It’s time to stop pouring taxpayer money into biased public broadcasting
There was a time when public broadcasting was the only option for some Americans to access up-to-date news and information. Those days are long over, though. From podcasts to social media feeds, Louisianians can get news from any source they please.
The federal government, however, has not caught up with the times. It continues to pay hundreds of millions of dollars each year to fund the programming on National Public Radio (NPR), Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and their affiliates.
In 2025 alone, Congress will send the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) $535 million. The CPB is a government-backed nonprofit that issues taxpayer-funded grants to NPR, PBS, and their affiliates. By 2027, the CPB expects the federal government to send it nearly $600 million to fund future programming on NPR and PBS.
One would think that receiving billions of dollars from taxpayers would motivate NPR and PBS to publish fair reporting that the American people can use. Instead, these organizations have consistently promoted ideas that reflect their own personal political beliefs, without attempting to provide the other side. These organizations are using taxpayer money to advance their own political agendas.
For example, NPR dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Covid-19 lab leak as conspiracy theories. PBS openly campaigned against President Trump in 2024 by airing a show called: “A Blueprint for the Case Against Trump.” PBS and NPR have reported that just about every aspect of American life is racist, including law and order, country music, and birds—yes, birds. And they regularly argued that there’s no evidence that biological boys have a physical advantage over biological girls in sports.
It's not just the national organizations that are producing this biased content on the taxpayer’s dime. In Louisiana, public broadcasting affiliates have called parents’ concerns about critical race theory “illegitimate” and claimed that Moms for Liberty was an “extremist” group because it opposed the use of sexually explicit books in elementary schools. One Louisiana Public Broadcasting program argued that kids develop “racial bias” by preschool.
NPR, PBS, and their affiliates have the right to publish these points of view, but they do not have the right to make Louisianians pay for it.
Congress doesn’t send taxpayer money to Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC. The American people don’t pay podcast hosts or social media bloggers for their reporting. And as much as Louisianians love the Hanna Newspapers, Congress still doesn’t give this publication any taxpayer money, either.
But for some reason, Congress has allocated more than $14.5 billion to NPR alone since 1970. NPR then spent that money on a $201 million office space in Washington, D.C. It pays its radio hosts as much as $532,000 per year while its Chief Diversity Officer makes $320,000. Despite all this spending, NPR’s audience has only declined.
Those who wish to support NPR, PBS, and any other public media outlet are welcome to donate to these nonprofits as they see fit. Congress, however, should not pick winners and losers by compelling taxpayers to fund public broadcasting—especially when the content is one-sided.
Even if the content on NPR and PBS was fair, the American people no longer need public broadcasting to access the news of the day. With more than $37 trillion in federal debt, the idea of giving these organizations a single penny is bone-deep, down-to-the-marrow stupid.
That’s why President Trump has paused federal funding to NPR and PBS through an executive order. He also recently asked Congress to formally rescind its funding of these public broadcasting entities—and the Senate should jump on this opportunity to pass President Trump’s rescission request on all his planned spending cuts as soon as possible. This would allow the Trump administration to cut off any money that the last Democrat-controlled Congress already allocated to the CPB and, in turn, NPR and PBS, in 2025.