NPR and PBS Chiefs Defend Themselves During DOGE Grilling

Marjorie Taylor Greene wrapped up Wednesday’s DOGE subcommittee hearing on federal funding for public media by warning about the “propaganda” airing on NPR and PBS, content “so radical,” she said, that “it is brainwashing the American people and, more significantly, American children, with un-American, anti-family, pro-crime fake news.”

Greene’s concluding screed could’ve been expected for a hearing billed as follows: “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.” The Georgia representative would eventually call “for the complete and total defund and dismantling of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” but not before NPR’s Katherine Maher and PBS’s Paula Kerger faced a litany of questions on everything from coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop and COVID’s origins to old tweets and content featuring drag performers.

Democrats, meanwhile, questioned why Congress was focusing on the likes of Sesame Street in the midst of shocking revelations that top Trump administration officials were sharing and discussing attack plans in a Signal chat that mistakenly included a journalist. Representative Stephen Lynch slammed the GOP House majority for failing to “hold Trump and Trump’s administration accountable,” adding: “They would rather post up against Big Bird than deal with that.” Representative Jasmine Crockett used her time to challenge her Republican colleagues, saying, “The idea that you want to shut down everybody that is not Fox News is bullshit.”

The hearing was charged from the start, with Greene flanked by a picture of drag performer Lil Miss Hot Mess—whom she called a “monster”—who she claimed had appeared in PBS programming. Kerger said the performer was actually not featured in any of the broadcaster’s “kid shows,” explaining that the image accompanying Greene was from a digital project made in partnership with PBS’s local New York City station and the city’s education department. That explanation was not satisfactory for Greene, who circled back to the drag performer in her closing statements, playing a clip of them for the subcommittee, calling it “repulsive,” and deeming the performer a “child predator.” Greene leveled the accusation that Kerger “lied under oath” when she said the performer wasn’t featured in PBS’s children’s programming, with Greene saying that the played clip had aired on the station in April 2021 and later been mysteriously removed. “I wonder why,” Greene taunted.

Maher was interrogated significantly more than Kerger, on concerns about NPR’s coverage as well as her personal social media and appearance track record. GOP representative Tim Burchett questioned Maher about having called Donald Trump a “racist” and “fascist” on social media. Maher told the committee, “I regret those tweets. I would not tweet them again today. They represented a time where I was reflecting on something that, I believe, the president had said, rather than who he is.”

Maher also acknowledged that NPR had made some slipups prior to her tenure as CEO and president, specifically when it came to coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Regarding the lack of coverage, she said that the organization’s “current editorial leadership believes that that was a mistake, as do I,” adding that NPR should have followed the story more “aggressively.” As for reporting on COVID’s origins, Maher told the subcommittee that the new evidence related to the Wuhan lab-leak theory “is worthy of coverage, and [we] have covered it.”

Former NPR business editor Uri Berliner’s op-ed in the Free Press last year, which accused the news organization of being closed-minded, was invoked multiple times by Republican members, with Greene calling the essay “powerful.” Greene argued that “NPR treated Berliner like a political dissident in the old Soviet Union. He was driven out of the organization and forced to resign. Sounds like Communism.” She laid blame on Maher, describing her as the “ringleader” of Berliner’s ouster.

“Certainly a media platform can have whatever opinion it wants in a free society. The question for us today as a committee is whether or not the taxpayers should be forced to pay for this kind of thing,” Representative Michael Cloud said, questioning the continued relevance of public media.

Republican lawmakers have long sought to eliminate federal funding for public broadcasters, with Newt Gingrich failing in his attempt to do so in 1995. Recent calls for defunding public media have reached a fever pitch under the current administration, with even the White House calling to slash payouts. On Tuesday, when asked whether he would be interested in defunding the organizations, Trump said he would “love to do that.” He argued that they have been “very biased,” adding that it’s “the kind of money that’s being wasted.” The president, however, doesn’t have the power to cut government funding allocated to public media, as Congress earmarks money for this purpose.

NPR says that, on average, it only receives about 1% of its annual operating budget from the federal government, via grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which was appropriated $535 million last year for the government, and other agencies. However, member stations receive an average of 10% of their funding from the CPB, with 30% of NPR’s budget then coming from local stations paying to license national content. As for PBS, the amount of federal funding varies slightly from year to year, but it currently sits at around 16%, according to the organization.

On Wednesday, Kerger argued that many of PBS’s small and medium-size stations would struggle to exist without these appropriations, specifically mentioning a station that receives “50% of their budget…from the federal government.” The PBS chief executive voiced concern that those stations simply might “not survive” if funding were pulled. “This would be an existential moment for them,” she added.