Chevron Saying Goodbye to PBS NewsHour

PBS NewsHour is about to lose $2 million from its budget. The New York Times reports that Chevron is going to pull its sponsorship of the show, which has lasted for four years.

"We constantly review which media we use to reach our target audience given our yearly budget and specific goals," Brent Tippen, a Chevron spokesman, told the Times. "We hope that we will be able to partner with them again at some point in the future."

The San Francisco Chronicle notes that the relationship had gotten some bad publicity in September when PBS ombudsman Michael Getler wrote about an online piece critiquing Chevron's sponsorship video (from its "We Agree" campaign, at top) that had the company claiming that every single last penny of its profits “went into bringing profits to the world.”

The Chronicle reports that Chevron claims that bad PR didn’t have anything to do with the ending of its sponsorship.

NewsHour approached a foundation earlier in the year for sponsorship dollars but was rebuffed, the Times reports. Still, Jim Lehrer, one of the longtime anchors of the show who now only helms it one night a week since stepping down as anchor in May, is confident the show will come up with the cash by year’s end, the paper reports.

At the end of October, Chevron announced that its quarterly earnings more than doubled with the company’s profit rising to $7.8 billion, according to Reuters.