For more than half a century, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) claimed to be a guardian of public trust, a neutral steward of the people’s airwaves.

Established by Congress in 1967 with a clear mandate to stay nonpolitical and not support any political party, it was supposed to serve as an impartial vehicle for news and educational programming.

But that ideal — while noble — died long ago.

The CPB’s failure to uphold its mission has been obvious for decades.

By the 1990s, it was already clear to many on the right that something had gone awry.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich and other Republicans criticized CPB-funded outlets like National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) for adopting a liberal bias. Programming tilted unmistakably toward progressive narratives, often casting conservative positions in a negative light. Non-lefties sensed they weren’t the public being broadcast to.

That growing sense of betrayal turned to alarm in 2005, when Kenneth Tomlinson, then chairman of the CPB and a Bush appointee, openly accused PBS of ideological bias. He pointed to specific programming decisions as evidence that public broadcasting had become a left-leaning mouthpiece. Conservatives renewed their calls for reform, but little changed.

The 2010s brought a new wave of frustration. NPR’s reporting on immigration, policing, and gender issues regularly framed right-leaning viewpoints as backward or even dangerous. Its refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story, dismissing this as a distraction, and its coverage defending progressive causes like DEI intensified conservative accusations of bias.

AllSides, a media watchdog that tracks partisan bias, has more than once categorized what NPR runs online as “left-leaning.”

By the 2020s, one couldn’t ignore that public media was no longer “public” in any meaningful sense. It had become the communications arm of the progressive elite.

But it wasn’t until 2024 that the curtain was pulled back completely.

NPR senior editor Uri Berliner — far from a right-wing firebrand — blew the whistle on the ideological homogeneity inside his own newsroom. Berliner revealed that the network’s newsroom had 87 registered Democrats, and zero Republicans, in editorial roles. This confirmed long-held conservative suspicions of ideological imbalance. His critique provided damning evidence that NPR had abandoned the CPB’s statutory requirement for impartiality, fueling GOP momentum to defund it.

That imbalance wasn’t just statistical. It was cultural.

NPR’s President and CEO had gone so far as to label the pursuit of “truth” a distraction from the network’s higher goals. Editors were instructed to avoid scientifically grounded terms like “biological sex.” Instead, they prioritized DEI narratives and rejected coverage that might challenge their worldview. When the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin surfaced — later affirmed by the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Energy — NPR shut it down, deeming it conspiracy-laden nonsense.

This wasn’t journalism. It was propaganda — funded, insultingly, by the very taxpayers it marginalized.

PBS was no better. Over a mere six months, its flagship program NewsHour used terms like “far-right” 162 times, while mentioning “far-left” just six. That linguistic asymmetry didn’t go unnoticed. Nor did PBS’s decision to air a children’s program featuring drag performer Lil Miss Hot Mess, or a town hall co-hosted with CNN designed to sell one-sided narratives about race to children. PBS even aired a film titled Real Boy, glorifying a teenager’s “gender transition,” and showcased animal sexuality in a Valentine’s Day segment that imagined cartoon fish “changing genders.”

PBS chief executive Paula Kerger asserted her network strives to present multiple viewpoints. However, a Media Research Center study analyzed all 86 episodes of NewsHour from January 20, 2025 through May 19. It found that liberal-Democratic leaning guests outnumbered conservative-Republican ones by 173 to 41, a stark 4.2-to-1 ratio, with just 106 guests rated neutral or politically unrelated.

This imbalance was even more pronounced when excluding elected officials and political appointees, with liberal guests outnumbering conservatives 91 to 16, a 5.7-to-1 ratio. The study also noted that liberal journalists, such as those from The Atlantic, appeared ten times, while no conservative journalists were featured, highlighting PBS’s preference for left-leaning voices.

To non-lefty Americans, these weren’t harmless editorial choices. They were provocations. Political activism cloaked in the language of public-interest broadcasting. A taxpayer-funded insult aimed squarely at those footing the bill.

So when Donald Trump issued an executive order on May 1, titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” it struck a deep chord. The directive called on the CPB to halt all direct and indirect funding to NPR and PBS, citing their failure to deliver on the neutrality Congress mandated generations ago.

He wasn’t alone. Just weeks later, Trump pushed Congress to rescind CPB’s budget altogether—$1.1 billion in total—arguing that NPR and PBS had become “radical left echo chambers.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene echoed the sentiment, blasting the CPB’s embrace of “woke” programming.

The statistics backed them up. In addition to all aforementioned data, research showed that PBS’s coverage of the 2024 Republican National Convention was 72% negative, while its coverage of the Democratic Convention was 88% positive.

Congress listened. On July 17, 2025, the Senate passed a $9 billion rescission bill—$1.1 billion of which came from the CPB. Only two Republicans voted against it. The following day, the House finalized the legislation, zeroing out the CPB’s funding and sending the bill to Trump’s desk. He promptly signed it. Shortly thereafter, the CPB announced it would shut down, with most staff fired by September 30.

This wasn’t just a budgetary maneuver. It was a long-overdue reckoning.

NPR and PBS had long defended their subsidies by claiming to be essential public goods. But in the modern media landscape—rich with alternatives, from online platforms to cable news—their role is redundant at best, toxic at worst. As Trump’s executive order rightly pointed out, “government support for news outlets is unnecessary, outdated, and corrosive to journalistic independence.”

The order didn’t stop at cutting funds. It directed all federal agencies to review contracts and grants for compliance. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), among other agencies, was furthermore instructed to investigate whether NPR and PBS had engaged in unlawful discrimination.

Critics claim this is an attack on the free press. But there is no constitutional right to a government handout—especially not for media outlets that openly vilify half the country. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press, not a federal subsidy.

For millions of Americans who have watched their values mocked, their beliefs caricatured, and their tax dollars used to fund it all, this moment is long overdue. Public broadcasting had a chance to remain above the fray. Instead, it chose sides.

Now, the public is choosing too.

The CPB’s demise is not a tragedy. It’s accountability. It’s clarity. And for those tired of paying for content that brands them as the problem, it’s justice. Still, some of us who grew up watching PBS Kids, years later finding Frontline and NewsHour to be insightful, can’t help but feel sad that things have come to this. It would’ve been nice if leftists hadn’t worked day and night to alienate us. Today’s situation probably would be very different.

Regardless, let the marketplace of ideas decide what survives. Not Washington bureaucrats. Not left-wing activist “newsrooms.” And certainly not an agency that forgot who it was meant to serve in the first place.

Dr. Joseph Ford Cotto hosts and produces News Sight, speaking the data-driven truth about economic and political issues that impact you. During the 2024 presidential election, he created the Five-Point Forecast, which correctly predicted Trump's national victory and the outcome in all swing states. The author of numerous nonfiction books, Cotto holds a doctorate in business administration and is a Lean Six Sigma Certified Black Belt. During 2014, HLM King Kigeli V of Rwanda bestowed a hereditary knighthood upon him. It was followed by a barony the next year.

Image: Logo// fair use