The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB, announced Friday it will shut down after President Trump signed a law that slashes $1.1 billion in funding for public broadcasting through fiscal year 2027.
CPB is the conduit for federal funding that helps support NPR and PBS. It was born out of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson with the goal of providing diverse programming to advance education.
Trump argued “the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options,” so it is “unnecessary” for the government to fund news media, in a statement. He has also argued that public media — especially NPR — is unfair to conservatives.
“Neither entity (NPR and PBS) presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens,” the statement argues.
Americans disagree with Trump, however. A Harris Poll last month found that 66 percent of Americans support federal funding for public radio, with the same share calling it a good value. Support included 58 percent of Republicans and 77 percent of Democrats. The online poll surveyed 2,089 US adults with a 2.5 percentage point margin of error.
“The ripple effects of this closure will be felt across every public media organization and, more importantly, in every community across the country that relies on public broadcasting,” NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher said in a statement.
Trump’s defunding of NPR and PBS will affect more than just those two organizations, both of which rely on federal funds for only a small portion of their budgets. PBS has over 300 members and affiliate stations across the country and NPR has over a thousand. Those smaller, local stations rely more heavily on CPB funding than PBS and NPR.
In the Boston area, we have WBUR and GBH, both of which have, and will continue to, take a hit from Trump’s defunding.
Approximately 3 percent of WBUR’s annual budget, or $1.6 million, comes from CPB. For GBH, which operates as both a radio and TV station, 8 percent, or $18 million of its budget is from federal funds, WBUR reported.
But WBUR could be hit in another way. It relies on millions of dollars each year in national sponsorships and syndication fees from other stations across the country that pay for its national programs, On Point and Here & Now. Stations that are forced to trim spending or shut down operations may cut WBUR’s programs from their air, which could be financially detrimental for the local station.
“It could be millions and millions of dollars lost,” Margaret Low, CEO of WBUR, told WBUR. “It’s really a ‘wait and see’ to see how much the loss is compounded by what happens to our station colleagues across the country.”
Television was fairly new before Johnson created the Public Broadcasting Act. Salesmen quickly picked up on how the new technology offered them large audiences to which they could sell their products through advertisements. That led to news stations operating for the likes of the advertisers that funded their programs.
“Advertising became the gatekeeper of the airwaves.” Bill Moyers, Johnson’s White House Press Secretary and long-time investigative journalist for PBS, said in a speech about the history of public broadcasting in 2006.
So Moyers and his White House colleagues discussed how to fix that issue. They wanted TV to be more of an open marketplace of ideas, a place where people could debate, stories could be told artfully, and Americans could observe the experiences and thoughts of people living in opposite corners of the country.
They wanted television to “encourage journalism that would help check the corruption and abuse of power — something that was very much on the minds of our founding fathers when they provided for the constitutional freedom of the press,” Moyers said at that 2006 speech.
And most importantly, they “talked about how television could be more of a mirror held up to America, revealing that we are not all white, or male, or tall, or blonde, or blue-eyed, or brave, or Protestant, or rich, or powerful,” and could convey the interests and opinions of more people than the economic and political elites.
Doing that “could in fact help those elites understand the questions regular people asked every day — how to get a job, how to pay the doctor, how to put food on the table, how to get the kids through school, how to afford old age,” he said.
They wanted to dedicate some of the airspace to Americans so all citizens could share their experiences and ideas for each other to learn about and for lawmakers to consider.
Those ideas formed the basis of the Public Broadcasting Act.
“At its best, public television would help make our nation a replica of the old Greek marketplace, where public affairs took place in view of all its citizens,” President Johnson said after signing the Act into law.
The Greek marketplace he referenced largely influenced America’s founding fathers when establishing American democracy. It was a central place where citizens discussed, debated, voted, and made decisions about their government, all in public view. That transparent form of government is what Johnson strived to uphold by dedicating broadcast airwaves to the public.
Trump’s decision to cut funding for those public forums puts them, and the true marketplace of ideas they create, in jeopardy. The CPB is not new to that kind of adversity, though.
Former President Richard Nixon condemned public television, asking his director of communications, Patrick Buchanan, to “get the left-wing commentators who are cutting us up off public television at once — yesterday, if possible!”
That didn’t happen, but like Trump, Nixon did cut CPB funding. He knocked out multiyear funding for the National Public Affairs Center for Television, which was created to provide independent journalism for the sake of democracy.
Paradoxically, the very National Public Affairs Center for Television that Nixon tried to kill, put PBS on the map by re-broadcasting in prime time every night that day’s Watergate hearings, drawing huge ratings night after night and establishing PBS as a force in the country.
Moyers warned people about the threats Washington posed on public media in another speech in 2017 — the early days of Trump’s first term as president.
“We are in denial if we don’t read the signs,” he said. “We face hard times, fevered agents of a hostile ideology, a waging war on all things public: public schools, public libraries, public art, public lands, public health, public parks, and public broadcasting.”
Eight years after Moyers delivered that speech, Trump is back in office, and we are watching the exact downfall he described then. Trump has not only cut funding for public broadcasting, but he has done the same for education and medical research.
The cuts to public broadcasting come at a time when local news is already at risk.
The US has lost more than a third of its newspapers in the past 20 years. Large corporations such as Gannett, Alden, and Sinclair have been buying up and gutting remaining outlets.
Gannett has bought over 1,000 newspapers across the country. They scooped up the Detroit Free Press, a newspaper serving Detroit, MI, that circulates to over 50,000 readers every day; the Arizona Republic, a paper in Phoenix, AZ, that reaches over 60,000 daily; and what were once local strongholds such as the Patriot Ledger, which served Massachusetts’ south shore; and, of course, the Lexington Minuteman.
All of those papers once had bustling newsrooms with several full-time reporters and editors, producing reliable and timely news. But they’ve become little more than ad space since being bought by Gannett, no longer serving the public good.
The corporations that bought those papers have fired news staff, leaving fewer reporters to cover larger regions. That has left the newspapers unable to cover all newsworthy information in a timely manner, which makes them less representative of the communities they serve. And, it’s made for bad working environments for reporters.
But local news is starting to see a resurgence.
In the past few years, senior reporters and editors have left their newsrooms to start their own local nonprofit papers.
Just in the Boston area, dozens of local newsrooms have popped up or been revitalized. Brookline, MA, has Brookline.News and Belmont, MA, has the Belmont Voice. Cambridge, Waltham, Arlington and Concord all have locally run, non-profit newsrooms. And Lexington has us, the Lexington Observer.
We are all newsrooms that are free, nonprofit, and largely funded by our readers.
In the face of our leaders in Washington cutting funding for NPR and PBS, with which we share the same mission of delivering free and trustworthy news, we need your support.
Your support will help us continue to fulfill the late Bill Moyers’ vision for a forum on which all people can share ideas, opinions, tell stories, and learn from others.
“We have a story of equal power. It is that the promise of America leaves no one out,” Moyers said in another 2006 speech. “Go now, and tell it on the mountains. From the rooftops, tell it. From your laptops, tell it. From the street corners and from Starbucks, from delis and from diners, tell it. From the workplace and the bookstore, tell it. On campus and at the mall, tell it. Tell it at the synagogue, sanctuary and mosque. Tell it where you can, when you can and while you can — to every candidate for office, to every talk-show host and pundit, to corporate executives and schoolchildren. Tell it — for America’s sake.”
Information from this WBUR report was used in the article.
This editorial reinforces why CPB deserved to be defunded, for extreme bias and losing the script. Lexington Observer will become more authoritative by working from and presenting the middle of the road, rather than drifting into oncoming traffic.
Only 1% of NPR and PBS funding comes from the federal CPB. That’s almost nothing, so they should be able to handle this tiny cut in funding, and let’s face it, NPR did this to themselves by not representing All American points of view, they drifted slowly and solidly to the left, unfortunately, which is contrary to their mission of being “public broadcasting”
PBS and NPR brought the defunding upon themselves by continuing to always present biased reporting echoing Democrats and leftists. Don’t even pretend that there is a nearly equal split of Democrats and Republicans or donors to those candidates among their employees. Same goes for members of the teachers union and college professors. Even after repeated warnings and threats to remove public funding, their leftist bias continued until the people could take it no more.
Hi Mark. Please help me understand what you mean when you say that PBS and NPR “always present biased reporting echoing Democrats and leftists.” It would help to know what examples you are thinking of, and how it is “always” the case. Thank you.