Donald Trump and his authoritarian friends have successfully destroyed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the closest this country has gotten to having a useful and effective publicly-funded media. The CPB this week voted to officially shut down, just months after Republicans passed a massive billionaire tax cut plan that stripped the organization of more than $1 billion in funding.
“For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans—regardless of geography, income, or background—had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling,” said Patricia Harrison, CPB’s president and CEO.”
As we’ve noted previously, right wingers and authoritarians loathe public broadcasting because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based, corporate media. A media that is easily bullied, cowed, and manipulated by bad actors looking to normalize, downplay, or validate no limit of terrible bullshit (see: CBS, Washington Post, the New York Times, and countless others).
The destruction of the CPB is particularly harmful for local U.S. broadcasting stations. While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributed over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations, which now face existential collapse.
The attacks on the CPB are part of a broader information warfare campaign by the U.S. right wing, which has involved destroying all remaining media consolidation limits, letting radical right wing billionaires buy up major news networks and social media platforms, and launching fake investigations into public broadcasting. They’re afraid of the truth and a functional press, and it’s not subtle.
While Republicans are outwardly hostile to informed consensus, Democrats historically have done a shit job defending journalism or implementing media reform. The press also generally doesn’t like covering this destruction too deeply because consolidated corporate media billionaire ownership doesn’t much like the idea of having to compete with government subsidized alternatives to their bland infotainment dreck.
And even though U.S. public media never truly reached the potential we’ve seen in other countries (usually due to decades of right wing defunding and attacks), this is a generational, devastating loss all the same. Especially in terms of what could have been.
Not that long ago, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight did a good bit on why public broadcasting is important. The segment features a lot of insight from UPenn media professor Victor Pickard, whose work on the (many) problems with modern consolidated U.S. corporate media has always been essential reading:
But Oliver also walked the talk. Oliver and his staff subsequently held an auction for all sorts of notable items from the show’s history, including a Bob Ross painting, a prop replica of former Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai’s goofy giant coffee mug, Russell Crowe’s jock strap, a bidet signed by a member of GWAR, and a giant gold-plated re-creation of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s balls:
“All told, the auction raised nearly $1.54 million for the Public Media Bridge Fund, which is assisting local public broadcasters in temporarily finding new funds in the wake of the CPB closure.”
As we’ve noted previously, authoritarians loathe journalism. But they really loathe public broadcasting because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the often perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based corporate media.
A corporate media that is easily bullied, cowed, and manipulated by bad actors looking to normalize, downplay, or validate no limit of terrible corruption and bullshit (see: CBS, Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times, and countless others). A media that has increasingly stopped serving the public interest in loyal dedication to our increasingly unhinged extraction class.
One of the real harms of the cuts has been to already struggling local U.S. broadcasting stations. While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributed over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations.
U.S. “public broadcasting” was already a shadow of the true concept after years of being demonized and defunded by the right wing, so even calling hybrid organizations like NPR “public” is a misnomer. Still, the underlying concept remains an ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots and corporations alike, because they’re very aware that if implemented properly, public media often provides a challenge to their well-funded war on informed consensus, as Pickard has long explained.
DC lawmakers and regulators (including Democrats) have been an absolute embarrassment on building and maintaining any sort of coherent media reform strategy. The evidence of that apathy has never been less subtle. So a hearty thank you to John Oliver for giving a shit.
Donald Trump’s FCC boss Brendan Carr is opening a fake new “investigation” into PBS, NPR, and BBC in the hopes of suppressing journalistic criticism of the country’s increasingly unmoored and unpopular President. Carr first leaked word of the fake investigation to right wing propaganda website Breitbart.
Carr clearly doesn’t regulate UK media organizations. The PBS and NPR never even aired the documentary in question and had nothing do do with the BBC’s edits. So in his letter, Carr has to jump through a bunch of hoops to make his performative effort sound official and coherent:
Trump's censor in chief at the FCC, Brendan Carr, just sent a letter to the heads of BBC, NPR and PBS informing them he's launching a "news distortion" probe into the BBC's editing of a documentary on Trump's Jan. 6 activities.Here it is:
Tim Karr, Senior Director of consumer group Free Press, told Techdirt that he spoke to the BBC, who never received the supposed letter Carr leaked to Breitbart. It’s also not posted to the FCC website. And it takes a few minutes of research to find that PBS and NPR, again, never aired the documentary in question (“Panorama,” which never aired in the U.S. and wasn’t even all that critical of Trump).
This is a manufactured scandal. Carr is putting on a cute little show for Trump and right wing media so he can pretend he’s being “tough” on “unfair” “liberal” media outlets. While this is performative grandstanding by a strange, unserious man, it’s still very dangerous for a government official to be abusing FCC authority to try and suppress journalism and free speech.
We’ve covered the BBC fracas recently. The short version: a right wing tabloid created a scandal out of the fact that a year old BBC documentary edited together two parts of Trump’s January 6 speech encouraging violence at the Capitol. While the snippet does reflect Trump’s clear and obvious intent to incite violence at the Capitol, the edit stitched together two parts of the same speech 54 minutes apart.
Still, as we’ve seen with outlets like ABC and CBS, that effort’s been working well so far when it comes to major U.S. media companies, whose affluent, usually Conservative owners are more worried about tax cuts, deregulation, and merger approvals than they are about consistently serving the public interest. It’s far less likely to work on a media organization in another country that isn’t regulated by Brendan Carr.
Trump has claimed he’s going to file a $1-$5 billion lawsuit against the BBC for the edit, despite the fact the edits occurred more than a year ago (outside the limits of UK defamation law).
The BBC hasn’t helped itself by over-reacting to the fake right wing scandal; with numerous high level BBC employees resigning, and the BBC CEO tripping over himself to apologize. Still, they’ve promised to fight Trump’s lawsuit, and have a very good chance of winning it.
Since that lawsuit isn’t likely to go well, Trump had Carr once again abuse FCC authority to launch a fake investigation based on the FCC’s decades-old “news distortion” rule. That rule, created in 1949, was supposed to be used to police major scandals — like a company or politician bribing a news organization to suppress a story important to the public interest.
A bipartisan coalition of former FCC officials just last week wrote a letter to Carr, urging him to eliminate the dated rule and stop abusing FCC power to crush free speech and undermine journalism. Carr, a dutiful MAGA loyalist, unsurprisingly refused, continuing to pretend he’s “serving the public interest”:
Unfortunately when the cowed U.S. corporate media covers these obvious attacks on free speech, they tend to soft sell how monumentally full of shit Carr and Trump are on this subject. Which is, of course, the exact outcome Trump and Carr are looking for.
The U.S. right wing is openly buying up major social networks (X, TikTok), and what’s left of our broken mainstream media (CBS, CNN), then trying to bully or bribe any stragglers into being pathetic stewards of major online information spaces (Meta), or feckless echoes of serious journalism (ABC).
However silly and performative Brendan Carr may be, his party’s mission to own, bully, or destroy all the cornerstones of major media is extremely dangerous. It’s the same gambit authoritarians in countries like Hungary and Russia successfully implemented to successfully cement permanent rule. And while it may improve as Trump’s health and influence fails, most of the U.S. responses to date have been pathetic.
With any luck, their hubris and incompetence will be their downfall. But it’s going to necessitate a broader awareness — especially among the Democrat party gerontocracy easily befuddled by the modern information environment — of what’s actually happening and what they’re trying to accomplish.
Carr’s roping in of NPR and PBS comes as the U.S. right wing also tries to destroy whatever was left of U.S. public media. They’re well aware that, untethered from the distorted financial incentives of ad-based corporate media, public media is more likely to be honest about the dangers of idiot authoritarianism (Jon Oliver recently had a good segment on public media that’s worth a watch).
It’s unlikely anything real comes of this inquiry itself. Again, the FCC doesn’t regulate the BBC and NPR and PBS literally had nothing to do with the BBC’s decision. Carr is putting on a cute (but dangerous) show for his mad king and right wing media, wasting taxpayer resources, and trying to scare media organizations away from telling the public the truth about an unpopular, embarrassing administration.
But banning kids from social media has a fundamental problem: kids will find a way. They always do. And part of that is just because kids need those kinds of “third spaces” where they can communicate outside the prying eyes of parents or teachers. And if adults keep blocking off those spaces, kids are smart enough to figure out clever workarounds.
Six years ago, when schools blocked social media apps on their networks, students simply repurposed Google Docs—required for assignments—into an improvised social network which they could hide from teachers and parents by claiming they were working on homework:
Teens told me they use Google Docs to chat just about any time they need to put their phone away but know their friends will be on computers. Sometimes they’ll use the service’s live-chat function, which doesn’t open by default, and which many teachers don’t even know exists. Or they’ll take advantage of the fact that Google allows users to highlight certain phrases or words, then comment on them via a pop-up box on the right side: They’ll clone a teacher’s shared Google document, then chat in the comments, so it appears to the casual viewer that they’re just making notes on the lesson plan. If a teacher approaches to take a closer look, they can click the Resolve button, and the entire thread will disappear.
That was 2019. I’m sure things like that are still happening in Google Docs, but it’s apparently also happening in an even more absurd venue: podcast comments.
The latest “How To Do Everything” podcast from NPR featured someone who monitors comments for the TED Radio Hour. She noticed something strange: kids are flooding the comments of random old episodes, turning obscure three-year-old podcasts into makeshift chat rooms where adults won’t think to look.
Yeah, so one of my responsibilities on my team is to monitor our Spotify comments. And for the most part, we mostly get really like nice comments or people engaging with our content, giving constructive feedback or saying how much they liked it. But about 3 weeks ago, I noticed kind of a different floodgate situation. And the first instance was only about 20 comments….
20 comments on one episode that came out three years ago. Yeah. And all the comments kind of had the same like, “No, you’re so pretty. You’re so pretty.” And I was really trying to rack my brain about the content of this episode 3 years ago to be like, is there a discussion about beauty standards that they are trying to engage with?
Yeah. And then about a week later, they struck again, but this time hitting the comments hit into the 90s.
And then I kind of felt like, okay, this really needs to be something we’re flagging. And when I brought it up, it seemed like other teams had also been privately sitting on this very odd situation.
So the show’s hosts discuss this, and the sense is that they’re using these shows as a space to communicate:
GUEST: Yeah, I mean, we definitely can’t say exactly who these people are, why they’re doing this, but my sense is that they’re kids. One of the theories that some other folks have put forward is that maybe this is just a way to get around a classroom phone free situation. Like maybe they can have their laptops out but they can’t have Instagram open or Spotify is the only thing they’re allowed to have. I don’t actually know. It seems like a workaround for sure.
HOST: It’s brilliant because like what could be less worrying to a teacher or a parent might be catching, you know, a look at one of these kids’ phones that they’re listening to NPR’s TED Radio Hour with their friends.
GUEST: Oh my gosh. Yeah.
They ask for an example episode, and indeed, there’s an episode on “What Leadership Looks Like” from 2022 (there’s another one with the same title that might just be a rerun from 2024 which doesn’t have comments) and you can see comments from a few weeks ago that are clearly kids chatting.
So, it seems likely that the theory is at least close to correct, that kids are just seeking out places where they can speak freely that look okay to adults at the very same time adults are trying to ban the other spaces where parents think they’ll talk and don’t like it.
As the person from TED Radio Hour (unfortunately, her name is not clearly stated and I couldn’t figure out what it was…) notes:
I think my sense from digging into it a little bit and following the usernames was effectively they make a playlist that has just one podcast and that podcast becomes kind of the graffiti space I guess of this… popup conversation.
To me, this demonstrates some of the futility of trying to ban these spaces. As I mentioned above, kids need these kinds of “third spaces” that are not school and not home in which to communicate more freely with their friends. Because of a variety of moral panics, we’ve closed off many of the real world physical spaces where that could occur, so it was no surprise that many kids gravitated to digital spaces.
But now that adults are, again, seeking to close off those spaces, kids appear to be coming up with clever ways to sneak around those bans and keep talking.
Of course, the moral panic could always follow them here too. Maybe Australia will ban kids from Spotify comments next. Then Google Docs. Then whatever random corner of the internet kids discover after that. We can keep playing whac-a-mole until we’ve legislated away every possible space where teenagers might talk to each other without adult supervision. At least it’ll feel like we’re doing something.
Or—and here’s a thought—we could stop trying to eliminate every space where kids communicate and start teaching them how to navigate those spaces safely. We could recognize that kids need room to talk, to mess up, to figure things out away from constant surveillance. That would require trusting kids to learn, rather than treating every unsupervised conversation as a crisis waiting to happen. But judging by the current trajectory, we’re more likely to see legislation banning carrier pigeons first.
The U.S. right wing has won a generational war against education and informed consensus with the closure of the Corporation For Public Broadcasting (CPB), which states it will being shuttering its doors after being unable to survive recent brutal funding cuts by Republicans.
In a statement, the CPB said the cuts, which “excluded funding for CPB for the first time in more than five decades,” were impossible to survive:
“Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country,” Harrison said. “We are deeply grateful to our partners across the system for their resilience, leadership, and unwavering dedication to serving the American people.”
Public donations in recently weeks, estimated to be around $20 million, weren’t enough to save the organization.
As we’ve noted previously, right wingers and authoritarians loathe public broadcasting because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the often perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based corporate media. A media, if you hadn’t noticed, that is easily bullied, cowed, and manipulated by bad actors looking to normalize, downplay, or validate no limit of terrible bullshit (see: CBS, Washington Post, the New York Times, and countless others).
One of the real harms of the cuts will be to already struggling local U.S. broadcasting stations. While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributed over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations.
U.S. “public broadcasting” was already a shadow of the true concept after years of being demonized and defunded by the right wing, so even calling hybrid organizations like NPR “public” is a misnomer. Still, the underlying concept remains an ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots and corporations alike, because they’re very aware that if implemented properly, public media can provide a challenge to their war on informed consensus (I’d recommend Penn State professor Victor Pickard’s writing on the subject).
U.S. media reforms (restored media consolidation limits, media literacy education, bolstered public media funding, creative new funding models for independent journalism) are desperately needed, but authoritarians (and affluent corporate ownership more broadly) positively adore an ignorant and befuddled electorate, easily distracted by propaganda, controversy, and shallow infotainment.
A confused, angry, misinformed and distracted electorate means less informed consensus, which means less organized resistance to their unrelenting pursuit of consolidated power and shitty, unpopular policies that only ultimately serve a small sliver of the the extraction class.
Authoritarian assholes really don’t like public broadcasting. They don’t like it because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the often perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based corporate media.
If we bolstered real independent media or public broadcasting, you might see journalism more interested in telling people the truth and challenging wealth and power. Yuck!
CPB uses a modest amount of taxpayer funds to help support organizations like PBS and NPR. A 51-48 vote last Thursday on President Trump’s rescissions package evaporated the $1.1 billion allocated to public broadcasting for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. 51 Republicans made the cuts possible.
While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributes over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations. In a statement, the CPB makes it clear the cuts will be particularly hard on these local NPR and PBS affiliates:
“Without federal funding, many local public radio and television stations will be forced to shut down. Parents will have fewer high quality learning resources available for their children. Millions of Americans will have less trustworthy information about their communities, states, country, and world with which to make decisions about the quality of their lives. Cutting federal funding could also put Americans at risk of losing national and local emergency alerts that serve as a lifeline to many Americans in times of severe need.”
Local journalism has been brutalized by media consolidation, creating massive news deserts where the local populace really has very little access to accurate information. Many Americans also lack the media literacy to find accurate information, something that’s increasingly exploited by right wing propagandists across every medium (AM radio, broadcast TV, cable news, the internet) to obvious effect.
CPB plays a major role in ensuring the public also receives timely emergency alerts, as explained on the CPB website:
“PBS WARN enables all public television stations to send WEAs [Wireless Emergency Alerts] out over their transmitters to provide a ‘hardened, redundant’ alternate path for the cellular companies’ connection. Between January 1 and December 31, 2024, more than 11,000 WEAs issued by federal, state, and local authorities were transmitted over the PBS WARN system, a 30 percent increase over 2023. Public television stations save lives in their communities, even those who might never turn on a television.”
NPR affiliates like Seattle’s KUOW had to turn toward begging the public to stay afloat, And while KUOW did raise $1.5 million in just 12 hours, begging to survive is not really sustainable longer term. These organizations are a public good, and their disintegration doesn’t just result in a more ignorant electorate, but a less safe public overall.
As we noted recently, U.S. “public broadcasting” is a shadow of the true concept after years of being demonized and defunded. Just 1 percent of NPR’s and 15 percent of PBS’s budget came from the CPB in the first place, so to even call these organizations “public” is a misnomer.
But the underlying concept remains an ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots because they’re very well aware that if implemented properly, it can provide a serious challenge to their war on informed consensus. Corporate media (as you’re seeing pretty much every day now) is easily exploitable by authoritarians because its primary interest is in protecting access, ad engagement, and the interests of (usually wealthy, right wing) ownership.
U.S. media reforms (restored media consolidation limits, media literacy education, bolstered public media funding, creative new funding models for independent journalism) are desperately needed, but authoritarians (and the extraction class more broadly) love themselves an ignorant and befuddled electorate.
When NPR sued Donald Trump Tuesday, it had an easy argument to go with. Normally, in First Amendment retaliation cases against the government, you have to pull together a bunch of disparate strands to prove the retaliatory intent of the actions. But as NPR noted in its filing, and as Justice Scalia once wrote about obvious constitutional violations: “this wolf comes as a wolf.” Trump’s executive order cutting public media funding doesn’t even pretend to hide its retaliatory nature — it literally calls NPR and PBS “biased media” in the title.
Republicans have been gunning for public media for decades, but historically, every time Congress tries to cut funding, outcry from their constituents is so overwhelming that nothing ever happens. It turns out tons of people (including Republican voters) actually like NPR and PBS. But Trump skipped Congress entirely and simply declared that public media wouldn’t be receiving any more federal funding — because he thinks their coverage hurts his feelings.
Federal funding for public media is already a bit confusing because very little of it actually goes directly to NPR and PBS. The funding mostly goes to local affiliates, many of which then do use it to purchase syndicated programming from NPR and PBS.
NPR’s complaint is refreshingly straightforward: this is textbook viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment, separation of powers, and due process. As the lawsuit notes, the Supreme Court made clear just last year (in the Moody v. NetChoice case) that “it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression — to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks biased.”
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox” in matters of politics or opinion. West Va. State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943). As the Supreme Court reiterated just last year, “it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression— to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences.” Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U.S. 707, 719 (2024). These fundamental First Amendment principles apply in full force in the context of public media and doom Executive Order 14290, which expressly aims to punish and control Plaintiffs’ news coverage and other speech the Administration deems “biased.” The Order also violates due process, the Separation of Powers and the Spending Clause of the Constitution. See U.S. Const. Art. I, § 8, cl. 1. It cannot stand.
What makes this case so obvious is that Trump hasn’t even tried to hide the retaliatory motive (because he doesn’t realize it’s unconstitutional and doesn’t much care about that). The executive order and accompanying materials openly attack NPR’s editorial choices:
On May 1, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14290, entitled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media” (the Order), 90 Fed. Reg. 19415, which contradicts these statutory precepts and violates the Constitution. Contrary to Congress’s intent to support an independent public radio and television system, and statutory requirements that expressly shield the Corporation and entities like Plaintiffs from governmental interference, the Order directs federal agencies as well as the Corporation to withhold all federal funding from NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The Order further directs the Corporation to “cease indirect funding to NPR and PBS” by mandating that local radio and television stations that receive grants from CPB, like the Local Member Stations, not use those federal funds to acquire NPR or PBS programming, and by revising existing grant agreements to prohibit grantees “from funding NPR or PBS.”…
It is not always obvious when the government has acted with a retaliatory purpose in violation of the First Amendment. “But this wolf comes as a wolf.” Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654, 699 (1988) (Scalia, J., dissenting). The Order targets NPR and PBS expressly because, in the President’s view, their news and other content is not “fair, accurate, or unbiased.” Order § 1. And the “Fact Sheet” and press release accompanying the Order, which echo prior statements by President Trump and members of his Administration, only drive home the Order’s overt retaliatory purpose. They deride NPR’s content as “left-wing propaganda,” and underline the President’s antipathy toward NPR’s news coverage and its editorial choices. See “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Ends Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media” (May 1, 2025) (asserting that NPR published articles “insist[ing] COVID-19 did not originate in a lab” and “refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story”); 1 Press Release, “President Trump Finally Ends the Madness of NPR, PBS” (May 2, 2025) (asserting that NPR “apologized for calling illegal immigrants ‘illegal’”).
It’s a bit surprising that PBS and NPR aren’t suing together, though the news side of NPR reports that PBS is looking into suing:
PBS is not a party to the lawsuit. The television network issued a statement Tuesday morning saying, “PBS is considering every option, including taking legal action, to allow our organization to continue to provide essential programming and services to member stations and all Americans.”
NPR also notes that the case has been assigned to the same judge, Randolph Moss, who is handling a different, but similar lawsuit, in which the Corporation for Public Broadcasting had sued Trump after he tried to fire a bunch of its board members.
Look, you can argue the federal government shouldn’t fund any media (though that would devastate rural communities that rely on public broadcasting). But even if that’s your position, such decisions belong to Congress, not a president with hurt feelings. And they absolutely cannot be made based on viewpoint discrimination.
Trump managed to violate both principles simultaneously — casually torching separation of powers while engaging in the kind of obvious retaliation against media that would be more fitting in authoritarian countries with dictators Trump admires. NPR’s lawsuit should be a slam dunk, assuming we still have courts willing to enforce the Constitution when it’s inconvenient for presidents.
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.
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.
Authoritarians don’t much like journalism, education, or informed consensus for what should be obvious reasons. But the far right has long had a particular animosity for publicly-funded broadcasting. In part, because when done right, public broadcasting is free of the kind of perverse financial incentives that results in the kind of feckless, truth-averse, “both sides” journalism we all saw last election season.
Of course in the U.S. we don’t really do public broadcasting particularly well. In a good piece over at The Nation, University of Pennsylvania professor Victor Pickard notes how the generational demonization of public media by the right routinely starves it of funding. That forces it to lean more heavily on commercial funding, which then results in journalism that looks a lot like the rest of our feckless, corporatized mush:
“By any measure, US government support for public media is paltry. The $535 million that Congress currently allocates to the CPB covers roughly 1 percent of NPR’s and 15 percent of PBS’s budget. To even call this a public system is a misnomer; most funding for public media comes from private sources in the form of individual donations, philanthropic grants, and corporate sponsorships.”
So the U.S. version of “public broadcasting” is decidedly half assed. Yet it still gets endlessly demonized by the right wing as some sort of extremist concept. That happened again this week when the White House issued a statement full of lies about public broadcasting, calling NPR and PBS a “grift”:
“For years, American taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidizing National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as “news.” As President Trump has stated, taxpayer funding of NPR’s and PBS’s biased content is a waste.”
White House budget director Russ Vought has drafted a so-far-unpublished memo for a rescission plan that will eliminate funding already approved by Congress, including $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
The far right doesn’t want reformers untethering journalism and media from commercial interests because they know that model is eminently exploitable, something that hasn’t been subtle the last few years. Looking for major merger approvals, tax cuts, and mindless deregulation, consolidated U.S. media companies have demonstrated they’re more than willing to throw the truth under the bus for financial gain. You see itabsolutely everywhereyou look. Again: not remotely subtle.
Running journalism as a traditional business has been positively fatal for informed consensus in the U.S. The country is awash with news deserts where the only news people get are either AM radio (dominated by right wing propaganda), broadcast news (dominated by right wing propagandists at Sinclair and Fox), or national cable news (dominated by right wing propagandists at Fox News).
When election season comes, and huge swaths of the electorate vote in favor of their own fucking immolation, political and polling experts then stand around with a stupid look on their face wondering why the public appears to have heads full of peddles and pudding. Democrats who could be pushing for media reforms or consolidation limits have instead often chosen to ignore the problem, and here we are.
Pickard’s research at UPenn has shown that publicly-funded journalism can result in healthier democracies overall for this very reason. If you strip away the problems caused by chasing ad engagement or coddling power for quarterly financial gain, journalism is more incentivized to tell people the actual truth and less incentivized to pull punches.
Not only has the right wing constantly starved 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.
There’s generally two reasons: one, these media outlets tend to reflect the interests of generally white, older, male, right wing ownership, which broadly thinks authoritarianism is a fair price to pay for some tax cuts, deregulation, and taking a hatchet to the knees of regulators.
Two, the ad-engagement model results in companies that are generally truth averse. They’re afraid of upsetting sources, advertisers, ad-clicking readership, and event sponsors, so they tend to sand all the rough edges off their journalism out of fear the truth (or responses to the truth) might impact overall engagement.
Both combined result in a sort of pseudo-journalistic mush that traffics in feckless “he said, she said” false equivalency journalism and has trouble accurately informing readers of the truth. This, in turn, is easily exploited by corporations, authoritarians and white supremacists, whose shitty, unpopular views tend to be sanitized and normalized by the weak-kneed corporate press.
One potential solution for this is more publicly-funded journalism. Studies generally show publicly-funded journalism tends to result in healthier democracies for the reasons outlined above. Making journalism a publicly-funded public good (and not a business) has great potential. But the right wing generally sees it as a threat because it’s not as prone to soften its criticism of corporatism or authoritarianism.
But after a generation of demonization of the idea, it’s basically a non-starter in the U.S. And the few partially publicly-funded news organizations we do have are already seeing relentless harassment by the Trump administration. NPR (which only gets about 1% of its money from the public) and PBS are already facing sham investigations by Trump earlobe nibbler and FCC boss Brendan Carr.
Now Carr is taking aim at smaller public broadcasters as well. Carr recently sent a letter to WBEZ and twelve other local public broadcasters to inform them they were under investigation for on-air sponsorships, commonly referred to as “underwriting.” Carr is pretending to be concerned that the stations aren’t following FCC rules restricting them from airing traditional commercials:
“I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials. It is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”
About 4.6% (1.6%) of WEBZ’s operating revenue comes from public funding. Publicly-funded broadcasters are restricted from running traditional commercials. So instead, they generally run corporate underwriting spots acknowledging corporate support. WEBZ and the other companies all say they’ve consistently adhered to the rules. Carr has offered no evidence of actual violations.
GOP policies are broadly unpopular. That’s why a cornerstone of the modern radical right involves mercilessly attacking education, academia, journalism, and informed consensus. And another key cornerstone has been to build a vast right wing propaganda machine across AM radio, broadcast TV, cable TV, and the internet that tells right wingers what they want to hear 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Public broadcasting (what very little the U.S. has) challenges this paradigm, so it’s an obvious early target for Carr. America has been so consistently conditioned to view publicly-funded journalism as “radical socialism,” and media policy deemed so unimportant, that it’s likely the public and politicians won’t put up much of a fight as what few publicly-funded stations we have are snuffed out by weird zealots.
