NPR’s CEO on the Fight Over Public Media

0:05Earlier this month, President Donald Trump took an axe to the public broadcasting budget. President Trump signed an executive order on May 1st, which ended federal funding for NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service, or PBS, over what he claims is bias in their programming. PBS and NPR are America's leading public television and radio networks, respectively. Both were established more than 50 years ago and given government funding by Congress in the process. This week, NPR pushed back against Trump's executive order, saying the order is an attack on free speech. How would you characterize the fight between National Public Radio and the president at the moment?

0:47It's a fight that's going on on multiple levels. That's our colleague Joe Flint. He covers media and entertainment. So one aspect of the fight is the idea or question of whether the government should continue to help fund public media. So there's been many attempts over the last several decades to end public funding, and Trump has just put it on the forefront. He has pretty much said, I feel that they are biased, hence we shouldn't support them with taxpayer money.

1:24But for NPR CEO Catherine Marr, this fight is about more than funding. This is about the First Amendment. It is our responsibility as a media organization, when the principle of the free press is challenged, to challenge back.

1:42Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Thursday, May 29th.

1:56Coming up on the show, NPR versus the Trump administration.

2:16The Federal Government got into the public media game in 1967 with the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act. The act created a private nonprofit called the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that would act as a steward for public media. PBS was founded two years later and has been home to legendary programs like Sesame Street, Antiques Roadshow, and the PBS NewsHour. NPR, launched in 1970, is known for its news and culture radio programs and eventually podcasts. And I should mention, I worked at NPR for about one year on one of those podcasts as an editor. Joe, can you take us back? When does criticism of public broadcasting actually start?

2:59Well, I probably started getting criticized sometime a few days after the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 was signed. Funding was threatened from as early as 1969. Fred Rogers himself, host of the classic children's show Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, testified before Congress to defend the importance of public broadcasting. I'm constantly concerned about what our children are seeing. And for 15 years, I have tried in this country and Canada to present what I feel is a meaningful expression of care. But I think we really began to see a push about funding public media in the 90s. Newt Gingrich wanted to end funding for public media.

3:49George W. Bush also at one point made remarks about whether there was a need to fund public media. Mitt Romney when he was running. The things I like PBS, I love Big Bird, actually like you too, but I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for. And now Trump. The kind of money that's being wasted and it's a very biased view, you know that better than anybody, and I'd be honored to see it end.

4:22You may have noticed a pattern here. It seems to be Republicans who want to explore this idea of cutting funding for public media because their idea is, you know, we have so many challenges and so many debts and everything else. Why do we need to fund public media when there's so many options for the consumer out there? As far as federal budget appropriations go, public media is a pretty small bucket. Congress had allocated$535 million a year for public broadcasting over the next two fiscal years. About 70 % of that money goes to more than 1 ,500 local public stations across the country. How important is this money for local stations?

5:06Well, I think it really depends on the particular markets. So you're in D.C., I'm in L.A. We're in big markets. the public stations here and in D.C. don't rely as much on those funds from CPB the way smaller market stations do. But you go out into smaller markets and you might be talking about 15, 20 percent of their funding comes from the corporation. And so if they lose that money, a lot of these stations, of course, produce their own local content. They're covering town halls, They're covering the markets they're in. They're doing their own TV shows. And so without that funding, they won't be able to make as much or do other services inside a town that they might provide.

5:52This year, the long-simmering tension over these funds came to a head. In March, Congress called on the CEOs of both NPR and PBS to give testimony on their network's content, which some Republicans say is biased. Walk us through what happened in the spring with Congress and NPR and PBS. Well, in the spring, there was a hearing chaired by Marjorie Taylor Greene to discuss the bias in public media. This hearing of the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency will come to order. And these hearings happen every few years, and they are somewhat predictable. Entertaining, but predictable.

6:42You will have Republicans telling us that the political bias of NPR and PBS is outrageous, and that they carry a lot of children's content that isn't necessarily appropriate for children, that they are pushing an agenda and a culture that they don't feel should be pushed to their kids. So these things quickly turn into kind of a lot of broad attacks. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting that we give over half a billion dollars to no longer serves the public. They asked us not to consider that the Hunter Biden laptop was real. They dismissed what was always the most probable theory of the COVID lab leak from Wuhan.

7:27I feel like it's propaganda. I feel like there's disinformation every time I listen to NPR. The hearing quickly turned into that sort of thing. One side is attacking them for their politics. The other side is defending Sesame Street. So the message I think today is very, very simple. If we're going to get rid of any puppeteers, we should get rid of the one that's actually controlling Donald Trump. Fire Elon Musk and save Elmo. And with that, I yield back. It sounds like this happens, as you said, every few years. What was different this time? Well, these things, usually there's hearings, there's lots of talk, but they don't go anywhere.

8:10And one of the reasons they don't go anywhere is there are even a lot of Republican lawmakers from rural areas that count heavily on those public media stations. So they also may not be in the biggest rush to to get rid of them because they're important to their constituents. We have a president right now who is very confident in his ability to get what he wants through executive order, through muscling his way through situations. And so he issued in May, early May, an executive order saying that all funding for public media should stop. The order came a few weeks after the White House released a memo with the title, The NPR-PBS grift has ripped us off for too long.

9:02In it, the Trump administration accuses NPR and PBS of spreading, quote, radical woke propaganda disguised as news. Would you say specific to NPR, is there a sense that maybe NPR did get more liberal or more perceived to be so? I think there's certainly a perception that over the last 20 years, NPR has gotten more liberal. Former NPR employee, Yuri Berliner, of course, wrote a piece for the Free Press many months ago, outlining, in his view, just how liberal NPR has become over the last decade. At the time, NPR's news leadership team strongly rejected Berliner's assessment, saying in a memo to staff that they are, quote, proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories.

9:53A Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year found that 12 % of Republicans say they trust NPR as a source of news, compared to 47 % of Democrats. You know, the NPR audience tends to be an urban audience in big cities that are usually democratically run, and that a lot of their content is geared towards those folks. There's nothing wrong with that. I think for the administration, their argument is, well, no, but why should we have to fund it?

10:27Certainly, there's always been an argument to be made that given the debt, given all the things that we need to cut and look at where we spend our money and what we need to invest in and what we don't, that public media maybe isn't the priority it was when the Public Broadcasting Act was created in 1967. And in the grand scheme of things, it's a relatively small amount of money. But nonetheless, it's still$535 million a year. It's not a drop in the bucket. So, I mean, you know, is there a rationale that it should be at least discussed? Yeah. You know, Trump is critical of media in general and has been since his first term.

11:08How is this different? I think it is safe to say that this administration is targeting media outlets whose coverage it doesn't like. So we've seen it go after ABC and CBS. We've seen Trump be very critical of MSNBC and its parent Comcast Corporation. And in going after NPR and PBS, he has the added leverage of trying to use the power of an executive order to end government funding for public broadcasting. So obviously with public media, that he has the power to strangle their money and force them to basically get their funding from somewhere else. After the break, I'm Catherine Marr, and I'm the president and CEO of NPR.

12:24NPR

12:32a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration over his executive order to pull funding from public media. Why did NPR decide to take up this fight? So it's really important for folks to have the understanding that we chose not to do this over the funding issue. Funding is for stations. It's funding is very important for local stations. I'm happy to talk about that. We chose to do this because it is a First Amendment issue. And what I mean by that is the executive order very clearly engages in what is called viewpoint discrimination, which is to say that the president has stated that NPR and PBS should not receive federal funding because he disagrees with our programming and our editorial choices in terms of the story selection that we cover or the way that we cover the news and therefore has said that federal funding shouldn't go to us because he accuses us of being unfair and biased.

13:33That is a matter of viewpoint discrimination. It is the action of withdrawing federal funding is retaliatory. And so this is a First Amendment issue. A spokesperson for the White House said that public broadcasting is, quote, creating media to support a particular political party on the taxpayer's dime. Therefore, the president is exercising his lawful authority to limit funding to NPR and PBS. The argument that the Trump administration has made is not new, right? Many Republicans have been attacking NPR as having a liberal bias for a while now. Last year, a former NPR editor also argued that there was left-leaning bias in the organization.

14:16And then just to broaden it out more recently, the Pew Research Center in a survey found that only 12 percent of Republicans say they trust NPR. Why do you think that is? Where does that perception that NPR is left-leaning come from? Well, that is at odds with what we see in our data around who listens to NPR and who comes to our website and who downloads our podcasts. As we look at the data of our audience, we see that it roughly matches the spread across the nation in terms of political belief. And so our audience is roughly a third self-identified as conservative, a third self-identified as independent or centrist, and a third self-identified as liberal or left, which is more or less the American demographic in terms of political belief.

15:04NPR says that data reflects the makeup of its digital audience or traffic to its website, podcasts, and NPR app. Marr also says that NPR reaches many rural communities in America, where people often don't have access to other local news sources. Public media steps into that gap and provides local reporting, local newsroom services, local programming, talk shows, local political affairs shows in ways that serve those communities directly. And so it's important to differentiate what people's response is to public radio as a whole and public media as a whole from the perception and conversation that's happening in a more politicized space about NPR.

15:53But is it really possible to divorce those two things, to separate them? Wouldn't the perception be a problem, especially for a news organization that receives government money? Well, I think there are a number of different things sort of packaged up in that. Perception is an issue, and we don't like being perceived as liberal. If you look at our reporting, we are consistently found to be centrist in reporting. Some of our shows programs that are produced that are non-news shows may feel as though they have a sort of cultural lens on them. But I want to be very clear that we are a nonpartisan news organization and make every effort to ensure that we have representatives of both major political parties on our air as frequently as possible, including this recent administration, which we view as a transformative administration elected by the American people that we have a responsibility to cover and reflect.

16:50So, yes, that is a concern. And I view that as something that needs to change in terms of that perception. Let me ask this bluntly. Why does NPR need federal funding? Oh, it's a great question, and I'm glad you asked it. I think it's so important that everybody listening understands public radio needs federal funding. Your local station needs federal funding. They are able, with those funds, to serve communities that would otherwise not be served by commercial media. They operate in communities that have lost their local newspapers in recent years. They also serve a universal access imperative, which is that 99.7 % of the American population is covered by public radio signal, which has an extraordinarily important role to play in emergency broadcasting, in extreme weather alerts.

17:51So from a national security perspective, that is tremendously important. NPR receives a tiny, tiny percentage of federal funding. But without federal funding, that really impacts stations and their ability to serve their role as part of the civic infrastructure of this country. And so could NPR and its local stations stay on air without that federal funding? You would start to see very large holes open up in the network if federal funding goes away. So some of those stations may have up to 50 percent of federal funding. You would see a significant impact on communities who have limited access or fewer options in terms of their ability to report and produce news.

18:36Many other stations would be forced to either reduce their coverage area, meaning that universal access promise and that emergency resilience promise would dissipate because you wouldn't have that 99.7 % coverage. You would see layoffs of journalists in local communities as well. And what ultimately that means is that cities and towns that are already well served by commercial media options would continue to likely be served. But cities and towns that are not well served would be the first ones to bear the brunt of the loss of federal funding. We started this conversation talking about NPR's lawsuit against the Trump administration.

19:16What is your contingency plan if it doesn't go your way? Well, when it comes to the lawsuit, we feel as though it's a really strong case. we are talking about fundamental First Amendment rights, in particular, the amount of precedent that is really quite robust in terms of finding in favor of private media organizations and private organizations in defense of those First Amendment rights around editorial point of view and the like. I say that because we feel really confident in the substance of our case, and that is what we are focused on.

19:56The Trump administration has been in conflict with a lot of other institutions over issues that the administration and the president disagrees with. And some major universities, some tech companies, even other media outlets have negotiated with the administration. Do you see a way to compromise here? Is that something you're considering? I don't believe that it behooves anyone to compromise on the independence of their organizations and their organization's missions. Particularly as a media organization, if you start negotiating or compromising on editorial point of view, what you're functionally doing is enabling external influence to color the way that stories are reported.

20:40And while it may well be that I may share some perspectives around the need for us to ensure a diversified audience and a representative range of voices, if I start negotiating with a government entity, official, president, now that raises questions about what other compromises might enter into our reporting. And so for me, that's a very bright line that a media organization should not cross.

21:17This episode has been updated. A previous version incorrectly said that PBS was the birthplace of Antiques Roadshow. The program was actually created by the BBC, and PBS licensed the show for an American spinoff.

21:35That's all for today, Thursday, May 29th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.