Defunding Public Media
Ever since U.S. President Donlad Trump returned to the White House on January 20 this year, he has persistently and consistently expressed his utter dislike for the national media. In fact, even during his first presidency, 2017-2020, he had often branded America’s many top media outlets, electronic or print, as the ‘nation’s biggest enemy’. And unfortunately, not only that, President Trump’s also utmost underpinning in demonizing the American media has now become a popular phrase, ‘fake news’. Be that as it may, and said to say that, Trump has also ‘christened’ media persons as the ‘enemy of the people’.
It’s probably due to the President’s heightened animus against the media that he has ordered to ‘Kill VOA’- America’s best channel to communicate with the world. President Trump has recently passed an Executive Order to defund the two most popular broadcast public media, NPR, national public radio and PBS, public broadcasting service, television network. These media networks are under the overall management of an umbrella entity, Corporation for Public Broadcasting. CPB receives and distributes over $535 million to public television and radio stations annually. The President’s Executive Order ‘eliminates millions of dollars in federal funding to the two public media organizations.’
According to a local media expert, the denial of this federal funding ‘amounts to perhaps the most significant threat in a decades-long campaign by Republican Party members to weaken NPR and PBS.’
CPB is a private company, partially financially supported by the federal government. The company’s chief executive, Katherine Maher, expressing her utter concern for the Trump Administration’s refusal to allocate funds has said that the federal government has ‘no legal authority over the company.’
Meanwhile, NPR has vowed to challenge the executive order, calling it ‘an affront to the US constitutional First Amendment. Similarly, PBS’s president, Paula Kerger, has also called the defunding order ‘illegal,’ saying that the President’s ‘blatantly unlawful executive order, threatens our ability to serve the American people with educational programing, as we have for the past 50+ years.’ It’s only Congress (both chambers of the US legislature) which can cut federal grants, the Trump administration has no right to cut funds. Incidentally, PBS is forward-funded two years to insulate it from political maneuvering, and a sizable chunk of money has already been paid. According to The Washington Post, both the agencies have ‘rejected the notion that they pander to liberal audiences.’ The audience is said to be ‘around 43 million listeners from every state of the nation.’
Anyway, the reasons cited for cutting funds are said to be that NPR and PBS have ‘liberal biases’, and lack of coverage of the Hunter Biden case, and for which the federal fund should not be spent, adding that NPR and PBS do not represent ‘a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events.’ The Trump Administration has since moved a bill in Congress to reduce CPB’s funding of NPR and PBS. Meanwhile, a legal challenge to the president’s executive order will also be filed in courts. Traditionally, it has been seen that lawsuits like these do not work.
Both CPB’s organs, NPR and PBS, do not always solely depend on federal funds, and are said to be capable of surviving on their own resources, such as commercial programing, donations, programme licensing from their member stations. NPR receives approximately 2 per cent of its budget from federal support. For PBS, the TV channel, this share is around 16 percent. Besides, both organizations get government support indirectly through grants.
Meanwhile, an eminent Harvard University constitutional law expert has opined that executive order ‘could run afoul of federal law that prohibited the president from rescinding federal funding without permission from Congress.’ He added that the presidents have the power to refuse to spend money that Congress has appropriated for specific purposes. Moreover, it’s also doubtful that the president has the authority to order CPB to do anything since it’s a private and a nongovernmental entity. Because of defunding, some local station may go off air.
Finally, it is pertinent to state here that NPR came into being on February 26, 1970, by the U.S. Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s regime. The stated object was ‘to support instructional educational and cultural activities’, and PBS was established on November 3,1969, and has been in uninterrupted public for over half a century. The services will particularly be missed by old-age listeners.
- R. Dua, former professor-head, journalism department, Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), New Delhi, and an ex-faculty Journalism, California State University, US.
