Trump Threatens NPR and PBS

“Journalists’ work is under fire.” Donald Trump is yanking federal funds from public media. Leaders at NPR-affiliate stations around the country explain why this attack feels different, and what the consequences of defunding would be. Plus:

• The Trump deportees turned “ghosts” in the U.S. legal system
• Jelani Cobb on Ryan Coogler’s road to “Sinners”
• A joyfully chaotic new movie about the indie-rock band Pavement

E. Tammy Kim
Kim writes about politics and the federal workforce.

One hundred days into the second Trump Presidency, the chaos has settled into a patterned upheaval. The Administration continues to defund and dismantle government institutions, fire independent decision-makers, and insult and intimidate the press. These strategies came together last week, when Trump targeted the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a nonprofit founded in 1967. The C.P.B. funds public radio and television stations in local markets, as well as fifteen per cent of the Public Broadcasting Service and one per cent of National Public Radio. Trump attempted to remove three of the C.P.B.’s five board members, to deprive it of quorum and freeze its activities. (C.P.B. has sued to block that action in court.) Then, last night, he issued an executive order instructing the C.P.B. to “cease direct funding to NPR and PBS. . . to ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage.” In a press release, the White House listed “examples of the trash that has passed for ‘news’ at NPR and PBS,” including a segment on diet culture, a feature on a book about “queer ducks,” and a documentary on reparations. It also mentioned NPR’s alleged refusal “to cover the explosive Hunter Biden laptop scandal.”

Previous Republican leaders have made similar attempts to defund public media. Big, existential cuts have historically been averted, mostly because Americans were willing to step up for Elmo and “NewsHour,” not to mention for the community radio we all rely on when wildfires and hurricanes strike. What feels different this year is that “a lot of people are afraid to speak up,” Jennifer Ferro, the C.E.O. of KCRW, the public-radio station in greater Los Angeles, told me. “Many public-radio stations are housed at universities that do not want to be in opposition to the Administration.” KCRW is a comparatively large station in a wealthy city; about five per cent of its budget comes from the C.P.B. But Ferro is also on the board of Marfa Public Radio, in rural Texas—“the only live broadcast service for some thirty thousand square miles,” she said—which would be badly hurt by a federal cut. Margaret Low, the C.E.O. of WBUR, in Boston, told me that, although only three per cent of the station’s budget comes from C.P.B., its national programs rely on “millions of dollars in syndication fees and sponsorships” from other stations around the country. Ira Glass, the host of WBEZ Chicago’s “This American Life,” which doesn’t rely on government funding but airs on many NPR affiliates, said that part of the harm of the executive order is that it poses a “branding issue”: “It’s not great to have the President saying your coverage is biased.”

Journalists at NPR, PBS, and every other outlet in the U.S. have much more to worry about than their paychecks. As the Committee to Protect Journalists put it in a recent report, “These are not normal times for American press freedoms.” On the same day Trump issued his executive order, the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, announced that the Justice Department will use subpoenas and warrants to obtain reporters’ phone records, notes, and testimony in order to investigate government “leaks.” “Journalists’ work is under fire in a way that has an emotional and psychological effect,” Tina Pamintuan, the outgoing C.E.O. of St. Louis Public Radio, told me, while she was in Washington lobbying for federal funds. (More than six per cent of her station’s projected revenue comes from the C.P.B.) “Yet they still go out there and do this amazing work.”