After Years Of Refusing Reforms, The CPB Accepts Institutional Death Over Political Dishonor

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

It is official. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting finally accepted death over balance.

This week, the CPB announced that, with the withdrawal of federal funding, it would cease operations by September 30, 2025: “Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations.”

The autopsy for the CPB, however, will put this cause of death as a self-inflicted blow.

For almost 60 years, Republican Presidents and conservative politicians have complained about the overwhelming liberal bias at the CPB and its supported programs, particularly National Public Radio (NPR). For most of those years, the CPB could shrug off the complaints. The Democrats controlled one or both houses (or at least the White House). With the political left solidly behind the CPB, the corporation refused to carry out even modest reforms. It simply gave the stiff arm to every conservative effort to bring its programming back to the middle of the political spectrum.

Even in the face of a GOP-controlled Congress and a Republican president, the CPB was defiant in denying any bias. It suggested that decades of complaints from the right were nothing more than the fevered imagination of far-right activists.

For the record, I was not calling for the termination of funding of the CPB, which I thought could still be forced to reform itself. What I opposed was the continuation of funding for NPR as a state-subsidized media outlet. It was not the pronounced bias of NPR that I felt justified termination. This country should preserve a wall of separation between the government and the media, a view that even a former NPR CEO acknowledged recently as legitimate.

CPB is different. It funded a broader array of programming and could easily correct its course. For decades, all the CPB had to do is refocus on programming to appeal to the greatest cross section of the population and to decline to fund media programs like NPR that became more strident and partisan by the year. It seemed that the CPB was trapped within its own echo chambered existence.

On the left, the CPB was the hero institution standing up to social and political reactionaries. That is what CPB officials heard at cocktail parties and conferences. They heard little from the public outside of their core, narrow constituency. For individual administrators and board members, their status and success were tied to the very bias that was alienating most of America.

For them, the choice was clear between neutrality and nonexistence: they grabbed a hemlock-filled, NPR pledge mug and drank deeply.

They are not the only figures choosing death over social dishonor. Efforts to restore balance and neutrality at the Washington Post has led to a virtual revolt. Even after CEO William Lewis told staff that the newspaper was gushing readers and revenue, the staff refused to yield. He could not have put it more bluntly, telling them, “People are not reading your stuff.” In other words, they were writing for each other as readers were fleeing to other sources of news.

You would think that Washington Post writers would recognize that, if they wanted to be journalists, they would have to return to more neutral and objective reporting. It does not work that way. Many of these editors and writers had secured their very positions in rejecting neutrality and embracing advocacy journalism. By their own previously stated standards, a return to traditional journalism would be capitulation and cowardice. Thus, they would rather see the Post go insolvent than independent.

That takes us back to the CPB. The announcement of cessation was met with a chorus of wails and laments on the left. Yet, these are the same people who preferred this option to reforming the CPB to serve the greatest number of Americans.

NPR made the same choice. A few years ago, it was given the opportunity to select a new CEO who would represent a serious, centrist leadership for the failing news organization. Instead, the board doubled down on that very bias and selected Katherine Maher, who had a long history of inflammatory political attacks on conservatives and was the very embodiment of activism.

As late as a few months ago, CPB could have come forward with real reforms. Instead, PBS President Paula Kerger threatened legal action if Congress had the temerity to refuse to fund her organization. At the same time, she did nothing to distance herself from NPR, which was dragging down CPB like an anchor. Even as NPR’s Katherine Maher imploded before Congress, Kerger refused to budge.

The irony is that NPR is likely to survive in reduced form, appealing to a shrinking audience of predominantly white, affluent, liberal listeners in major cities.

Conversely, CPB is laying off its entire staff in a righteous, indignant huff. None of these people needed to lose their jobs if their leadership served their organization by listening to views beyond their own insular circle of enablers. The demise of the CPB now stands as the most impressive and unnecessary act of self-termination since the appearance of Judean People’s Front Crack Suicide Squad: