Democratic Rep attacks House committee for holding NPR hearing without company CEO

Democratic Colorado Rep. Diana Degette slammed her colleagues on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Wednesday, for attacking the CEO of National Public Radio (NPR) for failing to attend a hearing on short notice.

The GOP-led committee invited NPR CEO Katherine Maher to testify in front of the committee on allegations that the news station held a strong liberal bias in its political reports, despite receiving some funding from taxpayers. Maher declined to appear in a statement Tuesday, claiming there was a scheduling conflict.

Degette said the short notice of the committee hearing contributed to Maher's failure to appear, which overlapped with a board meeting, and urged a more fair investigation into the alleged bias.

“I want to say, shame on this committee for doing this,” Degette said in a video, per the Daily Caller. “The majority members keep attacking the NPR CEO Katherine Maher because she’s not here. They gave her one week notice, she’s a brand new CEO and today is her board meeting, her first board meeting as CEO, and you want to haul her in here so that you can rake her over the coals for your partisan issues. Shame on this committee! I’m beside myself. I think it’s outrageous.”

Degette also defended NPR against the bias claims, stating the outlet has been fair in its local reports, which include weather reports in many states. She also claimed that the money it received from taxpayers amounted to less than one percent of the company's total budget.

The comments come after Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers defended the committee's hearing in her opening remarks, claiming the allegations of bias were "troubling" and that accountability and oversight were necessary. 

“It is especially troubling that an organization funded with taxpayer dollars has mocked, ridiculed, and attacked the very people who fund their organization,” Rodgers said. “When an entity that was created by Congress, and that receives taxpayer funding, strays from their core mission there needs to be accountability and oversight.”

Former NPR editor Uri Berlinger first made the allegations of bias within NPR in an op-ed last month, asserting that the news organization was very different than the one he had been apart of for 25 years.

"Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population. If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way. But it hasn’t," he wrote in the essay for The Free Press.

Without testimony from Maher, the committee was forced to rely on testimony from Howard Husock, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former Corporation for Public Broadcasting board member; Tim Graham, the executive editor of Newsbusters.org; James Erwin, federal affairs manager for telecommunications at Americans for Tax Reform; and Craig Aaron, one of the Free Press's co-CEOs.

Maher has offered to testify at another hearing "in the near future."