CNN
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Richard Nixon tried. Ronald Reagan tried. President Donald Trump tried during his first term in office.
All three Republican presidents wanted to strip taxpayer support for PBS and NPR stations. But all three men were stymied by Congress.
This time, however, might be different. Trump, emboldened in his second term, sent a package of spending cuts to Capitol Hill earlier this month, and the House of Representatives is expected to vote on the measure Thursday afternoon.
The bill, known on Capitol Hill as a “rescissions” proposal, is the closest NPR and PBS have ever come to a complete loss of federal funding. The bill would strip all federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes taxpayer dollars to radio and TV stations across the country. If it passes the House, it will move to the Senate for consideration.
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For public media officials, the bill is a worst-case-scenario. But for conservative activists, it is a welcome change and the culmination of a very long campaign.
“We are thrilled to finally get to this point,” NewsBusters executive editor Tim Graham told CNN. “I’ve been documenting their taxpayer-funded tilt at MRC for 36 years.”
Advocacy groups like MRC, short for Media Research Center, which runs NewsBusters, have been arguing against NPR and PBS for decades, asserting that the taxpayer funding is unnecessary and unfair.
The core contention is that public broadcasting is infected with liberal bias and thus is not representative of the public as a whole.
The leaders of NPR and PBS reject that charge. “One of the advantages of public media is that we serve everyone, and it is a requirement and a mandate. It’s also a very important mission in polarized times,” NPR CEO Katherine Maher told CNN.
One challenge with trying to be a middle-of-the-road platform is that “people don’t agree on what the middle is now,” she added.
But the belief that PBS and NPR “spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news’” (something the Trump White House claimed earlier this year) has become close to GOP orthodoxy. Trump has directed his administration to bring public media to heel, sparking several lawsuits this spring.
If the House and Senate pass the spending cuts package, it will be a victory both for Trump and for generations of conservative activists.
“This could be our last, best chance to win the battle once and for all,” MRC’s call-your-congressman website says.
Republicans have been trying to take the “public” out of public broadcasting for almost as long as the system has existed.
In the 1998 book “Made Possible By…: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States,” James Ledbetter chronicled how Nixon’s administration had a “smoldering animus against public television” that erupted several times in the early ’70s.
Nixon vetoed two bills relating to the system’s funding structure. But even his veto memos defended the existence of public broadcasting and said it needed to be “strengthened.”
Reagan, and later George W. Bush, also proposed cuts to the system’s budget and tried to slow its rate of growth.
But the proposals always ran into congressional opposition, including from fellow Republicans who strongly believed in the system’s mission. The power of educational TV programming like “Sesame Street” was often invoked to protect public media’s pot of money.
Graham’s group says those arguments are out of date now. And Trump has changed the contours of the debate by trying to zero out the corporation’s budget altogether.
Trump’s anti-NPR, anti-PBS budget proposals were ignored by Congress during his first term. But this year’s proposal is branded differently — as a “DOGE” cut, referring to the much-debated Department of Government Efficiency. The upshot: Added pressure on Republican lawmakers to go along with the bill.
The $1.1 billion in public media funds being targeted now, representing the next two years of funding, were allocated by congressional Republicans in a massive budget bill that Trump signed into law earlier this spring.
The rescissions package singles out the funds and also claws back money for the US Agency for International Development.
Graham said Republicans “should vote on a party line” to defund what he called “Democrat-run Broadcasting.”
“It’s not state-run, because it sounds like the very opposite of state-run when Republicans are in power. It’s Democrat-run at all times, and has been since Jim Lehrer gushed over the twice-a-day coverage of the Watergate hearings: ‘As justice, it was pure delicious!’”
Lehrer, the famed PBS anchor who died in 2020, made that comment about the fact that Nixon was plotting to defund the system but was sidelined by his own all-consuming scandal.
PBS grew in popularity thanks to its live coverage of the Watergate hearings, and some Nixon allies never forgot.
Public media officials often point out that news and current affairs programming is a small slice of the overall programming on stations across the country.
Shows like “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” and “Antiques Roadshow” have ardent fan bases — and those supporters have been urged to contact Congress to defend the federal funding that’s currently at risk.
At the same time, however, Trump allies like Kari Lake have taken to the commercial airwaves to argue that the public dollars are not needed, citing all the changes that have taken place across the media landscape in recent years.
“If NPR and PBS are as amazing as they claim, they should have no trouble securing public funding from people who want to support them,” Lake recently wrote on X. “But hardworking Americans should no longer be forced to fund content they find objectionable.”
Public media officials say those arguments are rooted in exaggerations and misperceptions about what the networks actually air.
CNN’s Max Foster contributed reporting.
