NPR CEO Katherine Maher and PBS President Paula Kerger took turns testifying in front of the Republican-led Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) subcommittee, but it was mostly Maher who was cross-examined by Republicans like a dogged prosecutor cross-examining a squirming defendant.
That’s because Maher has left a trail of damning evidence, such as Marxist-sounding social media posts and speeches that criticize free speech, which make the job easy for Republicans on the committee.
“Do you believe America believes in black plunder and white democracy?” Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX), asked the PBS boss during his time.
“I…don’t…believe that…sir,” Maher, shaking her head but looking guilty, answered.
“You tweeted that in reference to a book you were reading at the time called The Case for Reparations,” Gill, holding a copy of Maher’s tweet, reminded her.
“I don’t think I’ve ever read that book, sir,” Maher, her eyes now closed, said.
“You tweeted about it,” Gill, holding the copy higher for Maher, and for everyone else, to see.
Running from truth and 'late-stage capitalism'
In 2022, when she was leading Wikipedia, Maher led a TED Talk in which she bragged Wikipedia was learning to deal with the hot-button issues of politics and religion by not obsessing over what is true.
“Our reverence for the truth,” she opined from the stage, “might be a distraction that's getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
Farther back, in a 2019 tweet, Maher wrote that she is "so done with late-stage capitalism," an obvious Marxist reference. Despite her distaste for capitalism, Maher was earning nearly $800,000 a year at Wikipedia two years later.
At one point Maher caused the audience behind her to laugh after Rep. Jim Jordan asked her a water-is-wet question about bias at NPR.
“Congressman, I have never seen any instance of bias, of political bias, determining editorial decisions,” she replied.
Jordan and other Republicans on the committee also cited the criticism of NPR’s political bias from Uri Berliner, a former NPR editor. With a motive of balanced journalism, the 25-year veteran at NPR wrote a scathing Free Press article that pointed out NPR’s Washington, D.C. office has 87 employees registered as Democrats and none one is registered as a Republican.
MRC provided pile of evidence
An expert on the left-wing bias at NPR and PBS is Tim Graham, of the Media Research Center, who has documented their hatred of Republicans and conservatives since he started at MRC in 1989.
Graham, who witnessed the hearing in person Wednesday, watched congressional staffers bring in a six-foot-high stack of MRC articles and research papers, much like a prosecutor’s evidence being waved around in front of the jury.
Graham says MRC was proud to send its documents to the House DOGE Committee that were then cited by lawmakers during the hearing.
“We were pleased to be cited in some questions,” he says, “but the answers were simply bizarre.”
In one example cited at the hearing, an MRC analyst watched PBS programs over a five-month period during the summer of 2023. During the that MRC documented the term “extreme right” 162 times in news segments but “extreme left” was used only six times.
Some of the MRC analysis dates back to the 1980s. Those older examples weren’t cited, Graham says, but the point was to show how far back the anti-conservative bias has been happening.
Even though Maher received most of the grilling from the committee, Graham recalls that Kerger was asked about MRC’s analysis of PBS content. She told the committee she wasn’t familiar with the criticism, which didn’t surprise Graham.
“They are more concerned with serving their liberal-bubble audience,” Graham says. “It's quite clear from watching their programming.”
A half-billion annual budget
In the case of both news outlets, many conservatives view them like a government-approved pickpocket. Staffed with left-wing reporters and editors, and not one Republican on payroll, they take money from politically conservative taxpayers but then ridicule and criticize their beliefs in news reports and commentaries.
How much public funding NPR and PBS receive annually is a moving target. In the case of NPR, its defenders say it receives only about 1% of its funding from public tax dollars. That defense is a little dishonest, however, since a Politico story points out the local radio stations that broadcast NPR programs receive about 10% of their funding from the federal government.
The Politico story said both PBS and NPR are funded through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB. That agency gets approximately $500 million annually from Congress that is distributed to both public news outlets.
A spokesman for PBS told Politico about 16% of its funding comes directly from the federal government.
Like a closing argument in front of a jury, Heritage Foundation senior fellow Michael Gonzalez urged the DOGE committee to end the flow of taxpayers' money to public broadcasting. A nation that is $36 trillion in debt, he testified, should not be paying for news coverage that tells half the country to "get lost" because of its political beliefs.
"With their egregious bias, NPR and PBS have violated the public trust," he said. "Public media needs to be defunded and the CPB needs to be dissolved."
