Ted Cruz: NPR Has Allowed ‘Liberal Donors to Buy Desired News Coverage’

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is demanding National Public Radio (NPR) turn over documents related to its funding sources, contending the publicly funded news outlet has allowed “liberal donors to buy desired ‘news’ coverage.”

Cruz, the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, wrote to Katherine Maher, the president and chief executive officer of National Public Radio, last week, noting that because NPR receives federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) it is required to have “objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.”

The Texas senator demanded NPR turn over documents relating to its public and private funding by July 26.

Cruz wrote, “The organization is falling short of that mandate.”

Cruz contended that the publicly funded news outlet may be “engaged in a Payola scheme to leverage its dwindling credibility as a nonpartisan news organization to ‘help’ partisan, left-wing megadonors.”

The Texas Republican continued:

NPR has admitted that “these station programming fees comprise a significant portion of NPR’s largest source of revenue” and that “the loss of federal funding [from CPB] would undermine the stations’ ability to pay NPR for programming.” Despite NPR’s assertion that it is not “government-funded media,” the hidden flow of taxpayer dollars suggests otherwise.

A Commerce Committee memo also details how NPR gives its private donors “what they pay for,” including:

• “In November 2023, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has stated that “every country needs to undertake urgent and significant development and growth transitions to adapt to the consequences of ongoing climate change, and to fast track the move to a green economy,” donated $4 million “to support NPR’s ongoing coverage of global health and development issues and data infrastructure.” Two months later, NPR published an article highlighting “buzzwords in the world of global health and development,” such as “climate mobility,” and quoting Bill Gates as saying that the “2024 elections will be ‘a turning point for both health and climate.’”
• In January 2023, Carnegie Corporation of New York, which claims it is working to “fortify” elections due to “barriers to voting on the rise,” donated $1 million to NPR. In the year following, NPR reported extensively on issues such as “counter[ing] false election claims” and “Republicans aim[ing] to stop noncitizen voting in federal elections.”
• In 2022, the Rockefeller Foundation donated $500,000 to NPR “toward the costs of building reporting capacity for covering energy, environmental and climate change news in order to improve public knowledge and understanding, provide public accountability and help communities take action to protect the planet.” In turn, NPR published stories on “the new Climate Reality Check” for Hollywood blockbusters and “unexpected links between climate change, student debt and lower lifetime earnings.”
• In 2022, the Catena Foundation, which has a stated objective of giving to “left-of-center nonprofits in western states,” donated $600,000 to NPR for the purpose of “NPR and TX public radio immigration coverage.” NPR subsequently published a podcast accusing “U.S. immigration policy” of intentionally “tak[ing] advantage of” a desert in Texas to “raise the death toll for migrants” and attacking Republicans for “unprecedented anti-immigration rhetoric.”
• In 2022, the MacArthur Foundation, which works to promote DEI and end “philanthropy’s complicity in anti-blackness,” donated $500,000 “in support of NPR’s Race and Identity beat and Podcasts: Code Switch and Throughline.” NPR in turn published Code Switch podcasts on how “systemic racism” impacts U.S. tax policy and on “inherit[ing] whiteness.”
• In 2023, the Jacob & Valeria Langeloth Foundation, which seeks to “change the inherent nature and role of the current justice system,” donated $100,000 to NPR to “report on criminal justice and reform efforts at state and federal levels” as “social and racial justice issues will continue to thread NPR’s coverage throughout to inform the public about the realities of the nation’s criminal justice system.” In the months following, NPR published stories on the “role state politics play” in “racist mass shootings” in states such as Florida.
• In November 2023, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which claims “the racial reckoning of 2020” made clear that “health should be a right not a privilege” and that “structural racism” is “one of the biggest barriers to health in America,” donated $2.75 million to NPR with the stated purpose of “bridg[ing] the gap between personal, public and community health—especially the social determinants of health—and address[ing] the fundamental inequities of health and healthcare in America.” Months later, NPR published a piece on racism in medicine in which an interviewee said the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision would “have a long-term impact on Black health” and aired a podcast criticizing “race-based diagnoses” because “biological race is not a real thing.”
• In June 2023, the Melville Charitable Trust donated $250,000 to NPR “in support of national coverage of issues related to poverty and homelessness,” the “root cause[s]” of which include “Racist housing, zoning, and land use policies.” Shortly after, NPR published an interview with former Housing Secretary Marcia Fudge on how she’s “confronting a ‘racist’ system.”

“These and other examples show that NPR has strayed far from its ethos of ‘independent journalism in the public interest’ by allowing its liberal donors to buy desired ‘news’ coverage,” Cruz wrote to Maher. “If the American taxpayer is going to finance a public broadcaster, then they deserve nothing less than fair and unbiased reporting.”