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--:-- Ryan Knutson: Welcome to The Journal. I'm Ryan Knutson.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And I'm Jessica Mendoza.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Today, we're talking about the fight between National Public Radio and the Trump administration. President Trump signed an executive order in May cutting off federal funding for public broadcasters, including NPR and PBS.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: That's right. And we're joined by our colleague Joe Flint, who covers media and entertainment.
--:-- Joe Flint: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So one aspect of the fight is the idea or question of whether the government should continue to help fund public media.
--:-- Joe Flint: That's right. So there's been many attempts over the last several decades to end public funding. And Trump has just put it on the forefront. He has pretty much said, I feel that they are biased. Hence, we shouldn't support them with taxpayer money.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: But for NPR CEO Catherine Marr, this fight is about more than funding. It is our responsibility as a media organization, when the principle of the free press is challenged, to challenge back.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Thursday, May 29th.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Coming up on the show, NPR versus the Trump administration.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The federal government got into the public media game in 1967 with the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act.
--:-- Joe Flint: The act created a private nonprofit called the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that would act as a steward for public media.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: PBS was founded two years later and has been home to legendary programs like Sesame Street, Antiques Roadshow, and the PBS NewsHour.
--:-- Joe Flint: NPR, launched in 1970, is known for its news and culture radio programs and eventually podcasts.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And I should mention, I worked at NPR for about one year on one of those podcasts as an editor.
--:-- Joe Flint: Well, I probably started getting criticized sometime a few days after the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 was signed.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Funding was threatened from as early as 1969.
--:-- Joe Flint: Fred Rogers himself, host of the classic children's show Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, testified before Congress to defend the importance of public broadcasting.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I'm constantly concerned about what our children are seeing.
--:-- Joe Flint: And for 15 years, I have tried in this country and Canada to present what I feel is a meaningful expression of care.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: But I think we really began to see a push about funding public media in the 90s.
--:-- Joe Flint: Newt Gingrich wanted to end funding for public media.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: George W. Bush also at one point made remarks about whether there was a need to fund public media.
--:-- Joe Flint: Mitt Romney when he was running.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The things I like PBS, I love Big Bird, actually like you too, but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for us.
--:-- Joe Flint: And now Trump.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The kind of money that's being wasted and it's a very biased view, you know that better than anybody, and I'd be honored to see it end.
--:-- Joe Flint: You may have noticed a pattern here.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: It seems to be Republicans who want to explore this idea of cutting funding for public media because their idea is, you know, we have so many challenges and so many debts and everything else.
--:-- Joe Flint: Why do we need to fund public media when there's so many options for the consumer out there?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: As far as federal budget appropriations go, public media is a pretty small bucket.
--:-- Joe Flint: Congress had allocated $535 million a year for public broadcasting over the next two fiscal years.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: About 70% of that money goes to more than 1,500 local public stations across the country.
--:-- Joe Flint: How important is this money for local stations?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Well, I think it really depends on the particular markets.
--:-- Joe Flint: So you're in D.C., I'm in L.A.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: We're in big markets, the public stations here and in D.C. don't rely as much on those funds from CPB the way smaller market stations do.
--:-- Joe Flint: But you go out into smaller markets and you might be talking about 15 20 percent of their funding comes from the corporation
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And so if they lose that money a lot of these stations of course produce their own local content.
--:-- Joe Flint: They're covering town halls.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: They're covering the markets they're in.
--:-- Joe Flint: They're doing their own TV shows.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And so without that funding, they won't be able to make as much or do other services inside a town that they might provide.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: This year, the long-simmering tension over these funds came to a head.
--:-- Joe Flint: In March, Congress called on the CEOs of both NPR and PBS to give testimony on their network's content.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Which some Republicans say is biased.
--:-- Joe Flint: Well, in the spring, there was a hearing chaired by Marjorie Taylor Greene to discuss the bias in public media.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: This hearing of the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency will come to order.
--:-- Joe Flint: And these hearings happen every few years, and they are somewhat predictable.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Entertaining, but predictable.
--:-- Joe Flint: You will have Republicans telling us that the political bias of NPR and PBS is outrageous and that they carry a lot of children's content that isn't necessarily appropriate for children.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: That they are pushing an agenda and a culture that they don't feel should be pushed to their kids.
--:-- Joe Flint: So these things quickly turn into kind of a lot of broad attacks.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting that we give over half a billion dollars to no longer serves the public.
--:-- Joe Flint: They asked us not to consider that the Hunter Biden laptop was real.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: They dismissed what was always the most probable theory of the COVID lab leak from Wuhan.
--:-- Joe Flint: I feel like it's propaganda.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I feel like there's disinformation every time I listen to NPR.
--:-- Joe Flint: The hearing quickly turned into that sort of thing.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: One side is attacking them for their politics.
--:-- Joe Flint: The other side is defending Sesame Street.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So the message I think today is very, very simple.
--:-- Joe Flint: If we're going to get rid of any puppeteers, we should get rid of the one that's actually controlling Donald Trump.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Fire Elon Musk and save Elmo.
--:-- Joe Flint: And with that, I yield back.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: It sounds like this happens, as you said, every few years.
--:-- Joe Flint: What was different this time?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Well, these things, usually there's hearings, there's lots of talk, but they don't go anywhere.
--:-- Joe Flint: And one of the reasons they don't go anywhere is there are even a lot of Republican lawmakers from rural areas that count heavily on those public media stations.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So they also may not be in the biggest rush to get rid of them because they're important to their constituents.
--:-- Joe Flint: We have a president right now who is very confident in his ability to get what he wants through executive order, through muscling his way through situations.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And so he issued in May, early May, an executive order saying that all funding for public media should stop.
--:-- Joe Flint: The order came a few weeks after the White House released a memo with the title, The NPR-PBS grift has ripped us off for too long.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: In it, the Trump administration accuses NPR and PBS of spreading, quote, radical woke propaganda disguised as news.
--:-- Joe Flint: Would you say specific to NPR, is there a sense that maybe NPR did get more liberal or more perceived to be so?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I think there's certainly a perception that over the last 20 years, NPR has gotten more liberal.
--:-- Joe Flint: Former NPR employee, Uri Berliner, of course, wrote a piece for the Free Press many months ago, outlining, in his view, just how liberal NPR has become over the last decade.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: At the time, NPR's news leadership team strongly rejected Berliner's assessment, saying in a memo to staff that they are, quote, proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories.
--:-- Joe Flint: A Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year found that 12% of Republicans say they trust NPR as a source of news, compared to 47% of Democrats.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: You know, the NPR audience tends to be an urban audience in big cities that are usually democratically run.
--:-- Joe Flint: And that a lot of their content is geared towards those folks.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: There's nothing wrong with that.
--:-- Joe Flint: I think for the administration, their argument is, well, no, but why should we have to fund it?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Certainly, there's always been an argument to be made that given the debt, given all the things that we need to cut and look at where we spend our money and what we need to invest in and what we don't.
--:-- Joe Flint: That public media maybe isn't the priority it was when the Public Broadcasting Act was created in 1967.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And in the grand scheme of things, it's a relatively small amount of money.
--:-- Joe Flint: But nonetheless, it still million a year It not a drop in the bucket
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So I mean you know is there a rationale that it should be at least discussed
--:-- Joe Flint: Yeah You know Trump is critical of media in general and has been since his first term.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: How is this different?
--:-- Joe Flint: I think it is safe to say that this administration is targeting media outlets whose coverage it doesn't like.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So we've seen it go after ABC and CBS.
--:-- Joe Flint: We've seen Trump be very critical of MSNBC and its parent Comcast Corporation.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And in going after NPR and PBS, he has the added leverage of trying to use the power of an executive order to end government funding for public broadcasting.
--:-- Joe Flint: So obviously with public media, that he has the power to strangle their money and force them to basically get their funding from somewhere else.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: After the break, I'm Catherine Marr, and I'm the president and CEO of NPR.
--:-- Catherine Marr: Yesterday, I spoke to Catherine Marr. She's been the chief executive of NPR since March 2024.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: This week, NPR, along with three local stations, filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration over his executive order to pull funding from public media.
--:-- Catherine Marr: So it's really important for folks to have the understanding that we chose not to do this over the funding issue.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Funding is for stations. Its funding is very important for local stations.
--:-- Catherine Marr: I'm happy to talk about that.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: We chose to do this because it is a First Amendment issue.
--:-- Catherine Marr: And what I mean by that is the executive order very clearly engages in what is called viewpoint discrimination, which is to say that the president has stated that NPR and PBS should not receive federal funding because he disagrees with our programming and our editorial choices in terms of the story selection that we cover or the way that we cover the news.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And therefore has said that federal funding shouldn't go to us because he accuses us of being unfair and biased.
--:-- Catherine Marr: That is a matter of viewpoint discrimination.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: It is the action of withdrawing federal funding is retaliatory.
--:-- Catherine Marr: And And so this is a First Amendment issue.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: A spokesperson for the White House said that public broadcasting is, quote, creating media to support a particular political party on the taxpayer's dime.
--:-- Catherine Marr: Therefore, the president is exercising his lawful authority to limit funding to NPR and PBS.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The argument that the Trump administration has made is not new, right?
--:-- Catherine Marr: Many Republicans have been attacking NPR as having a liberal bias for a while now.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Last year, a former NPR editor also argued that there was left-leaning bias in the organization.
--:-- Catherine Marr: And then just to broaden it out more recently, the Pew Research Center in a survey found that only 12 percent of Republicans say they trust NPR.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Why do you think that is?
--:-- Catherine Marr: Well, that is at odds with what we see in our data around who listens to NPR and who comes to our website and who downloads our podcasts.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: As we look at the data of our audience, we see that it roughly matches the spread across the nation in terms of political belief.
--:-- Catherine Marr: And so our audience is roughly a third self-identified as conservative, a third self-identified as independent or centrist, and a third self-identified as liberal or left, which is more or less the American demographic in terms of political belief.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: NPR says that data reflects the makeup of its digital audience or traffic to its website, podcasts, and NPR app.
--:-- Catherine Marr: Marr also says that NPR reaches many rural communities in America, where people often don't have access to other local news sources.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Public media steps into that gap and provides local reporting, local newsroom services, local programming, talk shows, local political affairs shows in ways that serve those communities directly.
--:-- Catherine Marr: And so it's important to differentiate what people's response is to public radio as a whole and public media as a whole from the perception and conversation that's happening in a more politicized space about NPR.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: But is it really possible to divorce those two things to separate them?
--:-- Catherine Marr: Wouldn't the perception be a problem, especially for a news organization that receives government money?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Well, I think there are a number of different things sort of packaged up in that.
--:-- Catherine Marr: Perception is an issue, and we don't like being perceived as liberal.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: If you look at our reporting, we are consistently found to be centrist in reporting.
--:-- Catherine Marr: Some of our shows programs that are produced that are non shows may feel as though they have a sort of cultural lens on them
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: But I want to be very clear that we are a nonpartisan news organization and make every effort to ensure that we have representatives of both major political parties on our air as frequently as possible, including this recent administration, which we view as a transformative administration elected by the American people that we have a responsibility to cover and reflect.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Let me ask this bluntly.
--:-- Catherine Marr: Oh, it's a great question, and I'm glad you asked it.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Why does NPR need federal funding?
--:-- Catherine Marr: I think it's so important that everybody listening understands public radio needs federal funding.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Your local station needs federal funding.
--:-- Catherine Marr: They are able, with those funds, to serve communities that would otherwise not be served by commercial media.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: They operate in communities that have lost their local newspapers in recent years.
--:-- Catherine Marr: They also serve a universal access imperative, which is that 99.7% of the American population is covered by public radio signal, which has an extraordinarily important role to play in emergency broadcasting, in extreme weather alerts.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So from a national security perspective, that is tremendously important.
--:-- Catherine Marr: NPR receives a tiny, tiny percentage of federal funding.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: But without federal funding, that really impacts stations and their ability to serve their role as part of the civic infrastructure of this country.
--:-- Catherine Marr: And so could NPR and its local stations stay on air without that federal funding?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: You would start to see very large holes open up in the network if federal funding goes away.
--:-- Catherine Marr: So some of those stations may have up to 50 percent of federal funding.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: You would see a significant impact on communities who have limited access or fewer options in terms of their ability to report and produce news.
--:-- Catherine Marr: Many other stations would be forced to either reduce their coverage area, meaning that universal access promise and that emergency resilience promise would dissipate because you wouldn't have that 99.7% coverage.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: You would see layoffs of journalists in local communities as well.
--:-- Catherine Marr: And what ultimately that means is that cities and towns that are already well-served by commercial media options would continue to likely be served, but cities and towns that are not well served would be the first ones to bear the brunt of the loss of federal funding.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: We started this conversation talking about NPR's lawsuit against the Trump administration.
--:-- Catherine Marr: What is your contingency plan if it doesn't go your way?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Well, when it comes to the lawsuit, we feel as though it's a really strong case.
--:-- Catherine Marr: We are talking about fundamental First Amendment rights, in particular, the amount of precedent that is really quite robust in terms of finding in favor of private media organizations and private organizations in defense of those First Amendment rights around editorial point of view and the like.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I say that because we feel really confident in the substance of our case, and that is what we are focused on.
--:-- Catherine Marr: The Trump administration has been in conflict with a lot of other institutions over issues that the administration and the president disagrees with.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And some major universities, some tech companies, even other media outlets have negotiated with the administration.
--:-- Catherine Marr: Do you see a way to compromise here? Is that something you're considering?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I don't believe that it behooves anyone to compromise on the independence of their organizations and their organization's missions.
--:-- Catherine Marr: Particularly as a media organization, if you start negotiating or compromising on editorial point of view, what you're functionally doing is enabling external influence to color the way that stories are reported.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And while it may well be that I may share some perspectives around the need for us to ensure a diversified audience and a representative range of voices, If I start negotiating with a government entity, official, president, now that raises questions about what other compromises might enter into our reporting.
--:-- Catherine Marr: And so for me, that's a very bright line that a media organization should not cross.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: This episode has been updated.
--:-- Catherine Marr: A previous version incorrectly said that PBS was the birthplace of Antiques Roadshow.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The program was actually created by the BBC, and PBS licensed the show for an American spinoff.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: That's all for today, Thursday, May 29th.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: We're out every weekday afternoon.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Thanks for listening.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: See you tomorrow.
