Pressure of Truth
Exposing the spin on all sides of the news.
Outlet profile

Associated Press / PBS NewsHour

U.S. center / institutional nonpartisan

Owned byAP is a not-for-profit news cooperative owned collectively by its thousands of U.S. newspaper and broadcast members, with no single owner. PBS NewsHour is produced by NewsHour Productions, a nonprofit subsidiary of public TV station WETA (Washington, D.C.), in association with WNET (New York), and distributed via PBS, a nonprofit membership network of local public stations.
FundingAP is funded mainly by licensing fees paid by member news organizations and corporate/media clients, plus a newer donor-funded nonprofit arm (AP Fund for Journalism) supported by foundations like Knight, Lilly Endowment, and MacArthur. PBS NewsHour is funded by viewer donations, corporate underwriters (e.g., BNSF, Consumer Cellular), foundation grants, and public television funds; its main federal funding channel, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was defunded by Congress in 2025 and closed out in early 2026, forcing budget cuts at WETA.
On the administrationmixed

Background

The Associated Press was founded in 1846 by a group of New York newspapers to share the cost of telegraph news gathering, and it grew into the world's largest wire service, supplying text, photo, and video content to thousands of newspapers, broadcasters, and websites worldwide. Its cooperative structure — member outlets both own and buy from it — has long been cited as insulating it from a single owner's political agenda, and it has generally maintained a reputation for tightly sourced, restrained, just-the-facts reporting, notably through its widely used AP Stylebook. PBS NewsHour traces back to *The Robert MacNeil Report* (1975) and later *The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour*, evolving into today's hour-long weeknight broadcast produced by WETA and distributed on the PBS network of local public stations; it is known for long-form, low-sensationalism interviews and has drawn some criticism from both the left and right over the years for its measured, institutional tone. In 2025, the Trump administration barred AP reporters from the Oval Office, Air Force One, and other restricted spaces after AP declined to adopt Trump's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the 'Gulf of America' in its own copy; a federal judge ruled the ban unconstitutional, and litigation over full pool access continued into 2026 alongside a broader September 2026 fight over White House access for other outlets. Separately, Congress's 2025 rescission of federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting forced budget cuts at WETA and PBS NewsHour into 2026, deepening the outlets' reliance on private donors and foundations. Both organizations continue to present themselves as nonpartisan and fact-based, and are generally regarded by media-bias evaluators as near the political center, though their public disputes with the Trump White House over access and funding have drawn accusations of anti-administration bias from some conservative critics.

Sources

  1. The AP Fund for Journalism / Who Owns AP News?
  2. WETA to cut staff, cancel 'PBS News Weekend' and close News Hour West bureau
  3. WETA, MacNeil/Lehrer Productions announce planned transfer of PBS NewsHour to WETA
  4. Judge upholds Trump's right to block AP for now / AP sues Trump administration officials
  5. White House Restores Access to Media Outlets Banned by Trump, Following Judge's Order
  6. DOJ defends White House media ban, urges court to reject lawsuit

Profile compiled 2026-09-25; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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