Study shows Americans trust PBS precisely because it’s publicly funded

On May 2, President Trump signed the executive order ordering the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to halt all funding to PBS and NPR local stations. The executive order has been heavily disputed. PBS CEO Paula Kerger called it “blatantly unlawful.” CPB stated that its mandate comes from and, therefore, can only be terminated by Congress. Yet the President has found many in the Republican party to support his viewpoints. Notably, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene held a hearing March 26 titled “Anti-American Airwaves,” which followed in the footsteps of a longer history of Republican criticism of U.S. public media’s alleged left-leaning bias and “woke” agenda, the latter often illustrated through reference to children’s programming like Sesame Street. Contrary to these ideologically inspired beliefs, our empirical research, recently published in the Journal of Communication, finds that Americans from across the political spectrum do not subscribe to the notion of a biased PBS. More than this, we found that those who watch PBS trust it immensely for several complementary reasons.

[Christopher Ali is the Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications in the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University. Hilde Van den Bulck (Ph.D.) is professor and head of the department of communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Jonathan Kropko (Ph.D.) is an associate teaching professor and Quantitative Foundation Endowed Chair at the University of Virginia’s School of Data Science.]