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I've always opposed government funding for NPR and PBS, so I applauded Congress's vote last week to rescind $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity through which that funding has been channeled for almost 60 years. President Trump is expected to sign the bill this week.
Many conservatives and Republicans condemn the public networks because of their political bias and left-of-center orientation, but that was never my main objection. Of course NPR's programming reflects an ideological leaning. All news organizations do. The Boston Globe, The New York Times, CNN, Politico, and ABC News don't try to hide the fact that they generally see and report on the world through blue-colored spectacles, just as Fox News, Daily Wire, the New York Post, the Washington Examiner, and National Review are unmistakably conservative in their outlook.
It is a tiresome myth that the media are supposed to be unbiased. The First Amendment, which prohibits governments from "abridging the freedom … of the press," was crafted in part because the framers of the Constitution knew perfectly well that journalists cannot help bringing strong views to their work, that those views shape their coverage, and that it is no business of the government to decide what constitutes fair and accurate reporting.
No — the reason to defund public broadcasting is that it should never have been funded in the first place. A government barred by the Constitution from "abridging" the media ought never to have involved itself in subsidizing the media. Congress's vote to cut the flow of dollars from the Treasury to NPR and PBS was long overdue. As Walter Donway wrote in The Daily Economy, the rescission vote "strips away the illusion, cherished since the late 1960s, that in a free country with a free press, government can somehow act as a neutral arbiter of public information."
Yet right up to the last minute, the CEO of NPR, Katherine Maher, kept trying to save her network's federal funding by insisting that "we are, of course, a nonpartisan organization" and promising to iron the bias out of its journalism.
"As far as the accusations that we're biased, I would stand up and say, ‘Please show me a story that concerns you because we want to know,'" she said during a Wednesday appearance on CNN.
I'll be happy to take Maher up on that request but her plea misses the point. NPR cannot be unbiased. And even if it could, that wouldn't entitle it to taxpayer dollars.
That NPR leans left is not the problem. What is a problem is that its journalism has repeatedly fallen short of its own professed standards of accuracy, fairness, and intellectual honesty.
Take, for example, NPR's handling of the story about Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election. The network flatly refused to cover the revelations emerging from the laptop, dismissing them as "pure distractions" and insinuating without evidence that they were Russian disinformation. An NPR managing editor at the time explained, "We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories."
Yet the laptop and its contents were verified by major newsrooms months later and even liberal publications ultimately confirmed their authenticity. Earlier this year, Maher herself acknowledged that NPR's refusal to cover the story had been "a mistake." Actually, it was more than that. As former senior NPR editor Uri Berliner wrote in a startling tell-all essay, the story was deliberately "squelched" for fear that digging into it "could help Trump."
Or consider NPR's promotion of the false narrative in 2021 that Border Patrol agents on horseback appeared to be whipping Black migrants at the Texas border. NPR played up quotes from White House officials who called images of the episode "horrific" and framed the incident as a grotesque display of cruelty. "We saw Haitian black people being whipped by men on horses," reporter Maria Hinojosa continued to claim months later. In reality, the photographs at the center of the story were egregiously misconstrued. An investigation by the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that no migrants had been struck. But NPR, like other outlets, did little to correct the record or to grapple with how avidly it ran with an inflammatory and unfounded accusation.
On issues of race and the COVID-19 pandemic, NPR's record has often been problematic. It dedicated extensive airtime to claims of widespread racial hatred against Asian Americans, for example, often linking it to hostility triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic or featuring activists explicitly characterizing the bigots as "white men." Yet when data later showed that the largest share of anti-Asian attacks were perpetrated by Black assailants, NPR made little effort to revise or deepen its reporting.
When it came to COVID's origins, NPR leaned heavily into the narrative that the virus emerged from a wet market. The possibility that it might have escaped from a Wuhan lab engaged in gain-of-function research was almost "immediately dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory," Berliner wrote. Indeed, NPR went so far as to even declare in April 2020 that the lab leak had been affirmatively debunked, which was plainly untrue. "Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak," he continued. "But at NPR, we weren't about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story."
As late as 2023, when even the Biden administration was inclined to accept the lab-leak hypothesis, NPR was still declaring with confidence that "the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus." Once again ideology appeared to crowd out curiosity, and a highly plausible hypothesis was treated as taboo because the "wrong" people endorsed it.
These and other stories like them are not merely the products of a progressive worldview. They are failures of craft. The best journalists test the stories that fit their ideological predilections as rigorously as those that don't. Reporters like to think of themselves as speaking truth to power — but what does that mean if it doesn't extend to the powerful on their own side of the ideological divide? Time and again, NPR's record has shown not just that it has a perspective, but that it is willing to avoid inconvenient truths, or cling to favored narratives, rather than challenge a preferred perspective.
Just as — to be fair — every other media outlet does.
Which brings me back to the key point: Even if NPR hadn't dropped the ball on these stories, even if its reporting were as careful, accurate, and objective as is humanly possible, it still would not warrant a nickel of government money. Freedom of the press means that government must not tell journalists what to say or punish them for saying the wrong thing. It also means that news organizations must make their own way in the marketplace of ideas, sustained by their audiences, their advertisers, or their benefactors — not by the public treasury.
NPR has always described its work as indispensable. With the government out of the picture, it can finally prove its value in the only arena that truly matters: the free marketplace of ideas. If it can sharpen its journalism, confront its own biases, and earn the loyalty of more listeners willing to pay for it, so much the better — for NPR and for the nation. A free press thrives when it stands on its own feet, not on the public dole.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.
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