Republicans and Democrats fought over taxpayer funding for National Public Radio (NPR) on May 8 during a congressional hearing with the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
The hearing comes after former NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner published an April 9 op-ed criticizing the company for allegedly prioritizing Democratic and left-leaning viewpoints and story angles while dismissing conservative positions. Republicans were calling for an end to public funding for NPR, while Democrats largely dismissed the hearing as a “waste of time” and defended the broadcasting company and its public funding.
Republicans invited NPR CEO Katherine Maher to testify before the committee, but she declined, saying that May 8 was also the date of NPR’s annual board meeting. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) chastised Republicans for scheduling the hearing on the same day, calling it bad faith because the board meeting had been publicly posted “for at least a year.”
Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) criticized NPR for suppressing stories like the Hunter Biden laptop report from the New York Post over alleged concerns it could help former President Donald Trump win the 2020 election. He said the hearing’s purpose was to decide whether Congress should use federal taxpayer dollars “to promote one ideology at the exclusion of others.”
“If NPR wants to create one-sided ideological content that marginalizes a substantial portion of Americans, they can fight it out with other media companies for market share and pay for it on their own dime, not the taxpayers’,” Mr. Griffith said.
Democrats like Mr. Pallone and Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) lambasted the hearing as a “waste of committee time” and instead blamed “right-wing media” for having a worse partisan bias.
Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) pointed out that her delegation’s concerns lie with NPR’s taxpayer funding, not solely its alleged political bias.
“If my taxpayer dollars and my constituents’ taxpayer dollars are paying for NPR, then it should be unbiased. That’s the point. The Democratic colleagues say well, Fox News is biased. Well, guess what? CNN and MSNBC are biased, too, but the point is they’re not publicly funded. That’s the reason we’re here. We’re here because we’re talking about taxpayer dollars,” she said.
Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) argued that if NPR had been “truly objective,” there wouldn’t have been a hearing. As a congressional leader, he says he has a responsibility to oversee how taxpayer dollars fund government agencies.
If the public wishes to support NPR, he said, they should do so voluntarily.
Craig Aaron, co-CEO of Free Press and Free Press Action, defended NPR’s role in providing local news coverage on its various regional affiliates as thousands of local newspapers have shuttered their doors over the past 20 years. He said defunding NPR won’t fix problems of alleged political bias among the company’s leadership.
“Threats of defunding don’t just harm NPR executives; they endanger the work of more than 1000 local radio stations providing essential information to communities large and small,” he said.
Howard Husock, senior fellow in domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said NPR’s coverage is not sufficiently “reflecting America” and its diverse views, but said NPR should be “incentivized to serve a broader audience in new and vital ways” instead of being defunded.
He said NPR, by its admission, gets almost 31 percent of its revenue in fees paid by local radio stations that broadcast the company’s news coverage.
“Rather than simply getting revenue from local stations, NPR should look to them for journalism. Stories that surprise … that will tell us about the range of dramas, conflicts, issues, celebrations, and communities across the country. The local stations will provide not the fees but the news itself,” Mr. Husock said.
Mr. Pallone said many rural communities rely on public radio as their “last line of defense against growing news deserts” where there’s a lack of any local newspapers covering their cities and towns.
There was also disagreement over how much public funding NPR receives. Mr. Pallone claimed that in 2022, NPR’s taxpayer funding was less than 1 percent of its total budget. However, Mr. Griffith pointed out that its public funding is more complicated.
“Although NPR receives only 1 percent in direct federal grants, local radio stations may use any portion of their federal grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to pay for NPR’s membership dues and programming fees, and that figure is roughly 30 percent of NPR’s revenue,” he said.
