NPR Forced To Apologize For Not Letting James Comer Be An Assignment Editor

Last updated: 2025/03/28 at 3:24 PM

The CEOs of NPR and PBS were dragged before Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) DOGE subcommittee on Wednesday for a hearing that mostly served as an opportunity for House Republicans on the panel to gloat about how badly they hope to defund public media organizations. Trump opened the floodgates with his recent executive action attempting to shutter Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. He also said just yesterday that he would “love” to see both NPR and PBS defunded.

Democrats on the panel railed against their GOP counterparts for holding a hearing “to go after the likes of Elmo and Cookie Monster and Arthur the Aardvark … all for the unforgivable sin of teaching the alphabet to low-income families’ children and providing accessible local news and program,” as Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) put it.

House Republicans instead used the hearing as an opportunity to force NPR and PBS’ top leaders to apologize for covering the news in ways they found to be not adequately in line with their own talking points. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) launched into a diatribe that centered on his belief that NPR didn’t cover his pet project — of trying to impeach President Biden over the contents of his son’s laptop — as aggressively as he would have liked.

“I think you’ve abused the privilege that you had with receiving federal funds,” Comer said.

Facing a half-hostile audience that wants to see public media companies like hers gutted — and has been trying to do so for years — NPR CEO Katherine Maher said that perhaps her organization had been “mistaken” and “should have covered the Hunter Biden story more aggressively.”

She Co-Wrote An Op-Ed In Her Student Newspaper

An international graduate student at Tufts University was arrested by federal law enforcement Tuesday night. DHS is saying Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested for supposed “support of Hamas.” She’s being held at an ICE detention center in Louisiana. Her lawyers have said that she maintains valid F-1 visa status as a student at Tufts.

The video of the arrest, which shows unidentified men in masks and sweatshirts grabbing Ozturk off the street, is genuinely terrifying.

Ozturk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in March 2024 in their student newspaper, the Tufts Daily, where they called on Tufts leadership to take up a series of resolutions that were passed by the student government at the time. The resolutions included a call to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and “divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.”

It does not mention Hamas.

SignalGate Giving Some Senate GOPers A Spine

We mentioned yesterday that Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) announced his panel would investigate what exactly happened when an editor from The Atlantic was mistakenly brought into a Trump administration group chat on Signal about highly sensitive war plans. He and ranking member Jack Reed (D-RI) announced today that they intend to ask the Trump administration for an independent Inspector General report on the episode.

It’s not just Wicker. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) was among those encouraging Wicker’s panel to investigate what happened. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) an occassionally vocal critic of the administration, put it bluntly: “This is what happens when you don’t really have your act together.” More from The Hill:

“We’ll certainly be asking the IG to look into it,” Wicker told The Hill of the incident, which has sparked concerns among Republicans and Democrats over the frequency with which senior Trump officials are using Signal to hold sensitive conversations.

Senators say the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), will also investigate the security lapse, according to senators on the panel.