It’s bad enough that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting had been funneling millions in tax dollars to leftist propaganda mills NPR and PBS over the decades. But what if we were to tell you that the CPB funded one of America's "fact-checking" giants backed by George Soros responsible for censoring conservatives on social media platforms for years? Because that’s exactly what we’re about to tell you.

MRC Business discovered that the CPB, which is fully funded by tax dollars through federal appropriations, gave $599,330 to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in 2023 for an unknown purpose.

Poynter, which runs the left-tilting International Fact-Checking Network, was heavily invested in helping Big Tech platforms like Facebook widely censor "troublesome" opinions on the COVID-19 virus, amongst other topics, like elections and abortion. 

What’s worse is that liberal billionaires like George Soros, eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar and others are also some of IFCN’s most infamous financiers, further compounding the First Amendment concerns that government funds could have potentially been used to silence Americans.

This is not the only connection between Poynter and "public" broadcasting: their website PolitiFact has a partnership with the PBS News Hour. You can tell these are fast friends: PolitiFact has zero fact checks on anything said or written by PBS and NPR staffers. 

MRC Business released a study in February 2025 finding that government agencies had committed at least a collective $2.4 million into Poynter’s coffers through contracts, COVID-19 era Paycheck Protection Loan Program (PPP) loans, and grants between 2013 and 2025, during which time the IFCN was busy silencing Americans online through its fact-checks that were slapped on users’s posts by social media giants. It turns out that the CPB was involved in funding this censorship machine too.

CPB’s supposed purpose is to be “the steward of the federal government’s investment in public broadcasting and the largest single source of funding for public radio, television, and related online and mobile services.” A skeptic would immediately question: What does funding a censorship giant have to do with public broadcasting? But further investigation revealed that the CPB proudly publicized in June 2024 how it had selected Poynter to develop its Digital Transformation Program (DTP). 

“The initiative builds upon the success of the first Digital Transformation Program, also run by Poynter, which in 2022-23 trained 79 public media entities and 458 station personnel. As a result of the program, the participating stations generated more than $3.1 million in new digital revenue and acquired more than 10 million new digital audience users/subscribers,” CPB boasted. 

Poynter buries mention of its connection to CPB on its "Major Funders" page, but acknowledges its assistance in developing CPB's DTP program (as well its NPR connection):

• Corporation for Public Broadcasting
  • Teaching senior leaders from public media stations proven strategies to revolutionize their digital operations and culture through the Digital Transformation Program.
• National Public Radio 
  • Partnering through the shared values of truth and public accountability for a unique, multi-year contract in which Poynter senior vice president Kelly McBride serves as the NPR Public Editor

So Poynter, in effect, was getting CPB money while training personnel of lefty publicly-funded media to help expand their digital capabilities online, while it was busy working to censor conservative voices — er — online. 

How interesting that the liberal backers of "public broadcasting" were aggressively seeking to build an online empire, where no one can claim there's some "desert" of news content. 

In June 2025, the CPB didn’t beat around the bush concerning its relationship with Poynter: “CPB-funded Poynter Institute Advanced Track training fosters greater digital innovation and growth across public media.” It continued: “Twenty-five public media stations from across the country will begin training this week in the new 2025 Advanced Track of the second phase of the Digital Transformation Program (DTP), delivered by the Poynter Institute.”

What’s notable is that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg only terminated his company’s third-party fact-checking program with IFCN partners in 2025, after President Donald Trump won the 2024 election and the GOP gained full control of Congress. This begs the question whether CPB was aware that Poynter was running its Big Tech-supporting censorship operation when it chose to fuel its coffers with over half-a-million in tax dollars.

Even so, Google and its subsidiary YouTube had announced a partnership with IFCN in 2022 with at least $12 million in seed money to create a “Global Fact Check Fund to support worldwide fact-checking initiatives through 2025.” Both Google and YouTube’s censorship apparatus is also infamous in its own right.

Poynter caused outrage in 2019 when it tried to “blacklist” at least 29 conservative news outlets as “UnNews.” The list prominent right-leaning news sources such as Breitbart, Daily Signal, Daily Wire, Free Beacon, Judicial Watch, LifeNews, LifeSiteNews, LifeZette, LiveAction News, PJ Media, Project Veritas, Red State, The Blaze, Twitchy, and the Washington Examiner. Our Media Research Center and CNSNews.com sites were on the list. The public outcry was so fierce that Poynter retracted its “blacklist.”

MRC Business also unveiled in February 2023 that Poynter’s former IFCN associate director, Cristina Tardáguila, represented Poynter and its IFCN on the advisory panel of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which was also being funded by the federal government and Soros while it was doing its own blacklisting of conservative media. 

With a reputation this checkered on the free speech issue, the fact that the CPB opted to give Poynter grant money anyway is beyond disturbing. But they share an ardent desire to squelch an opposing viewpoint.

The MRC had finally succeeded in its 38-year long mission to get CPB’s (and NPR and PBS by extension) tax funding stripped after Congress passed President Donald Trump’s rescissions package to that effect. Now that it's revealed that CPB was collaborating with one of the most infamous censorship organizations in the business, it’s even more imperative that not a single dime of tax money ever goes towards funding that aberration ever again.