The chief executives of NPR and PBS endured a relentless grilling from Republican lawmakers on the House’s DOGE subcommittee over what the lawmakers said was partisan content published by the two outlets, which receive substantial taxpayer funding.

The hearing comes as government funding for public broadcasting, long under scrutiny, is facing its greatest threat yet from Elon Musk’s DOGE operation and from President Trump, who said on Wednesday he’d “be honored” to end taxpayer support for NPR and PBS. During the hearing, Republicans questioned the relevance of public broadcasting in the 21st century, given the dramatically changed media landscape and news being more widely available.

Separately, NPR is under investigation from the FCC about whether its “sponsor messages” are actually advertisements that violate public radio’s charter.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Democrats on the committee largely used the hearing to attack the DOGE and the rest of the Trump administration while asking questions mocking the hearing.

NPR Under Fire

Much of the hearing focused on NPR, which broadcasts far more news programming than PBS and is known for a pronounced liberal bias.  Republicans zeroed in on the bias issue, as well as on past comments made by NPR’s chief executive, Katherine Maher.  

The subcommittee’s chairwoman, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, confronted Ms. Maher over the “left-wing ideology and blatant opposition to free speech” in her previous public comments.

Ms. Greene noted that Ms. Maher has called President Trump a “deranged racist and sociopath” and has claimed America is “addicted to white supremacy.”

The NPR chief executive, who’s previously noted that as the business executive overseeing NPR, she does not have a say in editorial decisions, insisted that her previous comments have been misconstrued and that she is a “very strong believer in free speech.”

Ms. Maher has faced criticism over some of her previous comments that have come to light. Shortly after she was installed as the head of NPR, conservative activist Christopher Rufo shared an interview in which Ms. Maher criticized Wikipedia’s model – before taking her current job she was the CEO of Wikimedia –  of being “free and open,” saying it was “recapitulating many of the same power structures and dynamics that existed offline prior to the advent of the internet.”

She also said that the First Amendment is “the number one challenge” because it is “tricky” to limit “bad information” from “influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.” 

Ms. Maher said her organization was “mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner.” In 2020, before Ms. Maher’s tenure, NPR publicly stated it would not cover Hunter Biden’s laptop because it was a “pure distraction.” The laptop story was suppressed by Facebook and Twitter and not covered by dominant news organizations after a group of former top national security officials released a now-discredited letter calling the laptop Russian disinformation. Years after the election, news outlets confirmed the authenticity of the laptop and its salacious content. 

Congressman Brandon Gill of Texas, a Republican, used his time to confront Ms. Maher over several of her past tweets, including one in which she said she took a day off to read “The Case for Reparations” – a widely read article in the Atlantic magazine by the anti-Israel author Ta-Nehisi Coates arguing for direct payments to black Americans as an apology for slavery and racism – which the NPR executive said she did not remember reading. 

When Mr. Gill asked if she believed white Americans should pay reparations, she insisted she had never said that. However, the congressman read a tweet of hers from January 2020, when she stated, “Yes, reparations.” 

Ms. Maher insisted she was not calling for financial reparations but insisting that Americans “all owe much to the people who came before us,” which Mr. Gill called a “bizarre” representation of her comment.

Ms. Maher also said her thinking has “evolved” from five years ago when she tweeted that “America is addicted to white supremacy.”

Lawmakers also confronted Ms. Maher about some of NPR’s left-wing content, such as an article about “the whole community of queer dinosaur enthusiasts,” or another one that suggested that civility is racist and doorways are representative of “latent fat-phobia.”

Ms. Maher noted many of the stories or shortcomings that were referenced were made before her time at NPR. She said the outlet has hired an additional editor to help review stories to make sure they are “comprehensive” and “well-reviewed” before they are published. This editor was recently added after an explosive expose in the Free Press, by a then-NPR senior editor, Uri Berliner, described how NPR had lost its way due to an increasing obsession with identity, race, and gender issues.

PBS Assailed for Bias

The president of PBS, Paula Kerger, was not exempt from the grilling. Ms. Kerger insisted there is “nothing more American than PBS.”

However, lawmakers grilled the broadcaster for using “taxpayer subsidies” to produce overtly biased documentaries with titles such as  “Racist Trees.” That documentary reports on a “divisive wall of trees” on the edge of a “historically black neighborhood” in Palm Springs that the filmmakers suggest is “an enduring symbol of racism.” 

“Do you think PBS needs to fund ridiculous material such as this that the taxpayers are having to pay for?” Ms. Greene asked.

Ms. Kerger defended the “Racist Trees” documentary,  saying, “These are documentary films that are point of view films that are part of our primetime schedule for adults.”

Congressman Pat Fallon asked Ms. Kerger if it would “trouble” her to hear that “for six months, there was an analysis done on ‘PBS Newshour’ from June to November of 2023, where they found that ‘far right’ was used 162 times and ‘far left’ was only used six times.”

“I don’t know the study that you’re referring to, and I’d be very interested in seeing it and understanding how they came up with those numbers,” Ms. Kerger responded. 

Mr. Fallon noted the Media Research Center simply counted the number of times either phrase was said during the “Newshour,” PBS’ flagship evening news program, to determine its analysis. The Newshour, anchored by liberal journalists who came from ABC and NBC News, is known for its leftward bent. Its signature debate panel, a fixture for decades, now features the far-left commentator Jonathan Capehart, also of MSNBC and the Washington Post, as the liberal, and the anti-Trump commentator David Brooks of the New York Times as the “conservative.”  

At the conclusion of the hearing, Ms. Greene sought to correct the record on Ms. Kerger’s claim that PBS did not feature a drag queen on a show for children. Ms. Greene played a 2021 video from the broadcasters’ “Let’s Learn” program that featured an individual by the name of “Lil Miss Hot Mess” reading from his book, “The Hips of the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish.”

“Our witness, Ms. Kerger, lied under oath and said it wasn’t featured on PBS. This show was aired on PBS on April 1, 2021,” Ms. Greene said. 

Staffers held up a TV with the video of the drag queen, which showed a caption that read, “Let’s Learn,’ Education Show for Kids Ages 3-8.”

“That’s repulsive. That’s not what children ages three to eight should ever be watching: A grown biological man posing as a woman,” Ms. Greene said. 

Ms. Greene said her committee “will be calling for the complete and total defund and dismantling of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

________

Correction: Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of “The Case for Reparations.” His first name was misspelled in an earlier edition.