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“The Senate has passed about $9 billion in federal spending cuts requested by President Donald Trump, including deep reductions to public broadcasting and foreign aid… The legislation would claw back nearly $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which represents the full amount it’s due to receive during the next two budget years…
“The corporation distributes more than 70% of the money to more than 1,500 locally operated public television and radio stations, with much of the remainder assigned to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service to support national programming.” AP News
The left opposes defunding NPR and PBS, and argues that this will especially harm rural areas.
“Funds appropriated to the CPB amount to less than 0.01 percent of the federal budget, and the average taxpayer only pays $1.60 a year to support public media. The money is distributed to NPR and PBS; the television network obtains 15 percent of its annual revenue through the CPB. But a large share of CBP funding is distributed to the 1,500 locally owned member stations across the country, which allow for emergency alerts to rural populations, local news, musical and cultural events, and high school sports games without commercials…
“Every month, PBS Kids sees 345 million streams across all its digital platforms, outlets that provide carefully developed, well-researched, accessible and inclusive shows, educational games, and activities to America’s youth… These resources help to increase children’s early literacy skills, mathematical knowledge, and interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs.”
Naomi Bethune, American Prospect
“Republicans complain, not always wrongly, that public media reflects left-leaning assumptions and biases. And they can fairly tell NPR and PBS to do a better job of reflecting the citizenry that is subsidizing them. Yet the ‘national’ part of [NPR] that chafes conservatives may well be just fine without federal funds. Only about 2 percent of its budget comes directly from the federal government…
“A funding cutoff would damage valuable services that have little to do with ideology… As newspapers and television stations across the country fold, public radio and TV stations can be among the few sources of local news in rural areas. During storms and floods, radio can be the sole source of information when electricity goes out. After floods in Kentucky this year, a listener in the city of Hazard who had been without power and cellphone service wrote to her local public radio station to thank it for being her lifeline…
“The number of local journalists has declined by 75 percent since 2002, and a third of American counties don’t have a single full-time local journalist, a study last week found. The United States spends less per person on public media than other wealthy countries, but even that limited funding has helped make public radio a resilient part of local news. To abandon it would be to accelerate a dangerous trend straining civic health.”
Editorial Board, New York Times
“Though the majority of the country has access to cable television, broadband internet, and other forms of mass communication, there are still areas where significant percentages of the population get their TV ‘over the air’ — which is to say they pull in signals with an antenna (Almost all of us still do this with radio.)…
“Most of the federal government’s dollars to CPB (just over 65 percent) go toward one thing: keeping rural PBS and NPR stations alive… And local PBS and NPR affiliates in rural areas are occasionally among the only local stations left… [This] is yet another way that a policy proposed by Trump seems as if it will have the most adverse effect on those who voted for him.”
Emily St. James, Vox
The right supports defunding NPR and PBS, arguing that they are very biased.
The right supports defunding NPR and PBS, arguing that they are very biased.
“Supporters of public broadcasting extol the virtues of ‘All Things Considered,’ the ‘PBS NewsHour,’ and ‘Frontline’ — and yes (political bias aside), journalists do some good work for these programs. They also (again, political bias aside) do some good work at the New York Times and CBS News, yet neither [of these] outlets depend on federal tax dollars…
“Even if PBS collapsed tomorrow, [‘Semame Street’] would certainly go on… There’s [also] been educational programming developed by Nickelodeon (‘Blue’s Clues & You!’), Scholastic Entertainment (‘The Magic School Bus’), and Netflix (‘Ask the StoryBots’ and ‘Ada Twist, Scientist’). And somehow such iconic children’s programming as ‘Dora the Explorer,’ ‘Peppa Pig’ and ‘Bluey’ were created without the involvement of PBS…
“Then, there’s the argument that a cut-off of federal funding will be devastating to local public-radio stations in rural communities. It’s true that small stations could go out of business, but as anyone who has been paying attention has noticed, we live in an era of great media churn. Private media entities are going out of business — and being created — all the time. The government shouldn’t extend its favor to a few select outlets. Especially not when these outlets are so blatantly and pervasively biased.”
Rich Lowry, New York Post
“NPR botched major stories—and damaged its bond with the American people. To name a couple of prominent examples: It repeatedly insisted that the lab leak theory of Covid had been debunked and it refused to cover Hunter Biden’s laptop. NPR’s reporting on the most contentious issues of the day—climate change, youth gender medicine, and the war in Gaza—leaned on moralizing and emotional certitude more than on rigorous factual analysis…
“NPR could have regained some equilibrium, reclaimed a smidgen of independence, by copping to this reality even a little. It could have taken some visible steps back to the journalism gold standard of neutral impartiality. And it could have done all this prior to Trump’s reelection, so it wouldn’t look like NPR was caving to pressure from his administration. But NPR did none of these things.”
Uri Berliner, Free Press
“[NPR has] always been liberal, but I long found it basically fair, and thoughtful… But around 2012, I found that when I would be listening to NPR in my car, there would be times when I would get so angry at what I was hearing that I would turn off the radio. It was about how they would find the LGBT or migrant angle to just about any story. Or how they would obsessively cover the kinds of things that a highly progressive newsroom would care about…
“I don’t expect NPR to cover only things of interest to me, a white male conservative; in fact, one of the pleasures of listening to the old NPR was discovering things that I wouldn’t otherwise have done. But after 2012, NPR became 100 percent National Progressive Radio. People like me didn’t exist, except as the Enemy… NPR will continue to exist in some form, just not funded by the taxpayers that its newsroom fears and loathes. Good.”
Rod Dreher, Substack
“To be sure, President Donald Trump has undermined press freedom in numerous ways: He has sued media organizations over their editorial choices, and his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has threatened to remove the broadcast licenses of channels that criticized him. Both Republican and Democratic members of Congress routinely browbeat media companies for speech-related reasons—a practice known as jawboning, which violates the spirit of the First Amendment if not its literal text…
“But defunding NPR does not constitute censorship of NPR. On the contrary, forcing taxpayers to subsidize it represents a kind of compelled speech. NPR should be free to make its own editorial choices—even ones that are pathologically unfriendly to Trump—and Americans should be free to choose whether they want to pay for it.”
Robby Soave, Reason
