Late on Thursday night, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to cut taxpayer funds to PBS and NPR through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The text was posted on the Trump team’s “Rapid Response 47” account on X.
It said: “@POTUS just signed an executive order ENDING the taxpayer subsidization of NPR and PBS — which receive millions from taxpayers to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’”
The executive order includes this argument:
Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options. Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.
At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage.
Since PBS and NPR are funded by all the American people, it should reflect the viewpoints of the people, and instead, after Trump was re-elected, both networks have doubled down in their anti-Trump animus. This was the top of the NPR home page on Thursday morning:
PBS News Hour marked the first 100 days of Trump with White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez quoting federal judges slamming Trump for a "path of perfect lawlessness" and bringing in leftist historian Mark Updegrove to proclaim "Donald Trump campaigned on the notion of making America great again. We have seen him tear down much of what has made America great to this point."
Earlier this week, the CPB sued Trump over his move to fire three members of its five-person board that were Democrats appointed by President Biden.
The Trump administration has been working to defund the U.S. Agency for Global Media, including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which were founded to provide unbiased broadcast news coverage for people inside totalitarian regimes, but now sound more like NPR. You can tell, because liberal media outlets have presented them as journalistic heroes. Federal judges have ruled against some of these efforts, finding that funds were already appropriated by Congress.
The White House was expected to send a request to Congress this week that they rescind forward funding for the CPB, which has been given $535 million a year to provide a taxpayer-funded TV and radio equivalent to MSNBC.
The order demands an end of their taxpayer funding not just through CPB, but through "all executive departments and agencies," since public broadcasting entities have received grants through the Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other federal sources.
