Authoritarian assholes really don’t like public broadcasting. They don’t like it because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the often perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based corporate media.
If we bolstered real independent media or public broadcasting, you might see journalism more interested in telling people the truth and challenging wealth and power. Yuck!
It’s disguised as a war on wasteful spending, but fear is what’s at the heart of the Trump administration’s assault on public broadcasting and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
CPB uses a modest amount of taxpayer funds to help support organizations like PBS and NPR. A 51-48 vote last Thursday on President Trump’s rescissions package evaporated the $1.1 billion allocated to public broadcasting for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. 51 Republicans made the cuts possible.
While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributes over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations. In a statement, the CPB makes it clear the cuts will be particularly hard on these local NPR and PBS affiliates:
“Without federal funding, many local public radio and television stations will be forced to shut down. Parents will have fewer high quality learning resources available for their children. Millions of Americans will have less trustworthy information about their communities, states, country, and world with which to make decisions about the quality of their lives. Cutting federal funding could also put Americans at risk of losing national and local emergency alerts that serve as a lifeline to many Americans in times of severe need.”
Local journalism has been brutalized by media consolidation, creating massive news deserts where the local populace really has very little access to accurate information. Many Americans also lack the media literacy to find accurate information, something that’s increasingly exploited by right wing propagandists across every medium (AM radio, broadcast TV, cable news, the internet) to obvious effect.
CPB plays a major role in ensuring the public also receives timely emergency alerts, as explained on the CPB website:
“PBS WARN enables all public television stations to send WEAs [Wireless Emergency Alerts] out over their transmitters to provide a ‘hardened, redundant’ alternate path for the cellular companies’ connection. Between January 1 and December 31, 2024, more than 11,000 WEAs issued by federal, state, and local authorities were transmitted over the PBS WARN system, a 30 percent increase over 2023. Public television stations save lives in their communities, even those who might never turn on a television.”
NPR affiliates like Seattle’s KUOW had to turn toward begging the public to stay afloat, And while KUOW did raise $1.5 million in just 12 hours, begging to survive is not really sustainable longer term. These organizations are a public good, and their disintegration doesn’t just result in a more ignorant electorate, but a less safe public overall.
As we noted recently, U.S. “public broadcasting” is a shadow of the true concept after years of being demonized and defunded. Just 1 percent of NPR’s and 15 percent of PBS’s budget came from the CPB in the first place, so to even call these organizations “public” is a misnomer.
But the underlying concept remains an ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots because they’re very well aware that if implemented properly, it can provide a serious challenge to their war on informed consensus. Corporate media (as you’re seeing pretty much every day now) is easily exploitable by authoritarians because its primary interest is in protecting access, ad engagement, and the interests of (usually wealthy, right wing) ownership.
U.S. media reforms (restored media consolidation limits, media literacy education, bolstered public media funding, creative new funding models for independent journalism) are desperately needed, but authoritarians (and the extraction class more broadly) love themselves an ignorant and befuddled electorate.