Public broadcasting’s lobbyists and their television and radio clients huddled in a Washington hotel this week to chart an uncertain future. And who could blame them if they assumed the roar they heard outside came from a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk, stalking the hotel a la Jack Nicholson in The Shining?
The noise, however, was a bus rented by the Media Research Center — a rolling billboard with “DEFUND PBS & NPR” splashed on the side. It circled Capitol Hill this week, reminding its denizens that this is the year to end what is an injustice on many levels: taxpayer funding of these outlets.
END THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING
Of course, the broadcasting and lobbying executives at the 2025 Public Media Summit — the annual conference held by public broadcasting’s leading advocacy group, America’s Public Television Stations, at the Salamander Hotel Feb. 24 through 26 — probably saw no humor in the fact that the planets may finally be aligning against them.
Not only has Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency, been very outspoken that public broadcasting’s more than half-a-billion-dollar annual public subsidy is a target as he seeks to reduce federal spending, but members of Congress are also readying several bills to axe NPR and PBS funding.
The head of the DOGE Subcommittee on the House, Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA), has called on the leaders of PBS and NPR to testify sometime in March. At heart is not just the wasteful spending — it was revealed recently that NPR hosts make close to half a million dollars a year — but also that PBS and NPR are biased toward the Left.
Elon Musk recently posted on X, “Defund NPR. It should survive on its own.” The post included a video of NPR CEO Katherine Maher saying, “I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting things done.”
It’s not just the irony of the CEO of a news organization brazenly spitting at the truth. That clip perfectly encapsulates the smug liberal mindset that DOGE and President Donald Trump have set out to destroy in Washington, D.C.
“As an organization that receives federal funds, both directly and indirectly through its member stations, NPR’s reporting should serve the entire public, not just a narrow slice of likeminded individuals and ideological interest groups,” Greene wrote in a letter to Maher. An almost identical letter went to PBS.
Even the head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has launched an investigation into whether “public” broadcasting is really commercial-free, as its charter calls for.
The threats are coming from so many sides that Kate Riley, APTS’s new president, separated them into the “predictable” and the “unpredictable.” In the first category, figure funding cuts and plans to dissolve the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the vehicle that takes the half billion that Congress so inadvisably appropriates year after year and distributes it to the public broadcasters.
Again, the reason that conservatives have demanded defunding since the CPB was established in the late 1960s is the disgraceful bias. However, with Trump and Musk, there is a palpable urge for immediate action, and actions such as Carr’s at the FCC are new.
“We face a new political landscape with significant uncertainty and growing threats, some predictable and many unpredictable,” Riley warned her audience at the Salamander (a very apt name for the gathering’s location).
All hands are manning the lobbying barricades. Riley may have been making her first speech as APTS president, a position she took on in October, but she knows her way around the Hill. After working as legislative director for Californian liberal firebrand former Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA), she was on APTS’s government relations team for a decade and a half.
According to TVTech, Riley told the broadcasters to communicate with members of Congress and emphasize how public broadcasting affects local communities, urging them to “build the echo chamber of positive information about the valuable services your stations provide and why federal funding is essential to that work.”
“We must say that federal funding is essential to the local services that each one of your stations provides,” Riley said.
That is the new mantra: Public broadcasting is needed for weather emergencies in places such as Alaska and the Dakotas, and it provides the only local news coverage left in the United States. It has “some of the last locally controlled media in the country,” Riley said. It is all epically cynical, of course, as NPR and PBS clearly cater to a bi-coastal, hyper-liberal, urban crowd.
APTS is a membership organization that provides lobbying for public broadcasting through its affiliate, APTS Action, which, according to its mission statement, “promotes the legislative and regulatory interests of noncommercial television stations at the national level through direct advocacy and through grasstops and grassroots campaigns designed to garner bipartisan political support.”
Open Secrets has provided a chart showing how much APTS has spent on lobbying since 1998.
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One of the savvy things it does is give out bipartisan awards to members of Congress who don’t know what time it is. This year, it gave its Champion of Public Broadcasting Award to Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID). The APTS summit website also provided templates for letters broadcasters should send Congress.
But as the Media Research Center’s efforts, including the rolling billboard and this website on the work of a coalition dedicated to ending the taxpayer subsidies (full disclosure: I’m a member), demonstrate, many hope that this time, the efforts against the stations will fail. If NPR and PBS had been impartial for the last half-century, we wouldn’t be here. Now it’s too late, and Elon Musk cometh.
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its board of trustees.
