There Is a Way to Save PBS and NPR

If only the media would take the idea of viewpoint diversity seriously

Over the weekend, two different people—one a relative, the other making key copies for me at a southern California Home Depot—told me that President Trump’s vow to end “Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media” was evidence of his depravity.

While I agree that Trump is depraved, I disagree that federally defunding NPR and PBS exemplifies it. Rather, I see this move as anything from reasonable to necessary. Mostly, I see it an opportunity.

Trust in the media remains at an all-time low. Many liberals understand the problem with highly biased news outlets, and regularly decry the slant of Fox or Breitbart, which baldly sell the intermeshing of editorial and news. But few of us would admit that NPR and PBS are also slanted—just in a complementary direction to our own views. (Well, not my views, but those of the people around me, aghast that someone would steal the Pride flag from in front of a brownstone, while preventing a woman from posting on the neighborhood listserv when her Israeli flag was stolen. My view is that if you’re gonna be upset about flag theft, you gotta be upset about both of those instances equally.)

Groups that comb the media for bias tend to rate NPR and PBS as left-ish, not full blown propaganda. But former NPR employee Uri Berliner wrote in The Free Press that the organization had “lost America’s trust” by representing “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”

It used to be that NPR’s listenership was mixed; Berliner said that, once, 26 percent were conservative, 23 percent centrist, 37 percent liberal. By 2023, only 11 percent were conservative, and 67 percent were liberal. Not to mention the fact that NPR’s CEO, Katherine Maher, infamously said that “perhaps for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth, and seeking to convince others of the truth, might not be the right place to start.” She went on to aver that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction” from “getting things done.”

True, she was at Wikipedia then, not NPR—but that site should also be trying to search for and catalog the truth. That she never denounced that sentiment, and never publicly stated that it was anathema to the goal of a news organization, adds to the very important question of why taxpayer dollars should go to NPR, which apparently only relies on citizen tax money for 1 percent of its budget, anyway. It surely can fundraise that much from the likes of Soros, Pritzker, and Rothblatt—billionaires known for funding gender identity-based projects.

NPR’s coverage of social and health issues has dutifully reflected the left-leaning worldviews such billionaires and their advocacy groups support. They took Dr. Rachel Levine at face value when saying that “Transgender Health Care Is An Equity Issue, Not A Political One.” A sampling of headlines: “Shifting Federal Policies Threaten Health Coverage For Trans Americans;” “New research finds trans teens have high satisfaction with gender care.” “How school systems, educators and parents can support transgender children.”

What reporters at NPR should have been doing was questioning whether the psychological and medical interventions of “gender-affirming care” added up to healthcare. They should have asked, and educated others about, what “trans” means, and where the idea of gender identity came from. They should have scrutinized the research they reported as showing interventions were successful, and not just reported the research with conclusions that affirmed their own worldviews. They should have examined the differences between adult transsexuals and young people seeking transition, and taken the idea of rapid-onset gender dysphoria seriously, rather than ignoring it. They should have explained that, no, this is not an equity issue—it’s an issue of science and of medical ethics, and it’s a cultural issue, related to how we understand, or don’t, gender… whatever the hell that word means.

Trump’s order lists multiple examples of public media bias, and while I think the one about a drag queen named Lil Miss Hot Mess on a kids’ show turned out to be untrue, the compilation of lopsided coverage is pretty damning:

· NPR refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story, calling it a waste of time and a distraction, despite that it was highly relevant to the presidential election.

· NPR repeatedly insisted COVID-19 did not originate in a lab and refused to explore the theory.

· The FBI, CIA, and Department of Energy have all since deemed the lab-leak theory the likely cause.

· NPR ran a Valentine’s Day feature around “queer animals,” in which it suggested the make-believe clownfish in “Finding Nemo” would’ve been better off as a female, that “banana slugs are hermaphrodites,” and that “some deer are nonbinary.”

· Research shows that “congressional Republicans faced 85% negative coverage, compared to 54% positive coverage of congressional Democrats,” on PBS’s flagship news program.

· Over a six-month period, PBS News Hour used versions of the term “far-right” 162 times, but “far-left” only 6 times.

Yes, it’s absolutely absurd to object to liberal media’s refusal to take the Hunter Biden laptop seriously when far-right media insisted January 6 was a just a fun house party, not a terrifying and dangerous event. But two wrongly and intensely biased versions of events do not make a right—or a truth.

When it comes to gender, instead of helping us know enough to figure out how to think, NPR, like Fox often does about many issues, told us what to think. Considering the fact that majority of Americans don’t think that way—they may support people’s free expression but not, say, males identifying as women and entering their culturally-designated spaces—I see no reason why NPR deserves money from all taxpayers, whose views are alternately impugned or disregarded by the organization.

Look, public media’s flagrant bias isn’t all their fault. After all, the most trusted journalism programs and fact-checking organizations have been infiltrated by advocacy groups that train journalists to report mistruths as facts and to report on trans issues in a narrow, singular, fact-twisting way. I should know, as I attended some of those sessions. Many reporters have gone through “anti-bias” training that was actually pro-bias training.

Once, I called in to my local NPR station news show when linguist John McWhorter was on, and told the screener that I wanted to ask about the controversy over the word “woman.” What controversy, he asked. I explained that it’s controversial among some of us to apply that word to men. The screener hung up on me.

The only time I was allowed through to the air, no matter how many times I waited on hold for 45 minutes to talk about gender, it was a segment about immigration. The host assumed I was pro-Trump, just because I was anti-Democrat radical excess. Honey, there’s a long, deep, hollow between those hills. Come on out and cover the millions of us wandering around in here, looking for the path out.

I’d say it’s a little more complicated when it comes to PBS, which relies more heavily on federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting than NPR does. I don’t think Masterpiece Theater and Antiques Roadshow are suffering from ultra-biased leftism, even if PBS NewsHour is. And I think Sesame Street was one of the greatest things that ever happened in television history (and I highly recommend this documentary about it). But I still don’t see a reason for all of America to subsidize such programming. Trump’s declaration is correct about this: “No media outlet has a Constitutional right to taxpayer subsidized operations, and it’s highly inappropriate for taxpayers to be forced to subsidize biased, partisan content.”

Like most Americans, I’d rather defund CPB than I would the police—and that’s not because I’ve turned right-wing. It’s because I ended up learning a lot more about race, gender, Covid, George Floyd, and many other things than my incredibly slanted liberal media gave me. Some of that knowledge came from consuming an omnivorous media diet, including certain outlets I was told would forever stain my soul if I consulted them. Mostly, I learned more because I found individuals whose reporting and analysis I could trust—the Substack model of journalism. But that’s not what I want, nor do I think most people have the time to figure out whom to trust. They want to trust a news outlet, not an newsperson.

In fact, that’s what I want to happen again. I can be convinced to support publicly-funded media if that media is committed to critical thinking, viewpoint diversity, and combatting the biases of reporters. Yes, we’re all biased. Yes, objective truth is difficult to achieve—but that must be our goal. See, for instance, what the BBC aims for:

BBC viewers, listeners and users can rely on the BBC to reflect the many communities that exist in the UK. These communities may be based on geography, on faith, on language, or on a shared interest such as sport. The BBC will stimulate debate within and between the communities of the UK, and encourage people to get involved with their local communities.

Sure, there are plenty of accusations of left-leaning bias within the BBC, but that’s seen as a shortcoming, not a right. And the BBC audio series Nolan Investigates thoroughly dissected the relationship between the advocacy group Stonewall and BBC coverage of trans issues; I highly recommend listening to it. And then I highly recommend demanding that NPR and PBS commission similar programs or investigations of their own biases.

We need to interrupt and reverse the polarization within media, and among reporters. One version of a plan for public media’s survival is to change its priorities, its trainings, its coverage to truly reflect America. And by that, no, I don’t mean giving actual Nazis a platform, or just representing the most common denominator, which would turn PBS into the NFL channel. I mean covering issues beyond left and right, taking as prismatic a look at complex issues as journalists possibly can. I mean adopting the values of groups like Mill Institute or Heterodox Academy, of open inquiry and intellectual humility, a commitment to constantly evolving knowledge and understanding, rather than assuming you know the story before reporting it. Earn back the trust of the American people by not dismissing those of us who disagree with the elite media makers as heretics and bigots. Take CPB’s annual $535 million of taxpayer dollars and apply them to reinventing public broadcasting to represent the public, and to hold journalists employed by NPR, PBS, and their member stations to the highest standards.

The chances of that happening seem pretty minimal. So here’s another version, although one that takes a similar route. If PBS and NPR want to stay open, they’re going to need to rely more on a different kind of public funding—by individual members of the public, not the money we give the government through taxes. That means they shouldn’t just appeal to a small band of educated elites who want to bask in the glow of their own certainty. They should undergo a massive ideological overhaul to more accurately reflect the views and tastes of America.

Such an undertaking is exceedingly difficult when liberal media dismisses “viewpoint diversity” as code for “imposing right-wing views on everyone.” Look, sometimes it is that. But now that liberals are on the back foot in universities, in the government, in the cultural narrative, they’re the ones championing free speech, rather than realizing that only a few short months ago they were just as censorious. I find the lack of liberal self-awareness surprising—this is stupid of me, I know—not to mention demoralizing.

Let us take this moment to acknowledge that our media industry is broken, and forge a commitment to fix it. I’ll bet $535 million that we can.