(LifeSiteNews) — National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) have officially been defunded temporarily, as a budget bill passed in July went into effect on Wednesday. The law “clawed back” $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which then passes on that money to the two entities.
NPR praised itself for continuing to fight for “honest” and “rigorous journalism” and asking for donations to help the news outlet on “this historic day.”
“With your help, we’ll continue to bring you honest, rigorous journalism that doesn’t bend to the interests of shareholders,” the news outlet wrote on its Instagram. “We’ll still hold a microphone to American voices that might otherwise go unheard. And we’ll always stand behind our First Amendment right to a free press. ”
“Your donation on this historic day protects one of the last places where America comes together to hear itself, understand one another, and acknowledge that we belong to one always-changing story,” the Instagram post also stated.
PBS NewsHour made a similar statement. “Today marks the first day without federal funding for public media — a serious setback for the entire PBS system,” the outlet wrote on X. “Even so, our commitment to you hasn’t wavered. We remain steadfast in our responsibility to deliver reporting that is fair, accurate and independent.”
Although PBS received 15 percent of its budget from the federal government, it said it is laying off workers and cutting its spending by 21 percent. “PBS’s layoffs include 34 immediate pink slips, the closure of dozens of open jobs and cuts made earlier this summer when Congress axed funding for education programming,” the New York Post reported in early September.
President Donald Trump had called for defunding the outlets of taxpayer money. “At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage,” Trump stated in May. “No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the Government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize.”
Experts have regularly concluded that NPR and PBS slant to the political left and are biased against conservative views. NPR infamously declined to report on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, which provided evidence of the family’s questionable dealings.
The news outlets can also be biased in what stories they choose to cover. National Public Radio, for example, will write stories about “abortion rights” or “transgender rights,” according to Howard Husock, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a former board member of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “Unless they can serve a broad cultural and geographic cross-section of the nation, NPR and PBS don’t merit taxpayer support,” Husock wrote in National Review last year.
PBS also pushes leftist ideology even in children’s shows, including a homosexual “wedding” in popular show “Arthur.”
A March 2025 congressional hearing also exposed the leftism at NPR and PBS, as reported by LifeSiteNews. For example, all of NPR’s 87 editors are Democrats, while none are Republicans.
Former editor Uri Berliner previously explained the inherent bias at his former employer in a widely read essay for The Free Press. Berliner detailed how NPR pushed DEI ideology and frequently amplified anti-Donald Trump rumors that he colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, a favored hoax of the left.
“There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless — one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies,” Berliner said last April. “It’s almost like an assembly line.”