NPR’s CEO protested last week that her network was “unwavering in our commitment to integrity, editorial independence, and our mission to serve the American people.” Alas, her statement contradicts much of what she has said on the record. Rather than integrity, her declaration evoked dishonesty and desperation.
The latter may be understandable. Katherine Maher was responding last weekend to an executive order that President Donald Trump signed at 11:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 1. The order demanded that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting stop sending taxpayer money to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service and required it to ensure that local radio and TV stations stop using federal money to buy programming from the two content creators.
The CPB was established by the Public Broadcasting Act, which was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967. It created PBS and NPR two and three years later, respectively. Since then, it has done two things. First, it receives money appropriated by Congress, and second, it distributes that amount to NPR, PBS, other program creators, and public TV and radio stations, numbering around 1,500.
For the past few years, that appropriation has been around $535 million, which CPB got in the Continuing Resolution Congress passed in March. The 1,500 or so stations take 70% of the taxpayer funds that the CPB sends them to buy programming from NPR and PBS.
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Maher was hearing the wheels of the federal gravy train coming to a screeching halt. It would not be unreasonable if she felt desperation.
Dishonesty is never becoming, however. The arguments she made in her statement would strain belief from anyone defending the state broadcasters, but from Maher, they were laughable.
First, let’s take the opening line that insists, “NPR is unwavering in our commitment to integrity, editorial independence, and our mission to serve the American people.” Critics like me contest all three claims: NPR and PBS lack integrity because as public broadcasters they should remain politically impartial, and they haven’t; they are not independent of the progressive side of the political spectrum; and have fallen short in their mission to serve the public.
On March 26, 2025, I testified to the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency on what I saw as extreme political bias at both NPR and PBS. In my testimony, I included a plethora of instances of this favoritism to one political side, many of them compiled by the Media Research Center and others identified by an NPR whistleblower, Uri Berliner, last year.
I also took the two broadcasters to task for not fulfilling their mission to the public—that of a news media that examines difficult claims. The case in point was the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, when the broadcasters swallowed whole the argument that America is an oppressive society riven by “systemic racism.”
As Berliner wrote in the Free Press in April 2024, “We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way. But the message from the top [at NPR] was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.”
Maher’s statement goes on to assert that NPR “will vigorously defend our right to provide essential news, information and life-saving services to the American public.” But NPR has no right to pick the taxpayers’ pockets. Nor does NPR have a monopoly on the provision of emergency weather services, though it claims it does.
Maher claimed that “America’s founders knew that an informed public is essential to a functioning democracy, and that commitment to serve an informed public is the heart of NPR’s mission.”
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But Maher has not always shown such reverence to our founding, writing in a tweet in January 2020, “Yes, the North, yes all of us, yes America. Yes, our original collective sin and unpaid debt. Yes, reparations. Yes, on this day.”
When the founders spoke about anything that looked like the taxpayer subsidy that NPR and PBS received, they looked askance at it. Thomas Jefferson never heard a broadcast, but he summed up nicely why taxpayer funding is immoral when he said, “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”
But, of course, Maher’s worst claim in her weekend statement was when she wrote that “the president’s order is an affront to the First Amendment rights of NPR.”
First, by taking away the public teat, Trump is not abridging NPR’s First Amendment rights in any way. NPR can continue to operate without demanding that the public of all persuasions send it money, even when the views of half that population are denigrated.
Maher herself is the absolute worst person to make a First Amendment argument. She once said, “The No. 1 challenge that we see here is, of course, the First Amendment,” because its protections make it “a little tricky to address some of the real challenges of where bad information comes from.”
When contrasted with her past statements, it’s easy to see why these assertions show that Maher is the wrong person at the worst possible time to head NPR. But firing her, as NPR did with another CEO 10 years ago when controversy also swirled, will not fix the problem now any more than it did then. The problem is a public broadcaster with a bias it refuses to recognize or do anything about. And the only fix for that is defunding.
