Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta told PBS White House correspondent Geoff Bennett Friday that he’d give “public broadcasting” massive funding if he were in charge.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) shut down Sept. 30 after Congress passed a rescissions bill that clawed back funding. Acosta claimed that the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) provided “quality programs.”
“There are so many front-line, there are so many quality programs on PBS. I tell people all the time, if I could wave a magic wand, I would send billions of dollars to public broadcasting,” Acosta, left CNN in January 2025 after refusing to move his show to midnight Eastern Time as part of a planned change in schedule, said during the episode of “The Jim Acosta Show.”
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“Yeah. And I gotta say, it’s really heartening to see the ways in which our viewers have stepped up post-defunding. And the philanthropy is terrific, but really, it’s the individual viewers who are standing in the gap and deeply appreciate it,” Bennett claimed.
Republicans have accused PBS and National Public Radio (NPR) of left-wing bias in their news coverage. A fact sheet released by the White House in May 2025 noted that over a six-month period, PBS news reports used the term “far right” 162 times as opposed to only six uses of the term “far left,” according to a study by the Media Research Center.
PBS and NPR also understated how much taxpayer funding they received in their tax returns, according to Open the Books. NPR had $388.5 million in assets, while PBS had $641.23 million in total assets as of the end of fiscal year 2023.
In 2020, then-PBS White House reporter Yamiche Alcindor claimed Trump’s 2020 speech at Mount Rushmore promoted “white resentment” and that President Theodore Roosevelt “oversaw the desecration of Native land.” In January 2021, PBS fired an employee after Project Veritas released a video of him praising attacks on the White House, calling for the re-education of Trump supporters’ children and celebrating Republican voters dying from COVID-19.
PBS attached a warning label when airing a June 2023 speech by then-former President Donald Trump shortly after he was arraigned on charges surrounding classified materials. The network also boycotted X after the social media site labeled it as “government-funded” after Tesla CEO Elon Musk acquired Twitter.
Former NPR editor Uri Berliner, who cited examples of the network’s bias in an essay published by the Free Press on April 9, 2024, that outlined the network’s lack of “viewpoint diversity,” posted an announcement of his resignation from the taxpayer-funded media outlet on X on April 17, 2024, one day after news he was suspended without pay broke.
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