Trump demands NPR funding cut over bias accusation

Former President Donald Trump, who is running another campaign for the White House, demanded this week that funding be cut from National Public Radio (NPR) after a longtime NPR editor accused the network of espousing left-wing bias.

“NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM! EDITOR SAID THEY HAVE NO REPUBLICANS, AND IS ONLY USED TO ‘DAMAGE TRUMP.’ THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!” Trump said in a post to Truth Social on Wednesday.

The Free Press published an op-ed on Tuesday in which NPR Senior Business Editor Uri Berliner argued NPR “lost America’s trust” with its increasingly liberal bent. Despite his critique, Berliner said “defunding” was not the way to address the “missteps” he outlined.

“As the country becomes more fractured, there’s still a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith. Defunding, as a rebuke from Congress, wouldn’t change the journalism at NPR. That needs to come from within,” he said.

Multiple times during his presidency, Trump proposed reining in funding for public media, but Congress did not take him up on the cuts. If he is re-elected this year, that could change. As noted in a POLITICO report after the House blocked the advancement of a FISA bill that Trump opposed, the former president is “tightening his stranglehold on the congressional GOP’s policy agenda.”

When NPR ditched Twitter (now X) last year after being slapped with labels linking it to the U.S. government, the network insisted it “receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” Still, on its website, NPR says federal funding is “essential” and that ending it “would result in fewer programs, less journalism — especially local journalism—and eventually the loss of public radio stations, particularly in rural and economically distressed communities.”

In his op-ed, Berliner talked about how the “rise of advocacy took off” when Trump got elected to the White House in the 2016 election when he defeated Hillary Clinton.

“As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly),” Berliner said. “But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.”

Berliner discussed how NPR interviewed Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) dozens of times, during which he often spoke about there being evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia, but the network offered up “notably sparse” coverage when Robert Mueller’s special counsel report released in 2019 found “no credible evidence of collusion” and let Russiagate “fade” from its programming.

“It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens,” Berliner said. “You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.”

The editor shared an anecdote about the Hunter Biden laptop story, which emerged prior to the 2020 election, saying it was “newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.”

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Berliner also said he found 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans working editorial positions in D.C., where NPR is headquartered, but when he shared the data in a staff meeting and suggested there was a diversity problem, “the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference.”

NPR Editor-in-Chief Edith Chapin released a statement saying that she and her colleagues on the leadership team “strongly disagree with Uri’s assessment of the quality of our journalism and the integrity of our newsroom processes.” She also said, “We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories.”

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