Green. And then Trump, after that hearing, came out and called publicly for defunding NPR and PBS. So, you know, what are NPR and PBS's crimes? We can just go, you know, that might warrant this besides just the general wanting to cut funding.

Starting point is 00:01:45 Well, you know, Marjorie Taylor Green laid many of them out to the hearing. So I'll draw on some of her testimony from this week. But basically, you know, she pointed out, well, one, in the age of the internet, you know, funding for, you know, millions of dollars, actually hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for this kind of thing is not necessary. She said, you know, it was necessary to get information to Americans all around the country before the internet. But now that, now we have the internet, why do we actually need to pay this? It's not like there's going to be a lack of news or a poverty of news online or on the radio or on TV if NPR doesn't exist. That

Starting point is 00:02:18 was her first argument. But then she pointed to some of the political bias, particularly against Trump, that, you know, NPR was pretty anti-Trump in their coverage, pretty biased. I think it's pretty well-known. She also pointed out that NPR, you know, serves wealthy, urban white people. That was what she said. And it's not like this is, you know, the news station of the minority, you know, minority poor or the rural poor or anyone else. It's the wealthy white elite, you know, radio station. And so why are we funding it to millions at dollars? Then she also honed in on some specific examples. For instance, there was a PBS news show called Let's Learn.

Starting point is 00:02:59 That's children, it's targeted for young children, like eight years old and under. And they had a drag queen read a children's book on that show for children. And it's titled, The Hips on the Drag Queen go swish, swish, apparently referring to the tassels on the drag queen. And Marjorie Taylor Green had a giant photo of this drag queen at the hearing, which you can see at the Soonersquare.com. So there's others, you know, PBS had a documentary growing up trans. And then lastly, for I handed back to you, Dan, Yuri Berliner,

Starting point is 00:03:31 who was a longtime senior editor at NPR. He felt that NPR was going astray, becoming too liberal. And he did some research. And he found that in their D.C. office, they have 87 registered Democrats at NPR. And how many registered Republicans? You guessed it, zero. So, you know, this was a kind of open and shut evidence in his mind. He wrote a public editorial criticizing NPR. And so these examples have been building. And in the doge era, you don't even need good reason to get cut. So it'll be interesting to see how much they follow through on this. There is some American

Starting point is 00:04:05 support and trust in these institutions. But there's a lot of examples of liberal bias as well to give Republicans fought her for attack. Bottom line, whether you think NPR and PBS have a strong liberal bias, and there's plenty of evidence that they at least have some liberal bias, the bottom line is should taxpayers, me, you, federal taxpayers across the country, be funding these media outlets that many criticized do have this left bias, just overall when the country is in such massive debt. Right. I mean, well, it goes without saying that if we do fund them, that they should represent evenly and fairly the political views of the country, right? So that's why the liberal bias matters. There's plenty of news outlets to have liberal bias, and that is what it is. And of course, many with conservative bias. But if conservative and moderate Americans are paying for something, it should not be contrary to their political views. It should be down the middle and unbiased. So that's the first point. And then even if they are unbiased or moderate, Should they be taxpayer funding?

Starting point is 00:05:12 Yeah, I mean, that is the question. And it's not a small amount of money. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars. You know, PBS and NPR's executives testified before the lawmakers, of course, and took a lot of hard questions, you know. And, of course, the head of NPR has some really concerning comments about basically how truth can get in the way sometimes. And she had to answer for that. But basically they said, hey, this is actually going to hurt the local stations. the most. They're the ones who rely on this money.

Starting point is 00:05:43 It's not like it all just goes into some big pool, big bank account in DC. It's distributed to local affiliates. So their defense is that there's, you know, local news that's going to, needs to, these local stations are going to be the ones that suffer. But, you know, I don't know. It's interesting. Are we post radio? I mean, radio was so important for so long. It's hard to value things like radio and even, you know, television and whenever one is so heavily internet, especially, you know, the younger generation. I mean, I think Gen Z, when you talk to them, they don't have cable. And they, I'm not sure that they listen to the radio a lot. I mean, you get in your car and your phone automatically connects, right, to your car and you

Starting point is 00:06:25 listen to whatever on Apple Music or Spotify that you were listening to. So the relevance of these stations and platforms, while that Marjor Taylor Green's point about that did not get the most attention. It might be her strongest point. Yeah. So did it come up at this area? We're almost out of time, Casey, so please, they answer this. Did it come up? What would happen to PBS and NPR if they did lose all of this federal funding? I think they would find a way to cope, especially in PR. PBS might be in real trouble. They get more of their higher percentage of their funding from the government. NPR gets a lower percentage, but I think they could both survive. They would have to do cuts. Keep in mind that they are not majority federally funded. It's a minority of their funding comes from

Starting point is 00:07:06 the federal government. So they probably have to make cuts in different things. but I think both could survive without federal lowers. Thank you for joining us today, Casey. Listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecentersquare.com.

America's Talking - Trump Calls for Defunding NPR, PBS

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