Republicans push to defund accessible free news and children’s programming

As of 2022, the U.S. spent a few dollars per person per year — $3.16 — on public broadcasting. Meanwhile, the U.K. spent $81.30. 

Still, Republicans are moving to eliminate funding for free and accessible programming in a move that’s likely to gut funding for rural public media stations and broadcasting focused on serving underserved audiences. 

During a Mar. 26 Congressional hearing, Republican legislators maligned NPR and PBS efforts to diversify sourcing as “racism”, spouted anti-trans rhetoric, and diminished the utility of public media when rural areas “have an Internet connection.” The next day, following a promise from Marjorie Taylor Greene to “completely and totally defund and dismantle” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Representative Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) introduced legislation to do exactly that. 

The hearing saw a fixation on national stories over local impact — Russian collusion, the Hunter Biden laptop, and reporting on the Wuhan COVID-19 leak. It focused on demonizing coverage about sex and gender that Americans can choose not to listen to, while glossing over support for states’ emergency systems and self-paced educational resources. 

“When you have a DOGE and Pony show, that’s the distraction from what’s really going on, which is that this is about dismantling progress that was made for equal rights,” said representatives of Public Media for All, a community of public media professionals advocating for a public media representative of those historically mischaracterized and underserved. The representatives spoke to The Objective anonymously, for reasons of job security. 

“This is about dismantling progress that was made for the fourth estate,” they said. “And this is a part of a cycle.”

The CPB was established in 1967, when then-President Lyndon B. Johnson signed an act of the same name. Funding for NPR and PBS is a complex mix of CPB support, major donor gifts to specific stations, local small-dollar recurring donations, underwriting, and, in some cases, licensee agreements with local universities. 

Federal funding is a minor part of the total federal budget and makes up very little of public broadcasting’s budget. Last year, the CPB provided $535 million in funding to NPR and PBS stations. 

But the bulk of that money goes toward stations operating in rural areas. That’s in part because from the beginning, “public media and television programming was intended to meet “the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities” and mandated to be accessible to every American. 

Part of that accessibility for NPR has included working on a diverse sources base and tracking source demographics, which Greene said “embeds DEI into the fibers of its content … sounds like racism to me.” Yet collecting and analyzing that data has helped NPR stories to more accurately reflect the U.S.’s current demographics. 

NPR member and PBS affiliate stations are often the sole source of local news in an area.

“People in rural parts of America, places where they can’t afford to make private donations to support their local journalism, those [stations and communities] will be harmed,” said Maher, the CEO of NPR. “The additional harm is that Americans in places that are affluent or [who] do have many media choices will not be able to hear from their fellow Americans that are often underheard.” 

Heritage Foundation senior fellow Michael Gonzalez, who wrote a section in Project 2025 advocating to defund CPB, presented at the hearing. His appearance matches up with the plan’s stated goals: questioning the legitimacy of and weakening the press while decreasing access to education. 

Attacks on CPB in its 57-year tenure are hardly new. Fred Rogers, of titular Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fame, went to The Hill to argue against the Nixon White House’s proposal to halve funds for public media — less than two years after CPB was established. 

In the six-minute testimony, Rogers laid out the cost of his show ($6,000, after funding from Sears Roebuck Foundation, National Educational Television, and public television stations) and shared the particulars of his program.

“This is what I give,” he said. “I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique.” 

Instead of focusing on someone like Mr. Rogers, Republicans named specific public media stories — even if only to denigrate — and fearmongering about their impact, while questioning Maher and PBS CEO Paula Kerger. 

While Maher mentioned NPR being the only major news outlet with a veterans’ reporter whose reporting is free, the Public Media for All representatives called it one among “a lot of missed opportunities” to mention the impact of that reporter’s work: For example, policy change to the Veterans Affairs’ administration of their home loan program happened thanks in part to his reporting. 

Despite a plethora of Internet-accessible sources of information, the Public Media for All representatives pointed out that in many states, broadband access is still disparate despite bipartisan efforts to bridge the gap.

Greene’s testimony ignored the fact that many rural areas have little access to emergency information outside of public broadcasting. “NPR and PBS have increasingly become radical, Left-wing echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy, white, urban liberals and progressives, who generally look down on and judge rural America,” Green said during the hearing. 

And when Hurricane Helene hit Asheville, N.C. last fall, people used crank radios or car batteries to listen to Blue Ridge Public Radio broadcasts, which were initially the only source of information they could access. 

Both NPR and PBS function primarily as a network of locally owned and operated stations, which each exercise their own local autonomy and editorial judgment. PBS local stations worked to create free online educational resources aligning with local school curricula at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. That archive remains in place with both student and teacher sites. 

Plus, the Federal Emergency Management Agency works with public radio and broadcasting to send out emergency alerts, with the NPR-managed Public Radio Satellite System and NPR named as resources in at least 20 states’ emergency plans. 

Per a Pew Research Center study conducted in mid-March 2025, a majority of respondents who identify as leaning Republican or firmly Republican were either unsure about or not in favor of removing all funding from public broadcasting.

“If you see it as bizarro, incredible, unseen-ever-before, all of those speaks to the progress in the work and the strides that have been made to get to this point,” the Public Media for All representatives said.

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James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective and the podcast producer for The Sick Times. This story was edited by Gabe Schneider.