Title: NPR and PBS in the Congressional Hot Seat

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. It was NPR and PBS's turn to be put on the Doge and Marjorie Taylor Greene Oversight Committee hot seat yesterday as they called the chief executives of the two networks to a Congressional hearing where the conclusion was apparently determined before the event. It was called Anti-American Airwaves. Obviously, I'm an interested party. WNYC says about 4% of our budget comes from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.The station describes this as a relatively modest but still very meaningful revenue source and says the loss of government funding would significantly impact our ability to serve our city and state.

I'm told that some of that funding is in grants for specific initiatives such as our capital bureau expansion, which allowed us to hire another reporter to cover statewide issues, cover Albany, basically, coverage that we share with other public radio stations across New York State, as well as the Tri State Music Collaborative which is a partnership between our sister station WQXR and other music format public radio stations WBGO, WSHU and WSUV that air the non commercial music formats of classical, jazz, and adult alternative. With that disclosure, I'll do my best to characterize the arguments on both sides.

Republicans mostly accused the networks of liberal bias and of grooming kids to become trans. They also made the case that the government can't afford to fund public broadcasting anymore, and the many streams available on. The Internet now make the need for taxpayer-funded public stations obsolete in the rural areas where they have been essential. They also raise the investigation by Trump's FCC chair into whether corporate underwriting spots on public radio and television veer into commercials that are prohibited to them by law.

Democrats mostly push back on the liberal bias charge as just another way the Trump administration is trying to weaken all legitimate news organizations that cover them. The public subsidy is only about $1.50. per person each year. Focusing on this as essential to government efficiency is mostly irrelevant that nonprofit public media is still valuable to a society dominated by corporate media where the profit motive distorts the news, and now social media mis and disinformation. The stations do still matter in rural and lower population areas that don't have a lot of other options, and that the grooming accusation is absurd.

The two CEOs said they are following the guidelines for the line between underwriting and commercials. In addition to the network executives, there was a supportive witness from Alaska Public Radio and a critical one from the Heritage Foundation later this year. This is why it matters. Members of Congress will weigh the competing arguments and interests and decide if public funding will be maintained for future fiscal years, and they'll decide on whether there are any sanctions over the way underwriting is handled.

I'll play a few clips, and then we'll talk to Bill Grueskin from the Columbia Journalism Review, and you can call or text at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. One of the headlines from the hearing getting a lot of coverage in conservative media, especially, was NPR CEO Katherine Maher's admission that they should have covered Hunter Biden's laptop when it was first revealed by the New York Post in October of 2020, just before the election that year. Here's that moment from the hearing.

Katherine Maher: Thank you, Congressman. First of all, I do want to say that NPR acknowledges that we were mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner. Our current editorial leadership-

Congressman: Wuhan.

Katherine Maher: -we recognize that we were reporting at the time, but we acknowledge that the new CIA evidence is worthy of coverage and have covered it.

Brian Lehrer: Wuhan in that clip refers to the lab leak theory of where COVID came from. Here's a minute from when Congresswoman Taylor Greene raises the corporate underwriting issue, first to Katherine Maher from NPR, then to Paula Kerger from PBS.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Ms. Maher, are you familiar with Section 399B of the Communications Act? It prohibits non-commercial education broadcast stations, NCEs, from airing commercials on behalf of for-profit entities. The FCC recently opened an investigation into the underwriting announcements and related policies of NPR and PBS. Does NPR air commercials for for-profit entities? Ms. Maher? Yes or no?

Katherine Maher: Madam Chair, we are in full compliance with the FCC's inquiry, and we'll continue to cooperate.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: I remind you you're under oath, and violations of the Communications Act comes with a fine up to $10,000 and possibly up to a year in prison. Does PBS air for for-profit commercials, Ms. Kerger?

Paula Kerger: We air underwriting announcements, and we believe we are in full compliance with the FCC, and we look forward to delivering the material required part of this investigation.

Brian Lehrer: Now, here is Taylor Greene asking Kerger from PBS about programming the congresswoman had characterized as grooming.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Ms. Kerger, using taxpayer subsidies, PBS funded Independent Lens to make documentaries for part of your programming. In 2016, Real Boy was aired about a trans teen navigating adolescent sobriety and the ramification of his gender identity. In 2022, the same series aired Our League, in which a trans woman comes to her old school Ohio bowling league in a story about transition. Then in 2024, Racist Trees was aired telling a story of how in Palm Springs, a Black neighborhood fights to remove a divisive wall of trees. Do you think PBS needs to fund ridiculous material such as this that the taxpayers are having to pay for?

Paula Kerger: These are documentary films that are point-of-view pieces that are part of our primetime schedule for adults.

Brian Lehrer: Here's an example of a Democrat mocking the whole hearing as an absurd partisan witch hunt. He held up a picture of Elmo from Sesame Street and asked the head of PBS this

Democrat: Now, Ms. Kerger, the American people want to know, is Elmo now or has he ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States? Yes or no?

Paula Kerger: No.

Democrat: Now, are you sure, Ms. Kerger? Because he's obviously red.

Paula Kerger: He is a puppet but no.

Brian Lehrer: Some excerpts there from the Doge and House Oversight Committee hearing on public broadcasting. With us now is Bill Grueskin from the Columbia Journalism Review. He's also on the faculty at the Columbia Journalism School. His bio page says he has previously worked as founding editor of a newspaper on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation, city editor of the Miami Herald, deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, and an executive editor of Bloomberg News. Bill, thank you for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Bill Grueskin: Hi, Brian, thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: First, just from your own observation of the hearing, would you like to add or correct anything about the basic arguments you heard on either side of the aisle or from the witnesses?

Bill Grueskin: I think my favorite clip of it was when Katherine Maher mentioned the phrase editorial standards, and Comer took that to mean that she was talking about broadcasting editorials on NPR. There was this whole disconnect because I think that was indicative of the larger chasm here between what NPR and PBS executives say they're doing versus what the Republican congresspeople seem to think is going on in public broadcasting. They seem to portray it as a cabal of progressive journalists out there promoting their agenda and they don't really quite understand what it is NPR and PBS do.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get into some more of the specifics, but I'm curious if you think this hearing mattered in any way to the eventual outcome on federal funding. For one thing, I'm not seeing much prominent coverage of it, maybe because of the Signal chat story being so dominant, but maybe it was a tree that fell in the forest and there was noise. I don't know if the hearing moves the needle in any way or if the members of Congress are pre-baked on this one one way or another and yesterday's Hearing was just theater. Do you have an impression?

Bill Grueskin: It seems to me it was a lot of theater, as you say, Brian. As you know, between Signal and Trump's new tariffs on cars and God knows what else was going on in the world yesterday, this seemed to get buried. Most of the headlines I saw did focus, especially in conservative media, on Maher acknowledging, and I'm not sure appropriately so, but acknowledging that there should have been more coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story. That was a very complicated story. It came just two to three weeks before the 2020 election.

There were lots of doubts about that from lots of mainstream outlets, as well as, even you might remember, the New York Post, which broke the story. One of the reporters didn't even want their byline on it because they were so hesitant about it. That whole thing getting resurrected the way it was, it didn't really accurately portray what was going on in October of 2020 in the media.

Brian Lehrer: I was going to get into the complexities of that story too, and ask you why you think Ms. Maher, the head of NPR, went there. Maybe she made the headline she was hoping to make and took the heat on that aspect so other things don't get so discussed because it's relatively harmless at this point. I don't know. But I also thought, to the point that you just made, that it's important to look at that issue in context. I was looking back at a New York Times article from last June when Hunter Biden was convicted of illegally buying a gun, based in part on what was on that laptop, which was originally given to the New York Post by Rudy Giuliani. I'm going to read from that article.

Mr. Giuliani said he had given the laptop to The Post because either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out. That's a quote from Giuliani. To my eye, Bill, he's saying he didn't want journalists to add context and investigation so close to the election. The New York Post would just carry the agenda.

Bill Grueskin: Exactly. And obviously a lot of this was in the context of what happened in the 2016 election with the leaks that ran on WikiLeaks, with the late letter from James Comer at the time.

Brian Lehrer: Comey.

Bill Grueskin: I'm sorry, Comey. I'm getting Comey and Comer mixed up. Yes, James Comey, who was the FBI director at the time. There was understandably a lot of hesitation, especially once you had Rudy Giuliani's imprimatur on this thing, for a news organization to stake its credibility and reputation on what was a fairly dodgy story.

Brian Lehrer: Another thing from that Times article last summer, it says The Wall Street Journal, which, like The Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch, was approached in 2020 by Mr. Trump's allies, but passed uncovering the laptop.

Bill, I don't think you were still at The Wall Street Journal then, but does the fact that they passed on it indicate that if journalism as a whole made a mistake by not taking it more seriously from the get-go, NPR was not some ideological outlier, but in the mainstream of what seemed like good judgment by most to be skeptical of an October surprise unvetted political release like that.

Bill Grueskin: I mean, because it was a very hard thing to confirm. Look at journalists get tips all the time and what good journalists do is once you get a tip, you do everything. You can to gather evidence, you triangulate your evidence, and then you try to present it to your readers or viewers in a way that establishes as much credibility as you can give it while being transparent about what you don't know.

In a story like this, there was so much that journalists didn't know at that time, and that accounted for a lot of the hesitation. I also think a lot of this is the transferred anger from how social media was handling the story. You might remember Facebook and what was called Twitter at the time were both downplaying links to the story. And that's an entirely different argument from whether NPR or The Wall Street Journal or PBS or any other mainstream outlet should have been covering it in a certain way. I think there's a lot of anger among conservatives about how social media outlets handled it. Katherine Maher is taking a little bit of heat for that as well.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a text that says, "I grew up in rural farming Nebraska, where Nebraska Public Radio is constantly on in my family's farming equipment as they had ag commodity prices that we could only get through the radio when out in the field. It was and is a great public service for rural citizens." To that point, Bill, one of the reasons we thought you'd be a good observer today is because of your varied journalism background, including not just The Wall Street Journal, but rural South Dakota.

I think the politics of the federal funding might depend on how much some Republican members from rural areas still see their local public broadcasters as crucial services in the way that listener described in the text. Those Republican members have saved public funding in past attempts to defund. Do you have any take on whether the need or the politics are changing?

Bill Grueskin: Yes, and I actually think maybe the most effective witness yesterday weren't the heads of PBS or NPR, but it was the gentleman, I believe his name is Ed Ullman. He's the president of Alaska Public Media, who spoke quite eloquently and in great detail about the public service that public radio performs in a place like Alaska, where you have lots of communities that are separated by hundreds of miles where you don't necessarily have good broadcast ability and the kind of information they put out.

Interestingly, since you mentioned my time in Standing Rock, this has been an issue in North Dakota as well. They just had a bill in the state legislature that actually passed the state house. Keep in mind, the legislature there is very heavily GOP, very red. It passed the state house that would have prohibited the transfer of federal funds from the corporation from public broadcasting to any local outlets. It came up before the state senate last week and it got voted down on a 41 to 6 vote, which means that, at least for the time being, the funding for public broadcast in North Dakota, it amounts about $2.9 million a year, is still intact.

It's worth noting that the governor, who was also Republican, had kept that 2.9 million in the state budget. There's clearly a real appetite for the kind of local news that people in underserved areas really need. This comes, obviously, also in the context of the evisceration of local news outlets in small, medium, and large communities all around America. The newspaper that I founded back in 1977 no longer exists and lot of the surrounding newspapers are on their last legs as well.

There are certain things that the commercial market just doesn't provide anymore, and one of those is local journalism. There are basically two ways of addressing that. One is through nonprofit journalism sites you get look like Texas Tribune or the Colorado Sun, but you also need some kind of public sector financing as well. That's where this comes in.

Brian Lehrer: Craig in Yonkers, you're on WNYC. Hello, Craig.

Craig: Hi. Thanks so much for having me and covering such an important topic. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but freedom of the press is one of the defining characteristics of a democracy, also it's certainly a right of freedom of speech as well. We have a constitution that even supports this. Instead of cutting funding to companies like NPR and PBS, perhaps the government should think you guys are so great, they should give you even more money. That's what my thoughts are. I hope you can add to that.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Craig. I think what he implies there or states at the beginning of his call is that maybe one of the most questionable aspects of what the government is doing, and this was from one of the clips we played, suggest a broader attempt to destroy NPR and PBS as news organizations, not just save the taxpayer money or try to establish that this or that story or this or that, whatever leans left. I mean, that's the investigation into corporate underwriting's point.

I think the whole point of inserting that in the first place, a few decades ago, corporate underwriting was to encourage more private funding to allow for less government funding and it has these rules, you can say the name of your company and your product, but you can't make any claims about them, like in an actual commercial, or you can't have a call to action like buy this product.

Basically, they can just say who they are and what they do, and that they help support public broadcasting. Going after that private source of funding makes me much more suspicious that they're just trying to kill off a news organization than if they were debating federal funding alone. Is that aspect of all of this on your radar at all?

Bill Grueskin: Yes, and I think you could even pull your lens back even more broadly, that it's part of a broad and concerted and quite a transparent effort by the Trump administration to undermine independent journalism all around the United States. There have been efforts for many years to deprive the Corporation for Public Broadcasting of its funding. This is not necessarily new.

I think what's happening now is it is getting more jet fuel from the Trump administration's overall attitude towards independent journalism, which is whether they do it by techniques as ridiculous as keeping the Associated Press out of the White House press pool because they won't refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Whether it's because of these manifestly inane lawsuits that they've been filing against the news organizations from the Des Moines Register to ABC and CBS, whether it's what they've been doing to Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

I mean, there's just so many data points here in such a short period of time that it's impossible not to see this as a concerted effort to undermine independent journalism. Sometimes that comes in the form of NPR and PBS, and sometimes it comes in the form of mainstream for-profit news organizations.

Brian Lehrer: I think that the Voice of America story not covered that much. A lot of listeners probably haven't even heard that. If they've heard about the AP, if they've heard about the lawsuits against some of the commercial networks, also federally funded media, Voice of America, which exists precisely to pipe legit news into countries with no free press.

It looks to me it's the legit coverage of Trump administration controversies and there are so many controversies that mainstream news organizations, obviously, are covering, no matter how people come down on them with their opinions. But maybe they want more than previous administrations have wanted just the administration line to be piped around the world, and so all legit news organizations are under fire, even one like that, that is also government funded but serves to promote democracy globally, which is not their priority right now.

Bill Grueskin: Right, and in some countries, the Voice of America is one of the only independent sources of journalism that the citizens in that country are able to get. In a way, it's analogous to what they're trying to do to NPR and PBS for the listeners and viewers who live in communities that no longer have strong local independent journalism outlets.

Brian Lehrer: This is the dominant thing that's coming from a lot of listeners on our text thread listener, Trump is killing all info attack here, same as on universities, and goes on from there. Here's an interesting thought that maybe we'll end with from a listener. Listener writes, "I'm a supporter of both NPR and PBS. I think by nature," and this goes to the debate of over, are you left wing or not? "By nature," the listener writes, "The journalism and programming are progressive, but progressive is not a dirty word.

In the age of disinformation and unreality emanating from the White House, the goal is to offer listeners, audiences full stories and allow them to make their own assessment. Without spin, the only agenda is to provide an alternative to most for-profit media sources." This goes to something I've heard some journalists discuss and debate. I wonder if you at Columbia Journalism Review have ever engaged this or heard journalists discussing that. In a certain way, journalism is inherently a liberal pursuit because what you're trying to do is hold powerful people to account. What you're trying to do is, as some legendary journalists said, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Bill Grueskin: Right.

Brian Lehrer: Not because you're against the comfortable, but because those are the things that society needs to discuss. Your thoughts.

Bill Grueskin: I would push back on that a little bit because I think-- I grew up in Colorado Springs, which at the time, was, I think, rated the second or third most conservative city in America. I spent years in North Dakota, spent years in Tampa, and South Florida that were either purple or red at the time. I have a lot of good friends who were conservatives.

From my experience, at least up until the last couple of years, conservatives valued good journalism as much as liberals or Democrats did, and particularly when that journalism was even handed and when it did take on Democratic politicians as well as the Republican ones, when it would poke holes in things that progressives might like as well. I would agree that most newsrooms tend to be populated by people who are probably more likely to vote for Kamala Harris than Donald Trump. But that in and of itself doesn't mean those journalists can't do independent work.

I think what's happened in the last few years, and certainly ever since Trump came on the scene, but really, it started with Fox News and Roger Ailes, is there's this sense that independent journalism has to be tilted against the Republicans and against conservatives. I think that that makes it incumbent upon all journalists to be as even-handed as possible. That doesn't mean simply giving 50% of every story to both sides, but to take on powerful people wherever they are, whether they're in the White House or in corporate suites or in local government. That's what good journalists do.

Brian Lehrer: With thoughts on what good journalists do and should do, we leave it with Bill Grueskin, professor at the Columbia Journalism School and a former senior editor at The Wall Street Journal and Miami Herald, among other things, offering analysis of the hearing yesterday. Thank you for joining us.

Bill Grueskin: I appreciate it, Brian, thank you.

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