Photo Credit: Pew Research Center
According to a new survey from Pew Research Center, only 43% of American say NPR and PBS should continue to receive federal funding.
As the Trump administration’s Musk-led DOGE unit seeks to cut “redundancies” in federal spending, chief executives at NPR and PBS sat for a congressional hearing last week. Congress is considering legislation that would prohibit federal funding for the public broadcasters.
Around a quarter (24%) of US adults say Congress should remove federal funding from NPR and PBS, according to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center from March 10-16. Meanwhile, 43% say NPR and PBS should continue to receive funding from the federal government, while the remaining 33% are undecided.
Notably, Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to support ending federal funding for public media. Republicans aged 50 and older are even more likely to support ending federal funding for public broadcasters. There exists a large partisan difference in the number of people who get news from NPR and PBS, and whether they trust these sources.
20% of US adults say they regularly get news from NPR, while 21% say the same about PBS. Democrats are much more likely in both cases to get their news from one or both sources. 32% of Democrats say they regularly get news from NPR, while only 9% of Republicans say the same. PBS is similar, with 31% of Democrats saying they regularly get news from the broadcaster, versus 11% of Republicans.
Funding structures for both NPR and PBS are complicated, with much of their revenue coming from non-government sources, such as member donations and corporate sponsorships. But the proposed bill would ban all federal funding for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting (CPB), which has received $535 million annually in recent federal budgets. The CPB helps fund PBS and NPR both directly through individual local public media stations, many of which pay the broadcasters in programming fees or membership.
