White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday brushed off National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher's assertion that slashing federal funding to the network would potentially be a "risk to the public safety of the country."

"I'm not sure how NPR helps the public safety of our country, but I do know that NPR unfortunately has become, really, just a propaganda voice for the left," Leavitt said at a press conference.

"So just a few examples for you, in 2020, NPR refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the run-up to the election. They said 'their assertions don't amount to much,' writing [that] they did 'not want to waste the listeners and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions.'

"That does not sound like an unbiased opinion; that sounds like a partisan opinion to me, and this is a taxpayer-funded organization," she added.

On Thursday, Maher called public media "a critical part of the emergency response plans of nearly half of the states in this nation.

"If these types of emergency alerting go away, you will have fewer outlets to be able to respond in real time" to future natural disasters.

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