White House Takes Aim at Public Broadcasting & NPR Bias

The White House upped the ante this week as it continues to make its case for defunding Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio (NPR) for their longstanding liberal bias at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.

In a press release the White House listed several examples of programs the networks produced that had a decidedly liberal bias.

• In 2024, 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.”
• In 2024, PBS produced a documentary making the case for reparations.
• In 2023, PBS’s Washington Week roundtable covered up Joe Biden’s clear mental decline, with far-left “journalist” Jeff Goldberg claiming Biden is actually “quite acute.”
• In 2022, NPR educated the nation on the “whole community of genderqueer dinosaur enthusiasts” and “trans-ceratops.”
• In 2021, a PBS station aired a “children’s program” that featured a drag queen named “Lil’ Miss Hot Mess.”
• In 2021, NPR reported on the “cousin of diet culture” known as “healthism, which is the idea that we have to be healthy” — as if that was a bad thing.
• In 2021, NPR suggested doorway sizes are based on “latent fatphobia.”
• In 2021, NPR lamented that “animals deserve pronouns, too.”
• In 2022, NPR ran a feature titled “What ‘Queer Ducks’ can teach teenagers about sexuality in the animal kingdom.”
• In 2020, PBS show Sesame Street partnered with CNN for a town hall aimed presenting children with a one-sided narrative to “address racism” amid the Black Lives Matter riots.
• In 2020, NPR explored “the racial origins of fat phobia.”
• In 2017, NPR ran a story titled “Cannibalism: It’s ‘Perfectly Natural,’” in which an author describes eating another human’s placenta: “It was really the prep that made it taste good. Granted, the [husband] was a chef and so he knew how to prepare it osso bucco style and used a really nice wine I had brought. It smelled great. It didn’t taste bad.”
• In 2017, PBS aired a panel devoted to what it “mean[s] to be woke” and “white privilege.”
• In 2017, PBS produced an entire movie celebrating a transgender teenager’s so-called “changing gender identity.”
• In 2015, NPR dedicated an entire segment to the “population of anthropomorphic animal enthusiasts known as ‘furries.’”

Ruby Calvert chairwoman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting told the Cowboy State Daily that it is inevitable that their will be some kind of bias in PBS and NPR programming

“Are there going to be stories that slant right or left? Yes,” she said. “I think you have to keep everything in perspective with the claims of NPR and PBS.”

Defenders of NPR and PBS have struggled to offer examples of the networks producing right-leaning programs or viewpoints because they’re nonexistent.

Conservatives have been calling for reduced or the complete elimination of federal funding for both networks for decades but have been unsuccessful until now. This time could be different.