The attack on public broadcasting

 The Guardian -  The subcommittee hearing on Wednesday is part of a longstanding rightwing campaign against public broadcasters, whom conservatives accuse of using government funding to produce liberally biased reports. Republican efforts to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which President Lyndon Johnson’s administration created in 1967, have persisted under every conservative administration since then but failed to convince Congress.

A renewed attack against NPR and PBS began last year, however, following a conservative campaign alleging leftwing bias and anti-Trump sentiment during the election. Conservative activists such as Christopher Rufo also seized on an essay from the then-NPR senior business editor, Uri Berliner, who claimed that the newsroom had prioritized diversity, equity and inclusion over journalism.

Multiple NPR journalists publicly criticized Berliner’s article as self-serving and misrepresenting the newsroom, including the Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep who wrote a blogpost dissecting the essay that stated “my colleague’s article was filled with errors and omission”. ....

Musk, who frequently attacks critical media outlets, joined in the initial conservative campaign against NPR and amplified its backers on X, the social media platform that he owns. In April of last year, Musk called to “Defund NPR” in response to a post from Rufo and described the broadcaster as a “hard-left propaganda machine” while retweeting Berliner’s Free Press essay.

The Daily Beast - President Donald Trump has demanded that Congress ‘IMMEDIATELY’ defund National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, in a late-night social media rant against the “horrible and completely biased” public service broadcasters.“Republicans, don’t miss this opportunity to rid our Country of this giant SCAM, both being arms of the Radical Left Democrat Party,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.