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In 1971, National Public Radio was born. Its original mission was to “promote personal growth rather than corporate gain” and “speak with many voices, many dialects.”
In other words, NPR valued the most important diversity of all: that of thought in its quest to inform the public as an unbiased news source. Unfortunately, the original plan didn’t last long, with both entities hiring activists posing as journalists to push them hard to the left.
In 2025, not long after Donald Trump became president once again and Republicans controlled the House (barely) and the Senate, NPR and PBS were defunded of any federal dollars, and rightly so. Both outlets pushed back, insisting that taxpayer money was essential for their existence. But the fact was that NPR received funding for less than 1% of its budget directly from the federal government, and overall, received almost 10% of its budget from federal, state, and local governments indirectly. A loss of federal government assistance or of funds from state and local budgets would not be the final nail it was portrayed to be.
In recent years, both “news organizations” have gone completely off the rails. Take what happened on July 4, 2022. For 33 years prior, NPR celebrated the Declaration of Independence by reading the entire document for its audiences across the country.
But that year, it decided to end its tradition to instead talk about Thomas Jefferson‘s relationship with Sally Hemings, a slave, and all of the children born out of that relationship. Why do this? To examine Jefferson’s famous line in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” NPR used it to somehow pivot to what it means in modern America following the Supreme Court ruling that struck down Roe v. Wade.
“And many of our debates on this July 4th turn on what equality means. What voting rules really give equal access to the ballot? Do abortion laws give a woman equal control of her body?” host Steve Inskeep asked.
Of course, Inskeep didn’t ask about the rights of an unborn baby during an abortion. But why let such a pesky narrative get in the way of a pious presentation? And I’m not sure Inskeep heard at the time, but “equal access” and voting rights were (and are) thriving in states like Georgia, which then-President Joe Biden and members of his party referred to as Jim Crow 2.0, after the state passed new voter laws in 2021.
Jefferson wasn’t around for radio in any capacity, but the forward-thinking author of the country’s most important document knew it was bad news for the government to fund what NPR has become today.
“To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagations of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical,” he once wrote.
According to Pew Research, NPR and PBS, which is also taxpayer-funded, top the list of having audiences that are mostly “consistently liberal.” NPR clocks in at 72% of its audience describing themselves that way, while PBS’s audience is 71% “consistently liberal.”
And this may explain why NPR and PBS are not going to even attempt to present the news in a fair and balanced way in 2026. Exhibit A is media critic Eric Deggans’s NPR op-ed this month, which felt more like unintentional comedy than sober analysis.
“The Trump administration’s racist language will challenge news outlets,” Deggans said.
In a related story, Deggans is the author of a book literally titled Race Baiter, which decries what he deems as “conservative media” engaging in racist rhetoric. And yes, this is the same Deggans who accused Charlie Kirk of engaging in “sexist and racist” language not long after Kirk was assassinated. And it’s the same Deggans who believes that Claudine Gay, Harvard president and serial plagiarist, was only fired over her skin color.
Anyway, this week, Deggans alleged that Vice President JD Vance “has used language about white pride that some politicians feel comes too close to the language utilized by white supremacists.”
Come again?
Here’s the quote Deggans referred to from Vance at a Turning Point USA event last year after Kirk’s death:
“In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”
Not exactly a chant one would hear at your average KKK rally, is it?
Meanwhile, NPR President Katherine Maher has called Trump a “fascist and a deranged racist sociopath.” Photos also exist of her wearing a “Biden 2020 hat” before that presidential election.
PBS has been no better. Here’s exhibit B (for bias): The PBS NewsHour used the term “far-right” to describe Republicans/conservatives 162 times, according to a Newsbusters.org study, while “far-left” was applied to Democrats/liberals only six times, or 27 times less. And it’s all international.
Given that background, it’s as predictable as the sun rising in the east that NPR and PBS are covering anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis about as unevenly as it gets in journalism.
On PBS, enter David Brooks, who vehemently opposes Trump, calling Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations “an armed occupation” where officers behave with “violent abandon.”
“We’re coming close to something like an armed occupation of an American state by the American federal government. There are 3,000 ICE officers in Minneapolis, which is like five times the number of police officers. And they are behaving with reckless and violent abandon,” Brooks said.
Former President Barack Obama deported 3 million people during the course of his administration. He didn’t do it this way. He did it with people who were just coming over the border or people who were criminals.
Perhaps the reason why Obama was able to deport so many people without resistance or protests is that legacy media rightly treated ICE and its mission as a good thing. CNN even did a ride-along with ICE in 2016, all praising its efforts without any criticism.
“Just before the sun rises in the Windy City, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents fan out across Chicago to arrest criminals in the U.S. illegally,” reporter Pamela Brown explained as the segment began. “CNN was granted exclusive access to witness some of those raids.”
Brown went on to call illegal immigrants being arrested in the raids “criminal aliens.”
How times have changed.
NPR also didn’t disappoint, referring to agitators who recently stormed church services as “peaceful” and didn’t mention anything about this disruptive action being illegal, the FLAG Act, and the Ku Klux Klan Act. Former CNN “anchor”-turned-activist Don Lemon, who aided the protesters by handing out coffee and donuts before they stormed the church, was not even mentioned in the report.
And then there’s the story out of Minneapolis of a 5-year-old boy being “detained” by ICE. Here’s how NPR framed it: “On Wednesday in the northern suburb of Columbia Heights, federal officers detained a 5-year-old boy, who lawyers for the family say was used as ‘bait’ to draw family members out of their home. Officials with the Columbia Heights Public School District say federal agents have detained three other students, all under 18, in recent weeks.”
NPR went on to quote seven people attacking ICE as authoritarian thugs without one request for comment from ICE or any supporters of the agency. If this were a journalism 101 class on “The Basics of Reporting”, an F-minus would be in tow for failing to get both sides of the story.
As for the 5-year-old, ICE officers had no choice but to take him into custody because, after his father was arrested, the only other option was to leave the child out in subzero temperatures without a parent or guardian.
HOW TRUMP CAN FLIP THE SCRIPT ON THE ICE WARS
PBS and NPR may no longer receive your taxpayer dollars, but it hasn’t changed a thing when it comes to agenda-driven, amateur-hour reporting.
The good news is that so few are tuning in, its influence, like dollars from the federal government, has completely dried up.
