With the Trump administration and Congress focused on cutting waste, fraud, and abuse from the federal budget, there’s an effort underway to make sure public broadcasting ended up under the microscope. The notion that public broadcasting would be held to any form of accountability, including the possibility they broke federal law, was apparently beyond the pale for former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron, who vented to CNN International’s Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday.
“And Trump is working in a very determined way to try to undermine the press in every conceivable way that he can. And we are only, well, not that many weeks into this administration,” Baron lamented. “You've got about four more years to go. And he's going to continue doing that, and that is a real risk.”
Baron was fearful of the FCC scrutinizing the finances of NPR and PBS and recommending cuts to Congress. He also took issue with the examination of on those outlets for the possibility that they violated federal law barring commercials from their airwaves:
And, you know, there are other measures they're taking too, one of them is to try to -- the recommendations by the head of the FCC to Congress that perhaps they should cut off all funding to public broadcasting. That would be NPR and PBS. He's also launched investigations of NPR and PBS for sponsorships that they have, claiming that that violates -- that may violate the federal law against commercials on public broadcasting.
“If they were to lose that funding and use, lose government funding, you can only imagine they would be highly unlikely to survive,” he whined.
In that scenario, their funding would be cut predicated on them breaking federal law, which would mean it was their own fault. Clearly, Baron would prefer no accountability for how public broadcasting was spending taxpayer dollars.
That wasn’t the only time Baron mislead the audience on the scrutiny from the FCC. He tried to suggest that President Trump’s affinity for Fox News was sparing local Fox affiliates from scrutiny of broadcast licenses:
And at the same time, the head of the FCC is threatening the licenses of stations that are affiliated with ABC, CBS, NBC. Fox oddly enough or obviously enough, is excluded from the -- those threats. So, we're moving in a very concerning direction, and I'm very worried about how much farther we're going to go.
But here’s the problem with Baron’s assertions: of the 245 affiliates that use the Fox name, Fox Broadcasting Company only owned 18, and the remaining 227 were independently owned. That’s not to mention that Fox News being a cable network put them largely out of the FCC’s reach.
Trying to mislead the public about how the FCC, public broadcasting, and station licensing all work doesn’t help Baron’s case. In fact, it hurts it. And they wonder why public trust in the media is at an all-time low. It’s also a good reason to defund public broadcasting.
The transcript is below. Click "expand" to read:
CNNI’s Amanpour
March 5, 2025
1:29:50 p.m. Eastern(…)
MARTY BARON: And Trump is working in a very determined way to try to undermine the press in every conceivable way that he can. And we are only, well, not that many weeks into this administration. You've got about four more years to go. And he's going to continue doing that, and that is a real risk.
And, you know, there are other measures they're taking too, one of them is to try to -- the recommendations by the head of the FCC to Congress that perhaps they should cut off all funding to public broadcasting. That would be NPR and PBS. He's also launched investigations of NPR and PBS for sponsorships that they have, claiming that that violates -- that may violate the federal law against commercials on public broadcasting.
If they were to lose that funding and use, lose government funding, you can only imagine they would be highly unlikely to survive.
And at the same time, the head of the FCC is threatening the licenses of stations that are affiliated with ABC, CBS, NBC. Fox oddly enough or obviously enough, is excluded from the -- those threats. So, we're moving in a very concerning direction, and I'm very worried about how much farther we're going to go.
(…)
