Chief executives for NPR and PBS defended their organizations’ programming and made the case for public media in a congressional hearing Wednesday organized by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) to examine accusations that the two networks have a liberal bias.

For more than two hours, NPR CEO Katherine Maher and PBS President Paula Kerger answered questions from members of a House subcommittee on government efficiency about the organizations’ funding models and the alleged political biases of their organizations. Both rejected the notion that NPR and PBS pander to liberal audiences.

Maher and Kerger both emphasized the geographic and ideological diversity of their audiences. “We have 43 million listeners from every state in the nation,” Maher said.

Kerger: “Each month, over 160 million television and online viewers explore the world through our trusted content.”

Both NPR and PBS receive funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-backed organization that has helped fund public radio and television since it was created in 1967. The CPB received $535 million from the government for fiscal 2025. A portion of that goes to the public broadcasters — accounting for roughly 1 percent of NPR’s budget and 15 percent of PBS’s budget — while a larger share goes directly to smaller member stations.

Republicans have sought to strip NPR and PBS of federal funding, arguing that the public media networks have become biased and are a waste of taxpayer money because Americans have access to many other media options. Democrats and supporters of the organizations contend that there is no overwhelming bias, that access to free public media is an important part of a healthy information ecosystem and that federal funding is essential to maintaining local news programming — especially in rural areas of the country.

The hearing, titled “Anti-American Airwaves” and spearheaded by Greene is adjacent to President Donald Trump’s broader effort to discredit and sideline media organizations it opposes. In recent months, the administration has banned the Associated Press from White House events because the organization said it would continue to use “Gulf of Mexico” instead of “Gulf of America”; sued news outlets for coverage Trump didn’t like; taken control of the White House press pool and has added more friendly outlets to the rotation; and used the Federal Communications Commission to investigate perceived enemies in the media, including NBC News, PBS and NPR.

In the hearing, Greene accused NPR and PBS of being “radical left-wing echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy White urban liberals.” She specifically called out PBS for its programming about transgender people and NPR for its lack of coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop. And, along with nearly every other Republican in the hearing, Greene cited an essay written last year by former NPR senior editor Uri Berliner in which he criticized his then-employer for its alleged left-wing bias, as proof of the organization’s partisan bent.

“It’s up to Congress to determine if Americans are going to continue to provide [NPR] with taxpayer funds to continue to pursue their progressive, or rather communist, agenda,” Greene said.

In his opening remarks, Rep. Stephen F. Lynch (D-Massachusetts) blasted Greene for “stoop[ing] to the lowest levels of partisanship and political theater to hold a hearing to go after the likes of Elmo and Cookie Monster and Arthur the Aardvark.”

The “Trump administration is engaged in an actual disinformation campaign to minimize the catastrophic national security breach that was revealed earlier this week,” he said, referring to a report in the Atlantic that high-ranking Trump staffers discussed secret war plans in a Signal chat to which they accidentally added a journalist.

“If shame [were] still a thing, this hearing would be shameful,” Lynch said.

Kerger fielded a number of questions about PBS programming featuring transgender people. Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Missouri) brought up a PBS documentary titled “Real Boy” about a “trans teen navigat[ing] adolescence, sobriety, and physical and emotional ramifications of his changing gender identity.” Burlison asked Kerger why public funding would go toward this project.

“That was a documentary that was produced for adults as part of our prime-time audience,” Kerger said. “It was part of a point of view that we share to try to help people understand the wide breadth of experiences of people across the country.”

Maher, who started at NPR in March 2024, acknowledged that NPR’s current editorial leadership agrees that the organization’s initial failure to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story before her tenure was a “mistake.” She also said she regretted several years-old tweets that have come under scrutiny, including one in which she called Trump a “deranged racist sociopath.” But she maintained that NPR adheres to “unbiased, nonpartisan, fact-based reporting.”

“It is critical for the NPR newsroom to operate with the highest journalistic standards,” Maher said. “That means that they do their jobs independently, and, as CEO, I have no editorial role at NPR.”

Ed Ulman, the president and CEO of Alaska Public Media, told the committee that Alaskans rely on public media for access to safety information and community connections.

“We are more than nice to have,” he said. “We are essential, especially in remote and rural places where commercial broadcasting cannot succeed.”

Ulman testified that Alaska Public Media encompasses one of more than 360 locally controlled and operated public television stations and one of more than 1,000 public radio stations throughout the country. He said these stations collectively reach nearly 99 percent of the American public, a scale that would not be possible without federal support from the CPB.

Compared with several other countries, the United States spends far less per capita on public media, said University of Pennsylvania media scholar Victor Pickard, author of “Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society.”

The U.S. “pays just over $1.50 per person per year,” he told The Washington Post. “The Brits spend close to $100 per person per year for the BBC, and there are northern European countries that spend even more than that.”