‘I’m going to continue fighting to defund these propaganda outlets,’ Representative Brandon Gill told NR.
Representative Brandon Gill (R., Texas) said Thursday he believes National Public Radio has no right to push left-wing propaganda at the expense of American taxpayers, just one day after his viral exchange with NPR CEO Katherine Maher in which he exposed the publicly funded news outlet for its biased reporting.
Gill questioned Maher during a hearing before the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Wednesday about a series of racially charged social media posts she made in 2020. Maher joined NPR last year. The hearing was held to address the left-wing bias demonstrated by NPR and PBS and to consider whether they should continue receiving federal funding.
Asked about his impression of Maher, Gill told National Review, she’s an “example of a pseudo-intellectual liberal who has no substance to her whatsoever. She can speak in woke vernacular, but there’s nothing beyond that.”
In a viral exchange, the freshman congressman questioned whether the witness believes white people should pay reparations to blacks. Maher responded, “I have never said that, sir.” Proving otherwise, Gill cited one of her tweets.
“Yes, the North, yes all of us, yes America. Yes, our original collective sin and unpaid debt. Yes, reparations. Yes, on this day,” Maher wrote in January 2020, months before George Floyd’s death sparked Black Lives Matter riots that summer.
Backtracking from denying the statement, Maher then disputed that she referred to fiscal reparations. When pressed on what she meant by “reparations,” she claimed the term was “a reference to the idea that we all owe much to the people who came before us.”
Gill didn’t know what to make of her vague answer, calling it “bizarre.” Maher added she has never paid reparations nor is she asking anyone else to do so.
“She has the right to believe whatever she wants, however idiotic it may be,” Gill said. “And she has the right to use this weird woke language if she would like, but she doesn’t have the right to do it and NPR does not have the right to promote left-wing propaganda at taxpayers’ expense.”
The media executive also claimed she couldn’t recall reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2014 Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” even though she admitted planning to read it during her day off of work at the time.
“‘America begins in black plunder and white democracy,'” she posted, citing a quote from the article. “I appreciate the day off today to finally fully read The Case for Reparations.”
Speaking with National Review, Gill said he suspected it was more likely that she lied about reading it to virtue signal to her peers than lying under oath before Congress.
Additionally, Maher was asked about her defense of looting during the 2020 racial riots against police. In May of that year, she described widespread looting as “counterproductive” and said “it’s hard to be mad” about the damage of businesses because private property is part of “a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.”
Five years later, she stood by her characterization but also condemned looting as morally wrong and illegal.
In 2020, NPR promoted a book called In Defense of Looting. Maher told Gill she was unaware of the book or the article in which it was promoted because that came well before she joined NPR.
President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers want to defund NPR and PBS, alleging they exhibit bias against conservatives and waste taxpayer dollars on peddling gender ideology and diversity, equity, and inclusion. The outlets also fall short of journalistic integrity through their reporting, or lack thereof.
In the case of NPR, coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story was ignored weeks before the 2020 presidential election. Maher acknowledged the radio network was “mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner.”
Former NPR editor Uri Berliner shed some light on the outlet’s decision to forgo coverage of the controversy surrounding former President Joe Biden’s adult son. In a Free Press essay published last April, Berliner wrote that NPR ignored it “because it could help Trump” and disregarded the facts reported by the New York Post before the laptop information was later confirmed and independently verified.
Berliner left NPR for the Free Press shortly after Maher started her new job. Prior to her time at NPR, Maher served as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation from 2016 to 2021.
Public opinion largely remains in favor of the two outlets in spite of the alleged bias. A new Pew Research Center study found that while 24 percent say the NPR and PBS should be defunded, 43 percent of Americans say the federal government should continue funding the networks. The remaining 33 percent are unsure. Meanwhile, Democrats tend to trust NPR and PBS as news sources more than Republicans.
Both organizations primarily get their funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an independent company that Congress established in 1967 and continues funding to this day. Each fiscal year, the corporation receives about $500 million that it then funnels down to NPR and PBS.
Gill believes because both NPR and PBS promote left-wing ideologies and therefore amount to “state-sponsored media,” their funding should be cut by Congress.
Maher is “emblematic of the intellectual and moral rot in our elite institutions, and the fact that these institutions are oftentimes subsidized by taxpayers just adds insult to injury,” he said. “And we’re going to fight to stop it.”