The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced today that it will be laying off its staff and shutting down. CPB is the organization that provides funding to PBS and NPR and now that funding is gone.
For nearly 60 years, CPB has carried out its Congressional mission to build and sustain a trusted public media system that informs, educates, and serves communities across the country. Through partnerships with local stations and producers, CPB has supported educational content, locally relevant journalism, emergency communications, cultural programming, and essential services for Americans in every community.
“Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,” said CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison. “CPB remains committed to fulfilling its fiduciary responsibilities and supporting our partners through this transition with transparency and care.”
CPB informed its employees today that the majority of staff positions will conclude with the close of the fiscal year on September 30, 2025. A small transition team will remain through January 2026 to ensure a responsible and orderly closeout of operations. This team will focus on compliance, final distributions, and resolution of long-term financial obligations, including ensuring continuity for music rights and royalties that remain essential to the public media system.
So in two more months, CPB will be gone. In theory it’s funding would have allowed it to continue for a lot longer but President Trump succeeded in taking back money that had already been appropriated.
President Donald Trump launched a successful campaign to claw back the $1.1 billion allocated for the organization for the next two years, a measure he signed into law last month.
At the heart of the campaign was a critique that public media produce news that is biased and too liberal and should not be funded by taxpayer dollars. That argument, long held among many conservatives, finally prevailed thanks to unified Republican government during Trump’s second term in office.
As the Heritage Foundation pointed out a couple months ago, PBS and NPR were always liberal and Republican presidents have complained about that since CPB was founded.
All the Republican presidents who have followed LBJ, signer of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, have complained of Left-wing bias in the system…
The threat that taxpayer-funded journalism represented was clear from the start. A young lawyer in the Nixon White House anticipated the danger and wrote in a 1971 memo that “we are confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences—that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system.”
That young lawyer was none other than Antonin Scalia. The future Supreme Court justice argued that eliminating the creature that the act had created, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, CPB), wouldn’t be easy.
Scalia was right but ultimately, CPB dug its own grave. It’s political bias was always obvious but in the Trump era it became indefensible.
Uri Berliner, a liberal journalist who worked at NPR for 25 years, admitted as much in a 2024 essay. NPR, he said, had become a place that now offers only “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the US population. … An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.”
As with many things, it was Trump’s election in 2016 that sent NPR, liberal from its creation in the Seventies, irreparably off the rails. “His election,” Berliner wrote, “was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair.” Tough, “straightforward coverage” of Trump “veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.”…
The bias at NPR and PBS is also easy to quantify. The conservative-leaning Media Research Center has been doing tallies of it for years, and the results demonstrate Berliner’s allegations. The PBS NewsHour, for example, routinely books many more liberals than conservatives. Over a four-month period from November 2022 to February 2023, MRC found that liberal Democratic guests outnumbered conservative Republican guests 3.7 to 1. When elected officials and political appointees were removed from the guest count, the disparity was even more striking, reaching 5.7 to 1.
MRC analysts also examined weeknight editions of the NewsHour from 3 January, 2023, through 2 May, 2023, finding that, by a 5-to-1 margin, NewsHour promoted controversies involving congressional Republicans over those involving Democrats. Congressional Republicans faced 85% negative coverage, compared to 54% positive coverage of congressional Democrats, the analysis showed. NewsHour correspondents branded Republicans as extremists (“far right,” “hard right,” etc.) 20 times during this period. Not once were hard-Left Democrats so identified.
An MRC analysis also found that during last year’s political convention, PBS treated the Republican convention to 72% negative and 28% positive commentary. By contrast, the Democratic convention played with a home field advantage: it received 12% negative coverage, versus 88% positive commentary.
I’ve mentioned this before but I spent a lot of time listening to NPR’s Washington DC affiliate, WAMU, in the early 90s, i.e. the Clinton era. So I have a clear memory of how frustrating it was to be a conservative NPR listener at a time when most of the guests (and all of the hosts) seemed to be monolithically left-wing. I stopped listening after a few years but so far as I know nothing every changed. NPR was always a station for urban liberals. Conservatives were always the threatening outsiders. It was really NPR that taught me how liberals lie by omission. If a story or point undercuts their premise, it simply never got mentioned on NPR no matter how relevant it was.
All that to say, I’m glad to see it go. The larger NPR stations will survive, supported by their own liberal listeners, but the smaller ones will not. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work absent government subsidies for left-leaning speech.
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Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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