Wyoming’s Calvert, national broadcast chair, says NPR needs more perspectives

Wyoming’s Ruby Calvert, chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, challenged President Donald Trump’s characterization of federally funded public media as “trash,” “madness,” “biased,” “radical” and “woke propaganda disguised as news.”

Calvert, a 35-plus-year veteran of Wyoming Public Broadcasting Service in Riverton, leads the independent national corporation that distributes money to National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting Service and, mostly, to about 1,500 independent broadcasters around the country.

The CPB sued Trump and others on April 28, the day his administration tried to fire three of Calvert’s fellow national board members. Two days after that, Trump ordered federal agencies to stop direct or indirect payments to NPR and PBS, jeopardizing public radio and television programming across the country and the national emergency alert system.

The White House said Trump was finally ending “the madness of NPR and PBS.” The president said the fund-freezing order will “ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage.”

The White House characterized NPR and PBS broadcasting as “trash” and said “NPR and PBS have zero tolerance for non-leftist viewpoints.”

Calvert agrees some people believe some public broadcasts are biased, but rejected Trump’s broad-brush tarring of the news, educational and cultural programs. Asked in an interview with WyoFile whether NPR and PBS are biased and spread woke propaganda as alleged, she responded, “No.”

Need for different perspectives

Calvert said she believes NPR needs to work to rebut allegations of bias and correct any tilt in its reports. In news reporting, “there are bound to be issues of bias somewhere or other,” she said.

“I think they [NPR] need to be more careful and include more perspectives when they write these stories,” she said. “I’m not throwing NPR, you know, into the fire here.

“I think everybody has a different perspective, depending on your own prejudices,” she said. “Everything is different for everybody.”

NPR faces a particular challenge because it produces many more news stories than PBS, Calvert said. By definition, those news stories often are fast-breaking and touch on controversial topics in a sharply divided country.

Criticism of national public television news, however, is unwarranted, she said.

“I think the accusations against PBS are really not fair.”

Calvert’s perspective is unique, coming from a broadcast veteran from a deep red state.

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“Those of you who know me personally know that I come from a deeply conservative Republican family and state,” she told fellow board members at a May 2 meeting. “My brother [Eli Bebout] was both speaker of the House and president of the Senate in the Wyoming Legislature, where we continue to hold a large Republican majority.

“Like him, I am very fiscally conservative and philosophically conservative,” she said, “and I want to note that there are many conservative friends who support public media.”

She said she has spoken with U.S. Sen. John Barrasso about CPB funding in the recission package, in which the administration seeks to claw back allocated but unspent funds, and in the upcoming budget reconciliation negotiations where future funding is at stake.

“We don’t really know what’s in either one of those,” Calvert said. But she’s heard the corporation, NPR and PBS are clearly targets to the point that Congress “would basically eliminate our funding for 2026 [and] 2027.”

The CPB has requested $535 million each year, she said.

Barrasso “has been supportive in the past,” she said. “I think he understands the value of public television and public radio in Wyoming.”

The Wyoming delegation is in a tight spot, Calvert said.

“They’re trying to reduce the federal deficit, and they’ve got DOGE going on, and it’s a difficult situation,” she said.

Barrasso did not respond to a request for comment on the president’s attempt to fire CPB board members or his executive order regarding a freeze on funding.

The Calvert solution

Calvert has a solution far short of ending federal funding, public broadcasting and the emergency alert system that relies on NPR infrastructure known as the Public Radio Satellite System.

“I just hope that local stations, if they’re perceiving a large amount of bias with NPR, they need to be talking with NPR,” she said. “And, I would say, threatening them to say ‘we’re not going to continue to support you if this continues.’

“It’s got to be up to the local stations putting the pressure on [NPR] to look at their newsroom a little differently.”

Calvert spoke to WyoFile the day after a court hearing in Washington, D.C. at which a CPB attorney and one from the Department of Justice argued whether Trump could fire the three members of the independent corporation. Congress set up the CPB as a firewall to prevent the political meddling that Trump is practicing, broadcasters argue.

Trump claims that because he has the authority to appoint members of the board, he has the implicit authority to fire them. The judge hearing the case has prevented the president from appointing temporary replacements, a move CPB attorney said would have opened the door to a DOGE invasion and the corporation’s dismantling.

Among other things, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss said Wednesday that if Trump can fire the directors, he is, in effect, controlling the independent corporation contrary to law.

“There are cases that say the power to remove entails the power to control,” Moss said. “And the statute is pretty clear that the executive branch is not supposed to be controlling the CPB.”

To protect its independence, the CPB board on Thursday amended its bylaws to prohibit the president from removing any director, an option discussed in the hearing before Judge Moss.