For years, American taxpayers have been asked to subsidize National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread radical, left-wing propaganda disguised as “news.” As a Member of Congress, I have fought adamantly for a government that spends less of your hard-earned money, tells you the truth, and doesn't incentivize the polluting of our culture with radical leftist ideology.
With President Trump's recent executive order calling for an end to the federal funding for NPR and PBS, Congress has a chance to do all three. President Trump is yet again following through on a campaign promise — this time to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.
NPR and PBS are perfect examples of what Reagan referred to as “the closest thing to eternal life on earth is a government program.” They were started decades ago when TV and radio stations were scarce, especially in rural areas. Now, literally thousands of radio stations and hundreds of TV stations are available to anyone with a cell phone or internet access.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit organization that delivers your tax money to NPR and PBS so they can ignore stories detailing the murder of Rachel Morin at the hands of an illegal alien, is a prime example. Rescinding their federal funding is a necessary start.
In a free-market society, news offerings of every political persuasion should be allowed to operate — but on their own dime, without the American taxpayer forced to subsidize propaganda that disparages conservatives and American values. This is why I have co-sponsored bills and introduced amendments in the Appropriations process to end this bias against hard-working Americans.
NPR’s bias against the truth is no secret -- it’s actually been on full display for years. In 2020, NPR refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, baselessly claiming there were “many, many red flags” and its “assertions don’t amount to much.” In 2022, NPR wrote that the U.S. Declaration of Independence was a document that “contained offensive language.” Throughout the COVID years, NPR dismissed the theory that COVID-19 originated in a lab — a conclusion now deemed likely by the FBI and Department of Energy.
In nearly every recent news story, NPR has shunned neutral, unbiased reporting in favor of an ideology that favors the Left. Even their former editor, Uri Berliner, made a chilling yet unsurprising discovery during an internal investigation regarding the ideological diversity of NPR's D.C. headquarters: In total, 87 registered Democrats held editorial positions throughout the organization. That number was zero for Republicans. You read that right — an organization that takes in hundreds of millions of dollars from Republicans across this country doesn't even have one voice representing conservative values on its editorial board. This is simply unacceptable.
If NPR's bias wasn't enough, PBS has become nothing more than a woke propaganda outlet peddling the same anti-conservative garbage. In 2017, PBS devoted a panel to what it “means to be woke” and “white privilege,” and a 2024 Media Research Center study found that PBS’s coverage of the Republican National Convention was 72% negative, while coverage of the Democratic National Convention was 88% positive.
When refusing to air contents of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, NPR wrote: “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.” Ironically, nearly the entirety of the left-wing propaganda coming out NPR and PBS is a “distraction” and “a waste of time to listeners and readers.”
We in Congress have a historic opportunity to end the taxpayer subsidization of left-wing bias. I implore my colleagues to do the right thing — for fiscal sanity and for the sake of unbiased journalism.
President Trump is right: It's time we defund NPR and PBS.
Congressman Andy Harris, M.D. is the House Freedom Caucus Chairman and the current House Chairman of the Agriculture, Rural Development, and Food and Drug Administration subcommittee on Appropriations. He represents Maryland's First Congressional District.
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