Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) put National Public Radio (NPR) on blast in a Tuesday committee hearing, calling out the media outlet for its obvious left-wing bias following President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to end its federal funding.
Speaking after Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) made remarks against the president’s May 2 executive order to “cease Federal funding for NPR and PBS,” Cruz offered “the rest of the story”:
“The Communications Act requires public media entities, like NPR, to strictly adhere to ‘objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs on a controversial nature,’” the senator said. “Unfortunately, NPR does not. Last Congress, I put out a detailed report how NPR took millions in earmarked donations from left-wing mega-donors for very specific coverage.”
“After receiving those donations, NPR churned out content precisely mirroring its donors’ agendas,” Cruz continued. “Likewise, the Congressionally-chartered independent television service paid for documentaries like ‘Racist Trees’ to appear on PBS.”
Referring to Uri Berliner, the veteran former NPR editor who resigned from the broadcaster in April 2024 after being suspended without pay for publishing an essay calling out the networks’ left-wing bias, Cruz went on to claim that NPR CEO Katherine Maher “continues to deny that NPR has a serious story selection problem, even when senior editors are resigning because the bias is so overwhelming.”
The senator continued on to call out Maher’s displays of left-wing bias on her own social media pages, including a 14-post thread on X where she said white Americans hold a “collective sin” for the enslavement of black Americans:
“NPR continues to have a dedicated news desk for climate and for race, both of which are propped up by liberal mega-donors,” Cruz said. “This is the same woman who in January 2020, months before the death of George Floyd, tweeted, ‘Yes, the North, Yes, all of us. Yes, America. Yes, our original collective sin and unpaid debt. Yes, reparations. Yes, on this day.’”
“I think it’s more than time for some accountability at NPR,” he added.
Cruz shared similar sentiments on the Tuesday episode of his podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz, calling both NPR and PBS “partisan propaganda outlets.”
The senator expanded on multiple instances of NPR’s leftist journalism, including when the outlet issued an apology in 2019 “for calling illegal immigrants ‘illegal.’”
“They posted ‘Sorry, that was a mistake. NPR policy is not to characterize people as illegal.’ By the way, in federal law, an illegal alien is referred to as an illegal alien. That is in the United States Code,” Cruz jabbed.
In another instance of the publicly-funded outlet’s insane anti-American bias brought up by Cruz, the publisher issued a wacky “editor’s note” on a July 2021 article containing the Declaration of Independence, saying it ” contains offensive language about Native Americans, including a racial slur.”
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
