Corporation for Public Broadcasting's patriotic goodbye
Better nothing than a MAGA mouthpiece.
PN is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
On Monday, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting shut itself down.
Defunded by Congress and fearing that the Trump administration might pervert the organization to further undermine free media, the board members agreed it was better to salt the earth than leave behind a place for Trump to plant his poisonous, choking weeds.
“CPB’s Board determined that without the resources to fulfill its congressionally mandated responsibilities, maintaining the corporation as a nonfunctional entity would not serve the public interest or advance the goals of public media,” reads a statement on its website. “A dormant and defunded CPB could have become vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse, threatening the independence of public media and the trust audiences place in it, and potentially subjecting staff and board members to legal exposure from bad-faith actors.”
It’s a tragedy for the American body politic and a triumph for the nihilists who scorn the very idea of independent media and an informed electorate.
We used to be a proper country
In 1967, Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act. The law established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as private nonprofit corporation, tasked with distributing taxpayer money to local stations and subsidizing the production of “programs of high quality, diversity, creativity, excellence, and innovation.”
Congress called public television and radio “valuable local community resources for utilizing electronic media to address national concerns and solve local problems.” Acknowledging that market forces will not produce valuable content when not commercially viable, the Act finds that “it is in the public interest to encourage the development of programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities.”
And it worked. For almost 60 years, CPB doled out grants to local stations, which provided an alternative to if-it-bleeds-it-leads commercial news programming. Generations of American children watched educational shows like “Sesame Street” and “Reading Rainbow” without having to pay for it by sitting through commercials.
But for decades conservatives have targeted public broadcasting, accusing it of liberal bias.
“I personally would privatize them all,” then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in 1994, suggesting that Americans were “paying taxes involuntarily to subsidize something which told them how they should think.”
Howls about conservatives killing Big Bird were enough to protect public media 30 years ago. But right-wing opposition hardened over the decades.
Project 2025, the conservative manifesto, likened CPB to the BBC, which it meant as an epithet. In fact, the British Broadcasting Company serves as a considerable source of soft power for Britain, spreading its cultural and news programs worldwide. It also fosters a sense of civic unity and British identity — there’s a reason they call it “Auntie Beeb.” And shows like “Sesame Street” have similarly reinforced American values at home and abroad.
But Project 2025 insisted that “public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake,” whining that “the government should not be compelling the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views.”
“‘Sesame Street’ is on HBO now, which shows its potential as a money earner,” they snorted, without specifying how poor children, who need educational programming the most, might access the show without a local PBS station. (At least they didn’t suggest that Big Bird should maximize profits by showing a bit more cleavage and accepting product placement.)
They finally killed Big Bird
In a May 1 executive order, Trump ordered CPB to “cease direct funding to NPR and PBS, consistent with my Administration’s policy to ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage.” He also ordered CPB to bar local public media outlets from using federal money to pay for NPR programming like “All Things Considered,” or PBS shows like “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.”
Then in July the Republican-controlled Congress voted to zero out all funding for CPB. The bill, which passed the House by just 216-213, clawed back $1.1 billion which had already been allocated for public media.
In August, CPB announced that it would shut down entirely by September 30, leaving only a skeleton staff to wind down operations through January. NPR President Katherine Maher projected that some 70 to 80 public radio stations would shut down within a year.
But defunding CPB did not revoke the Public Broadcasting Act or the organization’s public charter. The entity still existed, bound by a statutory mandate it had no means of carrying out. The president still had the right to nominate members to its board, allowing him to repurpose the organization for his own ends. And the destruction of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) vividly illustrates what those ends might be.
Leave nothing
On March 4, Kari Lake, Arizona’s most famous sore loser, was sworn in as head of the USAGM. The agency oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and Open Technology Fund. Congress established and funded these outlets to project American values abroad, with VOA operating continuously since 1942.
Project 2025’s authors described them as a haven of spies, plagued by nepotism, and “abusing” their journalistic firewall to resist message diktat from the White House. It faulted the networks for daring to air critical coverage of President Trump and “targeting a democratically elected, pro-American European and NATO ally,” by which they meant Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban.
On March 14, Trump issued an executive order demanding that USAGM, along with several agencies including Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Minority Business Development Agency, be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, and such entities shall reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.”
Lake, who called USAGM “a rotten piece of fish,” was delighted to oblige. She fired 80 percent of the staff and was only prevented from shutting down the entire operation by Judge Royce Lamberth, an 82-year-old Reagan appointee who is not going to let some punk take a sledgehammer to a federal agency with an $810 million budget and a statutory mandate to stay on the air.
Lake has floated turning news operations over to Newsmax and One America News, two right-wing channels which spew nakedly partisan wingnuttery, including lies about election fraud in 2020. Neither one is commercially viable, with OAN being dropped by both DirecTV and Verizon in 2022, although it was picked up by Spectrum in 2025. Newsmax was only saved from a similar fate by the aggressive intervention of Republican members of Congress and Trump himself. Apparently, some government subsidies are good.
But even as it rails against “partisan media,” the Trump administration has been propping up some of the worst shitposters and treating them as legitimate journalists. After gutting the Pentagon press corps by forcing reporters to sign loyalty oaths or surrender their building passes, the Defense Department issued credentials to Laura Loomer, the Gateway Pundit, and even Tim Pool, a rightwing podcaster too stupid to realize he’d been paid to spout Russian propaganda.
Meanwhile the White House routinely grants favored access to the very worst conspiracy theorists.
There is no end to the depravity Trump could subsidize simply by replacing the board of CPB with MAGA edgelords. American tax dollars might fund Project Veritas-style sting operations against civil servants. Or TPUSA-style indoctrination campaigns styled as educational programming. Or glorified press releases lauding whatever quack cures Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy is flogging these days.
Faced with that prospect, CPB’s board members did the only thing they could.
“When the Administration and Congress rescinded federal funding, our Board faced a profound responsibility: CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks,” said Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of CPB.
It’s a disaster for independent media. But it’s a tragedy for America as a unified civil society.
In 1967, Congress said that “it furthers the general welfare to encourage public telecommunications services which will be responsive to the interests of people both in particular localities and throughout the United States, which will constitute an expression of diversity and excellence, and which will constitute a source of alternative telecommunications services for all the citizens of the Nation.” They invested in the education and edification of Americans because they believed it would strengthen and unify our nation.
Today we’re in thrall to a con man who denigrates the very idea of truth and uses media only to distract and divide. And so the CPB board members broke their plowshares lest they be beaten into swords by a deranged demagogue. It was their last act of patriotism.
But even as they did what they had to do, Ruby Calvert, chair of CPB’s Board of Directors, sounded a note of hope.
“After nearly six decades of innovative, educational public television and radio service, Congress eliminated all funding for CPB, leaving the Board with no way to continue the organization or support the public media system that depends on it,” she said.
”Yet, even in this moment, I am convinced that public media will survive, and that a new Congress will address public media’s role in our country because it is critical to our children's education, our history, culture and democracy to do so.”
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
The sun isn’t up and already I’ve had all the news I can handle today.
Our insane president is taking a flame thrower to the country.
Thank you for your clear reporting.