Donald Trump frequently criticized the US media during his campaign this year. The president-elect called that CBS lose its broadcast license after it aired an interview with Kamala Harris, refused to participate in an interview with 60 Minutes, and frequently referred to journalists as the “enemy of the people”.
Perhaps no American media has enraged the president-elect more than the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a non-profit corporation established by federal law in 1967 to distribute funds to public broadcasting organizations such as PBS and NPR.
“NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM!” In April, Trump wrote a post on Truth Social. “THEY’RE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. “Not a single dollar!”
As Donald Trump prepares to take office next month, public media organizations such as NPR and PBS, which have aired longtime favorites like Curious George and All Things Considered, are bracing for funding cuts and other attacks on their programming.
After Trump was re-elected in November, NPR member stations issued a report warning that “it would be unwise to assume that events will play out as they have in the past” in terms of funding, the New York Times reported Friday, and PBS board members received an update from political consultants earlier this month.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly urged the federal government to cut all funding for public media. In March 2017, Trump called on Congress to cut all funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in his first proposed budget, a call he repeated throughout his administration.
In response to a 2020 attempt to defund public media, PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger issued a statement stating that “PBS and our member stations have earned bipartisan Congressional support because of the vital role that public television plays in homes and communities across the country.”
PBS has been a trusted source of educational and thought-provoking programming for 50 years, including school readiness initiatives for children, support for teachers and caregivers, public safety communications, and lifelong learning on broadcast and digital platforms.”
However, the conservative playbook Project 2025 has continued to echo conservative calls to cut funding to PBS and NPR, stating that the new Trump administration should deprive public media of federal funding and licenses for noncommercial educational stations.
“Not only is the federal government trillions of dollars in debt and unable to afford the more than half a billion dollars squandered on leftist opinion each year, but the government should not be compelling the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views,” wrote Mike Gonzalez, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow, in the document, repeating a common conservative refrain that public media leans left.
In recent months, Trump allies like Elon Musk have joined the call to defund public media. NPR left Twitter in April 2023 after Musk referred to the news organization as “state-affiliated media,” a term he uses to describe propaganda outlets in Russia and China. After NPR left the platform, Musk tweeted, “Defund @NPR”.
In November, shortly after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy coauthored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
In it, the pair identified the $535 million allocated by Congress each year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as one line item they would cut to reduce federal spending. Musk recently stated on X that “legacy media must die”.
Although the attacks on public media are becoming more coordinated, they are not new. Since the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, every Republican administration has sought to defund public media.
The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, signed into law during Lyndon B Johnson’s presidency, gave rise to American public media.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a public-private partnership, provides federal grants to 1,190 public radio stations and 356 public television stations, allowing them to maintain editorial independence while also raising funds through membership and sponsorships.
Today, 99% of the US population lives within hearing distance of at least one public broadcasting station.
Nonetheless, the United States spends significantly less on public media than its peer countries. According to a University of Pennsylvania study published in 2021, Germany spends $142.42 per person on public media, Norway spends $110.73, the UK spends $81.30, and Spain spends $58.25, while the United States spends only $3.16.
In 2005, while defending against a Bush administration attempt to defund public media, then-Representative Ed Markey stated, “What parents and children get from public TV is an incredible bargain. The question isn’t ‘Can we afford it?’ but ‘Can we afford to lose it?’.”
Although Republican-sponsored bills to eliminate federal funding for public media are already before Congress (including the No Propaganda Act and the Defund NPR Act), two details may stymie those efforts: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is funded two years in advance, and many local public media stations run emergency alerts, a critical system that would have to be transferred elsewhere.
Efforts to defund public media are likely to have the greatest impact on local newsrooms in rural areas where Trump was the preferred candidate, as federal grants can account for a sizable portion of a member station’s budget.
“The most vulnerable stations serving the most vulnerable people are going to be the ones that are hurt the hardest,” Eric Nuzum, a former NPR executive and co-founder of Magnificent Noise, told the New York Times. “We’re talking about very rural parts of the United States.”
