Today’s ‘anti-American’ hearing could wreck public media

Today is a big day on Capitol Hill as leaders from PBS and NPR face Congress in a DOGE subcommittee hearing being called — how’s this for grim? — “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.” Even more ominous, it’s headed up by Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Greene is planning to call Paula Kerger, the chief executive of PBS, and Katherine Maher, the chief executive of NPR, to testify. Greene is also pushing to defund PBS and NPR, which has plenty of support among Republicans.

When asked Tuesday by reporters, President Donald Trump said he “would love to” remove federal funding from the two outlets.

Kerger told The New York Times’ Benjamin Mullin, “Everything is at stake. The future of a number of our stations across the country will be in jeopardy if this funding is not continued.”

Maher told Mullin in an email, “As a member of the public media system, we know that federal funding is essential to ensuring all of America can hear and be heard on a truly national network.”

Mullin wrote that Greene expects “that the hearing would address public media’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia — which she called ‘the Russian collusion lie’ — and other stories that were ‘left-leaning even to the point of propaganda.’”

Greene said, “I think the important thing for Americans to ask is: Is this where our taxpayer money needs to go? To extremely left-leaning broadcasting and political bias that doesn’t represent all of America?”

This hearing has a real chance of flying off the rails.

As Mullin wrote, “Some worry that Ms. Kerger and Ms. Maher will be subjected to the same combative interrogation that the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania faced in a hearing about campus antisemitism in 2023.”

This piece originally appeared in The Poynter Report, our daily newsletter for everyone who cares about the media. Subscribe to The Poynter Report here.