As we went to press yesterday, a show trial was unfolding in Washington, D.C.: a hearing that had tellingly been titled “Anti-American Airwaves” and was to be chaired by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
At the center of this performative spectacle were Paula Kerger, the head of PBS, and Katherine Maher, the chief officer of NPR, who had been called to face a red-hot grilling amid calls from President Trump and hard-right Republicans to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which, according to The New York Times, received $535 million in federal funds for 2025. The president on Tuesday called PBS and NPR “biased” and said that he’d “be honored to see” funding end for NPR and PBS.
As we saw with the congressional roastings of Ivy League college presidents, MAGA loves nothing less than to get a well-educated and powerful woman in the metaphorical witness box and start throwing low blows. A less sage and Solomon-like judge than Representative Greene we cannot imagine. She has been tasked with the investigation into political bias in public media as chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, part of Elon Musk’s DOGE. The accusation is that NPR and PBS have a left-wing slant, refusing, for example, to report extensively on Hunter Biden’s laptop and giving unfair airtime to allegations in 2015 that future President Trump was acting under Russian influence.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a private, nonprofit corporation created by Congress in 1967, most familiar to the average American as the entity that — through grants to local stations — helps fund, in part, such classic, nonpolitical programming as “Sesame Street,” “Masterpiece,” “Car Talk,” and “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” According to publicly available budget documents from C.P.B., most of its money goes to support more than 1,500 local public TV and radio stations; only 6 percent of its budget goes directly to news production. Grants to member stations help fund programs like “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”
To characterize C.P.B. as primarily a news-generating organization is grossly inaccurate, and to recast its role in our culture as some nefarious bugaboo, as this DOGE subcommittee is attempting to do, smacks of the McCarthy witch trials of the 1950s.
Public media is one of the greatest cultural assets this country has. Here on the South Fork, we all benefit from free access to WLIW out of Southampton and WKPN out of Bridgeport, Conn., as well as WGBH of Boston and WNET Thirteen from New York City. The news programming produced by public media is free from the influence of advertisers, and indeed typically is required to meet much more stringent standards of impartiality than most commercial news outlets do. An attack on journalistic bias from a politician like Representative Greene, a friend of Fox and NewsMax — neither of which makes any distinction whatsoever between news and editorial comment, both of which proudly and boldly ignore the rules of journalistic ethics — is richly ironic.
What can you do about all this? You can pick up your phone or go online right now, and send in a donation to public media as your signal of support for the free press.