Analysis: How bipartisan support for public media unraveled in the Trump era

When President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke after signing the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, he marveled at technologies like radio and television and satellites, and echoed the words of Samuel Morse in sending the first telegraph message.

"What hath man wrought?" Johnson asked. "And how will man use his inventions?"

Johnson offered an answer to his own question: "While we work every day to produce new goods and to create new wealth, we want most of all to enrich man's spirit. That is the purpose of this act."

The years that followed brought forth the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS and NPR, largely with bipartisan support. It also led to a framework of laws intended to ensure those organizations were protected from political pressure.

CPB began funneling an ongoing subsidy to hundreds of public media outlets across the country. Out of that system came original programs that have become familiar to all corners of the country: Sesame Street. PBS NewsHour. All Things Considered. Tiny Desk. NOVA. Antiques Roadshow. Wait Wait…Don't Tell Me!

A poster at a March 26 rally to protect funding for U.S. public broadcasters, PBS and NPR outside the NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C.

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They were on the air, online, and on platforms that Johnson could never have envisioned.

All helped foster a sense there was something for everyone.

That seeming consensus, under sustained attack, was shattered this week.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have passed legislation on a narrow, party-line basis to eliminate all federal funding for public broadcasting for the next two years. That's $1.1 billion previously approved by the Republican-led Congress and President Donald Trump. The reversal is notionally due to the need to cut funds to help pay for new Republican priorities, including an expansion of immigration enforcement and extension of Trump's prior tax cuts.

Yet Trump had campaigned on retribution and made the news media a core element of his grievance. Public broadcasting has offered a ready target, given the government funding, and he has repeatedly claimed NPR and PBS demonstrate ideological bias.

Last week, the president ramped up pressure on wavering GOP lawmakers, posting, "Any Republican that votes to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or Endorsement."

Another Johnson — Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana — said on Tuesday the time had come to turn off federal largesse to public media. "This is, in our view, the misuse of taxpayer dollars," he said. "They're not objective. They pretend to be so."

"In its origination, NPR and PBS might have made some sense," Johnson added. "But it shouldn't be subsidized by taxpayers."

Without federal subsidy, some stations will wither

While NPR receives just a small amount of direct federal government support — less than 2% of its annual revenue — PBS and local stations rely on it far more heavily. For public radio stations, federal funding makes up, on average, 8% to 10% of their budgets; for PBS and its member stations, the figure stands on average at about 15%.

But that level varies widely.

Executives at small stations — especially those that serve rural or tribal audiences — warn they could be devastated or even knocked off the air when aid from Washington fails to arrive at the start of the fiscal year in October.

Tri-State Public Media in southwest Indiana puts a special emphasis on agricultural coverage and has a show dedicated to food and farming given the importance of that industry in its region. It already is suffering from a loss of funding from the state government. About a third of its revenue comes from Washington.

Tim Black, the chief executive, says the loss of federal funds would be "pretty darn close to being catastrophic."

He says the station can drain its financial reserves and sell off its headquarters to survive another year or two. After that, it may go off the air.

Others are preparing for a smaller, scrappier future.

"I came here because what we do, we do for free. We try to reach everyone regardless of their ability to pay," says Sue Rogers, the executive vice president and general manager of WXXI, the NPR and PBS member stations in Rochester, N.Y.

"It will test every single shred of creativity we have to continue to try to serve our mission, which we will do," Rogers says.

Yet she warns that public media stations won't be able to do all they do now. 

"We know that we can do it as best we can, but there will be communities left out and there will be issues uncovered and there will be much lost, in my opinion," Rogers says. And she points to the $545 million saved annually — less than one-hundredth of 1% of the U.S. government's multi-trillion-dollar annual budget.

"All for such a tiny — really, $1.60 a person in this country per year — for a tiny commitment of dollars," Rogers says.

Intensifying scrutiny on national networks

Beyond the loss of the direct federal subsidy, NPR and PBS executives say privately they expect to feel the ripple effects of budget crises at member stations. While the stations receive the vast majority of federal funds, they use a significant amount of that money to pay the networks for the right to run their programs. Yet it will be hard for many of them to go without: Those national programs serve audiences throughout much of the day and help propel stations' fundraising drives.

Twenty years ago in our first in-person conversation, I asked then-NPR Chief Executive Ken Stern whether the network should forgo the $1 million subsidy it received at the time in order to escape periodic political flare-ups. Then-President George W. Bush's appointee as CPB board chairperson had accused PBS of liberal bias and was pressuring the network over specific programming choices.

It was an off-the-record, get-to-know-you chat, though Stern doesn't mind my reflecting on it here all these years later.

Stern told me it was important that NPR receive some federal funds so it would have "a place at the table" and could advocate for public radio stations.

On Wednesday, I asked him to revisit his thinking.

"It worked until it didn't," Stern says now.

Stern says the local stations always enjoyed more favor from lawmakers — even conservatives — than the national networks. "Even today, I suspect that, left to their own devices, many Republicans would still vote for funding," Stern says. "It's just that now every vote is a political loyalty test, unfortunately."

While a few Republican senators voiced support for local member stations over the past week, nearly all condemned NPR, including Maine's Susan Collins, often considered the most liberal Republican in the Senate.

Journalism and government funding in the U.S. are "incompatible"

Six years after my conversation with Stern, another controversy exploded the tenure of one of his successors, Vivian Schiller. Commentator Juan Williams had just been ousted by her chief news executive over remarks he had made on Fox News. Then an undercover camera stunt by right-wing provocateur James O'Keefe cemented her fate. Republicans used NPR as a rallying cry in the waning weeks of the 2010 elections to help take back the U.S. House of Representatives.

Schiller argues this week's votes were inevitable and that NPR leaders should have prepared for this action by walking away from the funds long ago. "Any evidence-based news organization that reports critically is going to be accused of left-wing bias," Schiller says. "Journalism and government funding in the United States — those two things are incompatible."

"That said, when I see these accusations of bias against what I consider one of the finest news organizations in the world, it's very, very painful," Schiller says. "These accusations against NPR's news organization are flat-out wrong. So that's where we are. It's excruciating."

Former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller says NPR should've stopped accepting federal funding long ago. "Any evidence-based news organization that reports critically is going to be accused of left-wing bias," she says.

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While PBS stirs controversy too, NPR's far more expansive news coverage draws the lion's share of public outrage. The late former CEO John Lansing, who retired in early 2024, considered diversity in hiring and programming choices both a moral imperative and a business strategy to broaden its reach. NPR's staff came closer to reflecting America's racial and ethnic complexity. Its audiences did not appreciably budge.

Conservatives noted the shift and often criticized it. They also singled out NPR coverage of Hunter Biden's laptop, the question of the origins of the COVID-19 virus and issues concerning LGBTQ people — particularly transgender rights.

Some people with ties to NPR agree with elements of the criticism.

Bruce Drake, a former vice president for news at NPR in the early 2000s, argues that the network has lost more support from its audiences than it is willing to admit — and not simply due to changes in how people consume media in the digital age.

"The NPR issue is not as much political bias as its sound, cultural orientation, sensibilities and tone — the same things that the Democrats were so tone deaf about in the [2024] election," writes Drake.

Last year, Uri Berliner, then a veteran business editor at the network, published an essay in the Free Press that revived the issue. Berliner castigated the network for embracing what he characterized as a progressive mindset instead of a more open-minded quest for truth in its reporting. He asked for a meeting with NPR's new chief executive, Katherine Maher, who had started days earlier. She declined.

He left NPR for the Free Press soon after.

Berliner says the Senate vote marks "a sad day."

"NPR was a treasured national trust," Berliner said in a text message. "It no longer is one. Instead of restoring the journalism gold standard of neutral impartiality the NPR leadership chose to squander the last year as the network doubled down on agenda-driven journalism by and for progressives. So here we are."

After Berliner's essay was published, conservative critics of NPR scoured Maher's social media posts.

NPR CEO and President Katherine Maher testifies during a House Oversight Committee hearing in March.

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They found she had condemned Trump during his first term and proclaimed support for then-candidate Joe Biden in 2020. Being chief executive of NPR is Maher's first job in journalism; the network's board said she was entitled to such views in a prior life. She nonetheless became a lightning rod for Republican lawmakers in the 16 months since.

NPR officials have resolutely defended the fairness of the network's reporting, though they say they are open to criticism. In an effort to shore up public trust, Maher and NPR's chief content officer created a senior editing team to ensure high-level review and awareness of all news content before broadcast or posting. That was paid for by a grant from the CPB.

Stations confront a changed landscape

Some station managers say they too have periodically complained about news judgment to the network. But they attest to the value provided by NPR and PBS programming and news coverage.

Others have spoken of the reporting collaborations NPR has fostered in recent years as a success. Texas Public Radio in San Antonio has taken the lead on reporting on the recent deadly floods in the Lone Star State. But Dan Katz, the station's news director, cites a collaboration with the Texas Newsroom, a joint project with other public media stations in the state, in helping him break news.

That newsroom has been cultivated in part with federal money in CPB grants, Katz says.

Ironically, as political debate over NPR has led Trump's congressional allies to wipe out federal funds for public broadcasting, several station officials say they have never worked more closely with the network to deliver top-notch local coverage of regions far from NPR's headquarters in Washington or major bureaus in New York or Los Angeles.

Maria O'Mara, the executive director of PBS Utah, NPR affiliate KUER and the bilingual station Avanza, says she's ready to move on from the political debate.

"It has just drained us of time and energy and brain power that we need to face other existential questions about our system and our public service," she says.

She hopes stations now forge an even stronger relationship with the national networks and each other to become more viable and vibrant.

"It is about public service," she says. "We are needed by our listeners. We feel that clarity of mission."

Disclosure: This story was written and reported by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik. It was edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Vickie Walton-James. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.
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