US strips $1bn in funding for PBS, NPR for 'woke' news coverage
The US Congress on Friday pulled more than $1bn from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which provides funding for the two major public broadcasters, PBS and NPR, as well as 1,500 local stations across the country.
The amount now being withheld would have covered up to several years' worth of grants for all those newsrooms, US media watchdog Poynter said.
Federal funding only makes up roughly 16 percent of the PBS budget, and one percent of NPR's budget, Poynter noted, so it's the local stations in rural areas that are heavily reliant on federal support.
Those stations are sometimes the only source for life-threatening weather alerts and guidance in those communities.
The decision was part of a $9.4bn rescissions package that strips taxpayer funding from both public broadcasting and foreign aid projects, all of which were previously approved by Congress for those purposes.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
The latest move came at the behest of the White House, which is scrambling to push through as many bills as possible to fund President Donald Trump's agenda before the November 2026 midterm elections, when Republicans could lose their majority.
The package had already been advanced in the House of Representatives before being approved with slight amendments in the Senate, meaning the House had to push it through one more time before it goes to the president's desk.
On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Republicans were "finally ending taxpayer funding for PBS and NPR, two media organisations that have ridiculously used federal dollars to push a partisan left-wing agenda for many years".
That "left wing agenda" was highlighted in a lengthy thread on X by the administration's dedicated "rapid response" social media account, which intends to "hold fake news media accountable".
Among the accusations is that "PBS staff used 162 variations of 'far right' labels and only six 'far left' labels, an astounding ratio of 27 to 1," the administration said, citing the anti-liberal media monitoring site, Newsbusters.
PBS also "produced an entire movie celebrating a transgender teenager’s so-called 'changing gender identity'," the account said, as part of its reasoning to defund the news outlet.
However, there were also examples of critical, rather than positive, PBS coverage of Trump's first term, suggesting that, where possible, the administration is indeed trying to shut down or weaken coverage that does not flatter the president.
NPR was similarly attacked for its coverage of immigration, given that back in 2021, it apologised for calling certain immigrants "illegal" rather than "undocumented".
In 2013, the Associated Press style guide, which governs most US news outlets, said it no longer sanctioned the term "illegal immigrant" because only actions, not people, are illegal, it said.
The Ad Fontes Media bias chart from January 2024 places both PBS and NPR squarely in the middle, whereas it shows outlets like CNN and Al Jazeera both skew left.
The other $7.9bn cut to US government spending in the package is set to impact refugee and development programmes, as well as international disaster response. Much of that work was done by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), but the organisation has been defunct since early this year, and only some of its programmes survived and have been rolled into the diplomatic arm of the US government: the State Department.
In a last-minute change in the Senate, Republicans voted to keep $400m in funding for the president’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a resoundingly successful initiative begun by former president George W Bush to combat HIV and AIDS around the world.
US foreign aid may very well be conditioned differently from here on out, and with the likely confirmation of Trump's pick for US ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, who told lawmakers he would tie foreign assistance decisions to whether or not countries vote with the US at the international body.
Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.
