Ex-NPR CEO: Mixing Journalism And Federal Funding A ‘Recipe For Disaster’

Former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller said in an MSNBC interview Monday that “I have long believed that mixing journalism and federal funding is just a recipe for disaster.” 

This comes as the Senate passed Trump’s $9 billion rescissions package on Sunday, which is awaiting the President’s signature to become law. The bill repeals over $1 billion in federal funding allocated to public media, including broadcast corporations like PBS and NPR. 

“In many ways, I think this is an opportunity for a reset,” Schiller said. “I think the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was a very bureaucratic organization that was, still is today, doling out that money, will go away. Let’s reset. Let’s come up with a new governance structure.”

Opponents argued the cuts will largely affect local news stations and rural Americans. 

CPB president Patricia Harrison said that “many local public radio and television stations will be forced to shut down.”

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told the Hill that rural communities are “frightened to death” that “they’re not going to have access to important information or alerts about weather situations, information that they need to know, education for their kids, because they’re not in communities where there are multiple sources of information.”

Schiller disagreed on the necessity of local news being impaired by the cuts: “Those of us that care about local journalism are going to help them,” she said. “The fact is this is done. The money is gone. The rescission has happened. So my perspective now is let’s move on.”

She added, “I tend to look at the bright side of life and say let’s just find a better way forward, because there were problems with the former system.”

The rescissions bill passed the House 51-48, largely along party lines. Republicans have long accused NPR and PBS of having a liberal bias.

“NPR reported that country music and birds are racist, told American people to stop eating beef, and promoted the Russia-gate conspiracy. No person with a brain above a single-celled organism would call these articles fair and balanced,” Senator John Kennedy said in a series of posts to X on Wednesday in response to current NPR CEO Katherine Maher’s challenge to Republicans to find one clear example of bias. 

“NPR reported that there is no evidence that biological men have an unfair advantage over biological women in sports. NPR also called America’s interstate highways racist. I did not know our highways were racist. I thought they were concrete, but not according to NPR.”