Congressional Republicans laced into PBS and NPR on Wednesday, accusing the country’s biggest public media networks of institutional bias in a fiery hearing that represented the latest salvo against the American press by close allies of the Trump administration.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who organized the hearing — which she called “Anti-American Airwaves” — opened her remarks by deriding PBS and NPR as “radical left-wing echo chambers” that published skewed news reports and indoctrinated children with L.G.B.T.Q. programming.
The leaders of both PBS and NPR testified that those claims were untrue, arguing that their stations served as a crucial source of accurate information and educational programming for millions of Americans, even as the NPR chief executive acknowledged regrets for posting critical remarks about President Trump before she joined the broadcaster.
Democratic committee members mocked the proceedings as a cynical excuse by Republicans to air a familiar list of grievances against the news media. Several Democrats tried to shift focus to the Trump administration, citing the revelation that top security officials inadvertently included the editor of The Atlantic on a group chat planning a military operation.
Representative Stephen Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, said that Republican lawmakers would rather go after Big Bird than President Trump. “If shame was still a thing, this hearing would be shameful,” he said.
The hearing, organized by a new congressional subcommittee, Delivering on Government Efficiency, represented another front in an extraordinary two months of unrelenting attacks on the news media led by the Trump administration and its allies.
The White House has barred The Associated Press from attending certain events, broken tradition by hand-selecting the media outlets that can participate in the presidential press pool and sought to dismantle the federal agency that oversees Voice of America. The Federal Communications Commission has questioned the objectivity of major news organizations and ordered an investigation into PBS and NPR.
Public broadcasters, and the federal funds that support them, have been targeted by Republican lawmakers for decades. In 1969, Fred Rogers, the star of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” testified before Congress to protest cuts proposed by the Nixon administration.
On Wednesday, the chief executives of NPR and PBS defended their programming and their value to listeners and viewers. They emphasized the community journalism that covers local sports teams and crop prices — often in rural areas with few other broadcasters — and beloved children’s shows like “Clifford the Big Red Dog” and “Curious George.”
“There’s nothing more American than PBS,” said Paula Kerger, the chief executive of PBS.
Ms. Greene took an adversarial stance from the start. She grilled Katherine Maher, the chief executive of NPR, about social media posts that she had written before she became the leader of the public radio network, in which she described Mr. Trump as a “racist” and “sociopath.” Ms. Maher said that she regretted those posts and would not have written them today. “They represented a time when I was reflecting on something that the president had said rather than who he is,” she said.
Ms. Greene also repeated assertions that journalists from both broadcasters underplayed a story, during the 2020 campaign, about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Ms. Maher, who was not running NPR at the time, said that “our current editorial leadership thinks that was a mistake, as do I.”
Republicans also cited the experience of Uri Berliner, a veteran NPR business editor who argued in an essay last year that his organization had become infused with liberal bias. The essay, published by The Free Press, became a rallying cry for conservatives eager to strip the broadcaster of federal funds; Mr. Berliner later resigned.
Asked on Wednesday how he felt about the day’s hearing, Mr. Berliner replied: “I don’t believe NPR should be defunded. But I think it should turn down federal support and openly acknowledge and embrace its progressive orientation.”
The hearing swung wildly between Democrats expressing ardent support for children’s programming and dark pronouncements by Republicans about the “propaganda” and “communist agenda” ostensibly espoused by public media, which Ms. Greene accused of “grooming children.” But there were moments of levity.
Representative Greg Casar, a Texas Democrat, held up a sign that read, “Fire Elon, Save Elmo,” referring to Elon Musk, the billionaire businessman who is leading Mr. Trump’s effort to shrink the size of the federal government.
At another point, Representative Robert Garcia, a Democrat from California, sarcastically asked Ms. Kerger if Elmo was a member of the Communist Party. (“Well, he is a puppet,” she replied. “But no.”) Mr. Garcia also asked if Cookie Monster, the “Sesame Street” character, was “silencing pro-cookie voters.”
“Cookies are a sometimes food,” Ms. Kerger responded.
Representative James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, recalled relying in his youth on local public radio for news while working as a farmer in a rural district of his state. But today, he said, “I don’t even recognize NPR anymore.” He asked why public media deserved the same level of government funding given the plethora of digital news outlets now available to Americans regardless of where they live.
The government-backed Corporation for Public Broadcasting received $535 million in public funds for this year; most of that money is spent on public radio and TV stations across the country, with a small portion of it going directly to NPR and PBS. Ms. Maher said that NPR produced “unbiased, nonpartisan, fact-based reporting” and that it had 43 million weekly users around the country. Ms. Kerger described PBS and its programming and local news coverage as part of the community fabric.
The Pew Research Center said on Monday that a survey this month showed that 43 percent of adults believed NPR and PBS should continue to receive federal funding; 24 percent said Congress should remove those funds; and 33 percent said they were not sure.
Toward the end of the hearing, Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, cited Mr. Rogers’ 1969 testimony before Congress, arguing that quality educational programming was a cause that should transcend political differences.
“Mr. Rogers understood what we’ve forgotten in this country,” Mr. Khanna said. “Some things are more valuable than money at a time where a country is polarized. I wish we had a little more empathy and caring, and that’s not a partisan issue.”
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