Trump’s Illegal Effort To Defund Public Broadcasting Stumbles Forward
from the terrified-of-the-truth dept
As recently noted, authoritarian assholes don’t like public broadcasting. Because they don’t like the idea of untethering U.S. journalism from the perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based media system. If we bolstered real independent journalism or public broadcasting, you might see journalism more interested in telling people the truth. Yuck!
That’s at the heart of the Trump administration’s assault on public broadcasting and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which uses a modest amount of taxpayer funds to help support organizations like PBS and NPR. As we noted recently, U.S. “public broadcasting” is a shadow of the true concept after years of being undermined. But it’s a major ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots all the same.
Clearly incapable of getting the votes needed to take action in Congress, Trump signed an executive order on May 1 calling for an end of taxpayer funding of U.S. public broadcasting. The claim is that both PBS and NPR exhibit a “left wing bias”:
“The CPB Board shall cease direct funding to NPR and PBS, consistent with my Administration’s policy to ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage. The CPB Board shall cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding.”
Except the “maximum extend allowed by law” isn’t very much. NPR and PBS are funded by CPB through 2027, and it requires an act of Congress to change that. So the EO tries to tap dance around the law by demanding the CPB rewrite grant eligibility rules by June 30 to ban funding for either NPR or PBS. This is, CPB President Patricia Harrison tells Ars Technica, very clearly illegal:
“CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the president’s authority. Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government,” statutorily forbidding “any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors.”
Not only is the U.S. right wing starving public broadcasting of funding forcing them to embrace more traditional commercialization, Trump’s earlobe nibbler over at the FCC, Brendan Carr, is now launching sham investigations into public broadcasting’s reliance on commercials. Carr claims, without evidence, PBS and NPR are violating on-air sponsorship or “underwriting” rules.
Trump’s efforts to dismantle the US Agency for Global Media haven’t fared particularly well in the courts, and it’s likely courts will intervene here as well.
This is all an extension of decades of right wing claims that any criticism of right wing ideology has a “left wing bias” and is to be immediately discredited. One irony is that NPR’s coverage (like CBS, WAPO, the LA Times, and countless others) has folded to this bullying by being friendlier to Republicans than ever, which actively helped normalize authoritarianism this last election season. And they are still being bullied.
The $535 million that Congress currently allocates to the CPB covers roughly 1 percent of NPR’s and 15 percent of PBS’s budget. So even calling this “public funding” is generous (especially in comparison to public media funding in Europe), and yet they’re still being bullied.
That’s because this has nothing to do with government efficiency or saving taxpayers money. It has everything to do with authoritarians controlling the flow of information and the shape of modern media, which they prefer to be a combination of right wing propaganda and feckless, obedient, oligarch controlled mush terrified of having too pointed a relationship with the truth.
Filed Under: consolidation, executive orders, journalism, media, public funding, public media, reporting
Companies: cpb, npr, pbs
Comments on “Trump’s Illegal Effort To Defund Public Broadcasting Stumbles Forward”
Technically true, the best kind of true
The claim is that both PBS and NPR exhibit a “left wing bias”:
I mean, he’s right, but that’s just because reality has a ‘left wing bias’ and as a result any accurate and honest reporting on it will too.
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Reality doesn’t have a “left-wing bias”, the right has an anti-reality bias. The truth is just too inconvenient for them.
Somehow he always succeeds no matter what happens.
Either that, or the dems help pass something that make the job easier for him.
Not to mention the global ID-verification push means ICE will have an even easier time tracking down people who dissent.
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No he doesn’t always succeed, JFC, and stop with the Eeyore-ing.
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The latter half of what I said sure is succeeding worldwide, with the EU about to introduce a rushed digital ID this summer.
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You better just stop posting here to be safe.
No, they don’t like broadcasting that runs counter to their propaganda. They generally LOVE state-controlled media (as long as they are the one controlling it).
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PBS and NPR aren’t state-controlled.
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They aren’t privately controlled, ergo they are publicly controlled. They are the state. They aren’t controlled by the MAGA cult (yet), but that doesn’t make them not governmental.
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There’s beholden to their funders, which are corporate sponsors and viewers. They have no real reason to kowtow to the government but all the corporate sponsors make me suspicious.
I’ve been seeing emergency messages on PBS asking for funds because Trump is attacking them. I bet the donations are rolling in. Regardless of whether it really is an existential threat.
You can't roll over enough for these people...
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
Advertising on some public radio stations
There sometimes seems to be little difference between “underwriting” and advertising on some public radio stations. Speaking as the member of the board of a small opera company that barely squeaks by financially, I must say that I have been annoyed by the refusal of our local classical music station to mention our company’s performances unless the company buys an “underwriting package” in which different levels of payment secure specific numbers of mentions, with higher payments securing mentions at more favorable times.
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Capitalism be like that.
NPR deserves to go under because it plays little league softball with the fascists. They’ve been one of the pioneers of of “sane washing” Trump and his cronies since his first administration and have never stopped.
They may as well just run a live feed of Murdoc’s propaganda network 24/7 instead and it’d be less harmful to actual journalism because they wouldn’t be pretending anymore.
So public broadcasters get their funding back if they drop their equal time rule and stop giving a platform to Republiturds? Cool.
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Ah if only… no, what he’s saying is that any press coverage that isn’t fawning over him and calling his actions and orders the most amazing things ever are ‘biased and partisan’ and therefore don’t get any federal funding.
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TBH, I think AC actually got that, but you just didn’t get the joke they were making.