Trump is right about NPR's news bias and is justified in wanting to pull funding | Opinion
NPR will fight the Trump administration for federal funding. It should fight its own bias first.
NPR is suing the Trump administration in response to the president's executive order revoking funding to the nonprofit broadcasting company.
The public radio company joins the ranks of Harvard University, which is also suing the administration for revoking its research grants. As much as the American left wants to argue that this is an unwarranted retaliation against public broadcasting and education, it isn’t. Trump is just the first president willing to step into the ring with an obviously biased publication masquerading as nonpartisan.
Organizations that don’t want to be subjected to the whims of government should cut the strings attaching them to government funding. The fact that a hostile administration could target NPR's funding was always part of the arrangement. The best way to avoid that happening is to avoid federal funds.
Trump’s road to pulling funding is murky, but NPR’s arguments are weak
Debates over whether Trump should do these things are absolutely valid, and I’m sympathetic to points on both sides, even if I think the NPR and Harvard checks need to stop. Another area of concern is whether the president can pull this funding.
In the case of NPR, much of their case is bogus. NPR charges that Trump's revocation of funding is in violation of the First Amendment, which is obviously ridiculous on its face. There is no First Amendment right for any organization to take public money.
NPR also says Trump cannot revoke funding based on his viewpoint. But there is a Supreme Court precedent to back Trump up here.
"It is well established that the government can make content-based distinctions when it subsidizes speech," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in a 2007 decision.
Plus, it should be clear that if presidents can fund programs they are sympathetic toward, they can revoke that funding for programs they disagree with.
The sole question remaining to be answered in the case of NPR concerns the wording of the statute that created the institution. NPR’s lawyer argues that the statute creating NPR requires Congress to be the one to defund it, and it is its best argument. It is very likely that this is the argument that forces a prolonged legal battle.
I don't know the answer to that debate, but whether courts decide that Trump defund NPR himself, Congress should step in.
If it turns out that Trump does not have the authority to revoke NPR’s funding, Congress should take it upon itself, though that seems unlikely. The happier ending is that NPR amends its practices in a way that satisfies the administration, avoiding the messy legal battle that appears imminent.
Funding being pulled from all of these groups was inevitable
Trump isn’t the first Republican to embrace defunding NPR, and 44% of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents agree with defunding both NPR and PBS. It is, however, unheard of in terms of actual action.
Nobody is entitled to federal money forever; its distribution is subject to change based on the government viewing it going to a worthwhile cause. Any institution that accepts federal money is agreeing to the conditions of that money, and one of those conditions is that it will only continue so long as the government continues to view it as a good investment.
Any promise of funding was always subject to a hostile administration coming along and revoking it.
Only about 1% of NPR’s funding comes directly from the federal government, though it receives more indirectly through fees paid by its local member stations.
If these institutions want to remain independent of the government, they should sever their financial ties. Doing so will make them freer in pursuing their own mission without the burden of kowtowing to the government to receive their checks. Trump is simply the first one to have exposed this as a vulnerability for NPR.
NPR and Harvard do not deserve federal funds
Trump is right that NPR is unworthy of federal funds because of its bias against Republicans, and also spot on about Harvard's campus climate in response to the Israeli war in Gaza.
There's little dispute NPR has had a slant against Republicans; that much has been clear for years. It helped to stretch the Russian collusion narrative against Trump, it ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story to the benefit of Joe Biden, and it took years to admit that the COVID-19 lab leak theory was even plausible.
However, in the case of NPR, it doesn’t even technically matter if bias is real or not, even though there demonstrably is. All that matters is the perception of bias from one side of the American political spectrum. In 2023, just 11% of NPR’s listeners were conservative.
If the purported claim of federal support for NPR is to build “a more informed public,” then it is failing. It is instead creating a more informed left, armed with the news coverage activists need to bolster their perspective, but not the coverage to challenge their view. Such an organization is not worthy of federal funds.
Nor can it be overlooked in the other case that Harvard botched its handling of the response to the Israeli war against Hamas since the attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. Jewish students have reported being shunned on campus, antisemitic cartoons being circulated, and even being silenced from talking about their holocaust surviving grandparents by student groups
An institution fostering an unsafe environment for Jewish students is not worthy of federal funding, regardless of the “good” produced by its research. No matter how many institutional statements are issued, taxpayer dollars should be withheld until Harvard (as well as other universities’) environments improve.
Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for Paste BN and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.