In a bold and necessary move, President Donald Trump has pledged to cancel federal funding for National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Many argue about whether public media deserves government support, but the most urgent reason for defunding NPR and PBS is simple: their biased and harmful reporting about the Israel-Hamas conflict. These government-funded outlets have promoted a one-sided narrative that paints Israel as an aggressor while ignoring the brutality of Hamas. This bias has contributed directly to the wave of antisemitic incidents across the United States.
After the October 7th attack—when Hamas terrorists murdered over 1,200 people, including children, and kidnapped hundreds more—NPR ran a segment that chose to explain Hamas’s motives instead of condemning their actions. Rather than focus on the victims of these attacks, NPR aired an interview with Mkhaimar Abusada, a political analyst in Gaza who has repeatedly justified violence against Israel.
NPR portrayed him simply as an “activist” for Palestinian rights, downplaying his history of promoting armed resistance. Abusada blamed the violence on “75 years of aggression” by Israel, repeating a narrative that ignores decades of peace offers and Israeli withdrawals from territories like Gaza.
In fact, Israel left Gaza entirely in 2005, dismantling all settlements and removing thousands of Israelis. Despite this, NPR provided a platform for the idea that violence is the natural response to Israeli actions, just weeks after a massacre of civilians.
Government-funded media should not provide favorable interviews with those who justify terrorism. Yet that’s exactly what NPR did, not once referring to Hamas as a terrorist group, despite its formal designation as such by the U.S. State Department, the European Union, and others.
NPR repeatedly uses terms like “militants” or “fighters,” as noted by the media watchdog CAMERA, while its internal guidelines tell reporters to avoid the word “terrorism” because it implies the victims were “innocent.” That logic is insulting to the families of murdered Israeli civilians and shows how deeply NPR’s reporting is shaped by ideology.
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PBS has followed the same pattern. Recent reporting on the Gaza war routinely cites death tolls from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry without making clear that the numbers do not distinguish between terrorists and civilians. For example, one PBS report claimed over 54,000 people had been killed, “mostly women and children,” relying entirely on Hamas-provided statistics.
But Israel’s own numbers, released in January 2025, confirmed that over 20,000 of the dead were Hamas fighters, plus at least 3,000 more from other terror groups. Many more have died since.
Worse, their coverage routinely omits the core facts behind Israel’s military operations. PBS rarely reports that Israel imposed its blockade of Gaza only after Hamas violently began launching waves of rocket attacks targeting civilian areas. Since the October 7th attack, Hamas has fired over 30,000 rockets into Israeli towns and cities, including Sderot, Ashkelon, and Tel Aviv.
PBS also avoids mentioning the Hamas Charter, which in its original 1988 version explicitly called for the murder of Jews, and even in its 2017 revision continued to frame “armed resistance” as a religious obligation—openly endorsing
NPR’s reporting on the October 17 Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion was especially reckless. Correspondent Daniel Estrin cited unverified social media footage—some sourced from Al Jazeera, the Qatari state-funded outlet that has a documented history of pro-Hamas sympathies—and echoed claims that Israel had bombed the hospital.
Estrin failed to independently verify the videos and did not highlight that both the Israel Defense Forces and respected open-source intelligence analysts, such as Bellingcat and GeoConfirmed, concluded the blast was caused by a failed rocket launched from within Gaza by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This failure to prioritize factual accuracy over sensationalism misled millions.
College students and young Americans rely heavily on platforms like NPR and PBS to shape their understanding of complex international conflicts. When those outlets distort events or omit crucial context, they misinform an entire generation. On college campuses nationwide, Jewish students have faced verbal abuse, physical intimidation, and threats in the wake of anti-Israel protests. Skewed reporting has contributed directly to a climate where antisemitic harassment is normalized or excused.
Why should American taxpayers underwrite that?
Public broadcasting was once a hallmark of integrity and educational value. Today, when taxpayer-funded media downplay terrorism and justify the actions of a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization, they betray that mission. NPR and PBS are no longer neutral news outlets—they are political actors shaping a dangerously one-sided narrative.
The federal government should not be in the business of funding propaganda that emboldens extremists and endangers Jewish communities. If NPR and PBS wish to promote editorial lines that excuse terror and vilify America's democratic allies, they can do so without taxpayer support.