Pressure of Truth
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Outlet profile

Associated Press / PBS NewsHour

U.S. center-left

Owned byAP is a nonprofit cooperative owned by its U.S. newspaper and broadcast member organizations (more than 300 daily papers and broadcasters hold governance rights). PBS NewsHour is produced by NewsHour Productions LLC, a nonprofit subsidiary of WETA-TV, the PBS member station in Washington, D.C.
FundingAP is funded primarily through licensing fees paid by member and client news organizations worldwide, supplemented by more than $60 million in foundation grants raised over the past decade (funders include the Hewlett Foundation and MacArthur Foundation, among others). PBS NewsHour draws on corporate underwriting (BDO, BNSF, Consumer Cellular, Raymond James), grants from major foundations (MacArthur, Robert Wood Johnson, Carnegie Corporation, Knight Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Hewlett, Walton Family, and others), and viewer donations. Federal support via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was eliminated after Congress rescinded CPB's two-year appropriation in 2025 and CPB shut down by fall 2025.
On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

The Associated Press traces its roots to 1846, when New York City daily newspapers formed a cooperative to share the cost of transmitting news from the Mexican-American War; it was formally reincorporated in Illinois in 1892 and grew into the world's largest independent newsgathering organization. AP is rated 'lean left' by AllSides and 'left-center' by Media Bias/Fact Check, with reviewers citing word-choice tendencies that favor liberal framing and a fact-check operation that critics say scrutinizes conservative claims more frequently than liberal ones. In February 2025, the Trump White House barred AP reporters from Oval Office pool coverage after AP declined to adopt 'Gulf of America' as its default term; a federal appeals court later upheld the White House's right to exclude specific outlets. PBS NewsHour began in October 1975 as The Robert MacNeil Report on PBS, launched after MacNeil and Jim Lehrer earned an Emmy for their Watergate hearings coverage; it expanded to a full hour in 1983 and was renamed PBS NewsHour in 2009. In 2014, MacNeil/Lehrer Productions donated the program to WETA-TV, converting it into a nonprofit subsidiary; the show has long been regarded as measured and deliberate compared to commercial television news. AllSides shifted PBS NewsHour's rating from Center to Lean Left following a 2022 editorial review. The second Trump administration moved aggressively against public broadcasting: Congress rescinded $1.1 billion in CPB appropriations on a party-line vote, CPB shut down by fall 2025, and a Trump executive order directing further funding cuts to PBS and NPR was later permanently blocked by a federal court; NewsHour West and NewsHour Weekend both ceased operations by early 2026.

Sources

  1. Associated Press – Wikipedia
  2. PBS News Hour – Wikipedia
  3. How the Associated Press Got Its Start 175 Years Ago – Smithsonian Magazine
  4. Associated Press Media Bias – AllSides
  5. PBS NewsHour Media Bias Rating shifts to Lean Left – AllSides
  6. PBS NewsHour Funders
  7. Court Rules Trump White House Can Ban AP Over 'Gulf of America' Issue – Variety
  8. CPB says it is shutting down after being defunded by Congress – PBS News
  9. Judge blocks Trump executive order to end federal funding for PBS and NPR – PBS News
  10. A look at 50 years of the News Hour – PBS News

Profile compiled 2026-06-26; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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