Wikipedia handles the leftist propagandists at National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) with kid gloves, all while it bars editors from citing nearly every right-leaning media source.
The online encyclopedia revealed its true colors when it rated NPR and PBS as "generally reliable" in its permissible sources list for editors, despite ample evidence of the two publicly-funded media outlets’ flagrant bias. But Wikipedia rated every single right-leaning media outlet included in the list as “blacklisted,” “deprecated,” “generally unreliable” or “no consensus.” Both NPR and PBS are partially funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and have been under the gun in Washington, D.C. due to their leftist bias and public funding.
Wikipedia assigns ratings ranging from “generally reliable” to literally “blacklisted” to determine whether and where publications can be cited on the online encyclopedia. In a previous report, MRC Free Speech America found that Wikipedia labeled 84 percent of the listed left-leaning media sources featured here as “generally reliable,” including NPR. Wikipedia then smeared 22 out of 29 right-leaning sources with negative labels, while the other seven fell under “no consensus.”
Wikipedia applied none of these negative labels to NPR or PBS. In fact, it labelled NPR as “generally reliable for news and statements of fact.” Wikipedia also greenlit citations of NPR opinion pieces “with attribution.” Wikipedia declared PBS “generally reliable” with no qualifiers of any kind.
MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider condemned Wikipedia’s rating systems. “Wikipedia has slammed the door on all conservative media outlets. It has a clear agenda to reward left-wing politicians and radical media outlets and to silence any alternative perspective. NPR and PBS turn the tax money of ordinary Americans into leftist drivel, dripping with hatred for the American people,” he said.
The Media Research Center has extensively exposed the absurd bias of the naked partisans at NPR and PBS. MRC NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham gave five reasons to defund “public” broadcasting in a piece published February 5, 2025. Graham highlighted how both NPR and PBS shamelessly covered for President Joe Biden. For example, a September 2024 MRC study found that PBS provided 72% negative coverage of the Republican National Convention compared to a minuscule 12% negative coverage of the Democratic National Convention.
MRC has collected countless other examples of PBS's years of radical programming that aired from shilling for critical race theory to comparing the first Trump administration to Nazi Germany. PBS also aired an over two-hour movie titled “Democracy on Trial,” which attacked President Donald Trump during his campaign to return to the White House.
NPR, on the other hand, has distinguished itself by reciting pro-abortion talking points, offering wildly slanted coverage of anti-Israel campus protests, and hiring an extremely biased CEO. NPR CEO Katherine Maher, previously the President of the Wikimedia Foundation, is a radical leftist. Maher infamously complained about how the rights affirmed by the First Amendment interfere with countering disinformation. She also has a history of making radical posts online, including downplaying the destructive and violent Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Maher has also embraced woke talking points about race and demonized President Trump as a racist.
MRC’s analysis of NPR’s bias has even been echoed by a former NPR insider who said that NPR offered “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population” and increasingly only spoke to the left rather than the general public.
Following years of the MRC exposing NPR and PBS for rampant bias against the right, Maher testified during a hearing on public funding for her institution, alongside PBS CEO Paula Kerger. Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) directly confronted Kerger with an MRC study showing that PBS used the terms “far right” 162 times more than it used the terms “far left.”
After the hearing, Trump called for NPR and PBS to be defunded, saying: “NPR and PBS, two horrible and completely biased platforms (Networks!), should be DEFUNDED by Congress, IMMEDIATELY. Republicans, don’t miss this opportunity to rid our Country of this giant SCAM, both being arms of the Radical Left Democrat Party. JUST SAY NO AND, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
Trump’s White House has also published a list of examples of bias at NPR and PBS, which cited three damning MRC studies on PBS and a piece on a PBS panel denying Biden’s cognitive decline.
An MRC-led coalition has written to the president and asked him to push for “the complete defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and its affiliates, PBS and NPR” when he sends a request for funding cuts (rescission package) to Congress.
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