Congressional Republicans are casting a harsh spotlight on PBS and NPR, America’s biggest public media networks, on Wednesday in a government hearing, lobbing accusations of media bias against the media organizations.
Paula Kerger, the chief executive of PBS, and Katherine Maher, the chief executive of NPR, are testifying at the hearing, ominously titled “Anti-American Airwaves” and organized by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia.
Ms. Kerger and Ms. Maher are defending their organizations, which are under serious threat of seeing their federal funding eliminated by Congress and the Department of Government Efficiency, an effort led by Elon Musk.
Here’s the latest.
Partisan split: The hearing has unfolded along predictably partisan lines. Ms. Greene has laced into the leaders of PBS and NPR, deriding the public broadcasters as “radical left-wing echo chambers” that publish skewed news reports and indoctrinate children with programming that features transgender individuals and drag queens. Democratic committee members have mocked the hearing as a craven partisan exercise and tried to shift focus onto the Trump administration, including the revelation that top security officials inadvertently included the editor of The Atlantic on a group chat planning a military operation.
The witnesses: In addition to Ms. Kerger and Ms. Maher, the witnesses include Michael Gonzalez, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation who favors defunding public media, and Ed Ulman, the chief executive of Alaska Public Media, an NPR and PBS affiliate. Republicans are criticizing Ms. Maher about examples of perceived media bias at NPR and Ms. Kerger about PBS programming that some conservatives have found objectionable, including a digital segment called “Drag Queen Story Hour.” PBS and NPR’s leaders have been mostly calm and understated in the hearing, denying claims of bias and arguing that their stations are a crucial source of accurate information for Americans, particularly those who live in rural areas.
What’s at stake: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a government-funded company, received $535 million from the government for this year. Most of that money is spent on public radio and TV stations across the United States, with some of it going directly to NPR and PBS. In prepared testimony made available by Congress before the hearing, Ms. Maher and Ms. Kerger argued that money helps keep citizens across the United States informed and educated.
