By Kevin Gosztola / The Dissenter

The end of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is a major victory for Republicans in their decades-long campaign to defund public media, particularly the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR). Yet American conservatives did not achieve this moment on their own. 

Democrats and the nonprofit corporation itself consistently failed to protect public broadcasting from the culture war waged by Republicans. The CPB even monitored journalists and staff at PBS, NPR, and other organizations that received government funds, which reinforced the false notion that the United States government was funding media filled with “anti-American” or “left-wing” ideologues. 

On July 24, President Donald Trump signed a bill that revoked over $1 billion in already appropriated funds for the CPB, which financed NPR and PBS. The massive cuts immediately had a ripple effect that spurred plans to cut staff or end operations at “nearly 70 small radio stations in states such as Alaska, Kentucky, Texas and Mississippi.”

NPR and PBS previously sued the Trump administration for allegedly violating their First Amendment rights and engaging in “viewpoint discrimination” when the White House pushed to defund the media organizations through an executive order. 

“Regardless of any policy disagreements over the role of public television, our Constitution and laws forbid the President from serving as the arbiter of the content of PBS’s programming, including by attempting to defund PBS,” PBS argued. 

The CPB was created through the Public Service Broadcasting Act of 1967. Notably, a 15-member commission convened by the Carnegie Corporation of New York recommended that “Congress provide the federal funds required by the [CPB] through a manufacturer’s excise tax on television sets (beginning at 2 percent and rising to a ceiling of 5 percent). The revenues should be made available to the Corporation through a trust fund.” But the legislation passed without a means for ensuring funding.

Without a funding mechanism, renowned media scholar Robert W. McChesney, who died on March 25, recalled in his 2004 book, “The Problem of the Media,” that PBS was vulnerable to political pressure: 

When PBS broadcast muckraking programs such as 1970’s Banks and the Poor, it sent some politicians into a tizzy. President Nixon vetoed the public broadcasting budget authorization in 1972 to express his displeasure. The Democratic platform that year, arguably the most left-wing one since the New Deal, stated, “We should support long-range financing for public broadcasting, insulated from political pressures. We deplore the Nixon Administration’s crude efforts to starve and muzzle public broadcasting, which has become a vital supplement to commercial television.” PBS eventually did get its funding, but with it public broadcasters got a clear message: be careful in the coverage of political and social issues and expect resistance if you proceed outside the political boundaries that exist in commercial broadcast journalism.

McChesney understood why conservatives obsessed over public broadcasting. As he described, public broadcasting lacked “traditional sources of control” that were found in commercial media—“owners and advertisers.”

Republicans were always afraid of the potential for this system to “produce critical work” and so much so that Speaker Newt Gingrich announced after the 1994 election that conservatives would “zero out” funding due to public broadcasting’s “liberal bias.” (Gingrich eventually backed off after his call sparked intense opposition among potential campaign donors.)

Republican Cronyism And Editorial Interference At The CPB

The truth is, from Nixon to Trump, Republicans were actually rather successful in manipulating the CPB to serve their partisan agenda. Back in 2005, when Republican Kenneth Tomlinson was in charge, the New York Times reported that the chairman aggressively pressed “public television to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias.” The chief executive of PBS even accused Tomlinson of threatening “editorial independence.” 

Peter Hart of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) further noted that an unnamed senior official at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) claimed Tomlinson was “engaged in a systematic effort not just to sanitize the truth, but to impose a right-wing agenda on PBS. It’s almost like a right-wing coup. It appears to be orchestrated.”

To further contextualize this “political cronyism” under President George W. Bush, Hart referred to James Ledbetter’s 1997 book “Made Possible By…: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States,” which recalled how Nixon “deliberately plotted to use his CPB appointees as spies, to use them to topple [President Lyndon B. Johnson-appointed] CPB chairman Frank Pace, and to quash public TV content he and his allies disliked.”

Then as now, PBS had an “elite, pro-business slant” that made its programming difficult to distinguish from corporate news programs.

FAIR studied public affairs shows in 1999 and concluded that they lacked “consumer advocates or public interest voices.” The shows regularly featured government officials, so-called professional journalists, and “corporate/Wall Street representatives.” In fact, “Not a single representative of organized labor appeared in discussions of corporate mergers or of layoffs.”

Given the recent hearings on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers grilled the heads of PBS and NPR over their promotion of “far-left ideologies,” one might think PBS was a bastion for American socialists. But as Hart documented for FAIR:

A rival to Fox News Channel could be launched with the list of conservatives who have hosted or produced shows on public television over the years: John McLaughlin (The McLaughlin Group, McLaughlin’s One on One), Peggy Noonan (On Values), Ben Wattenberg (Think Tank and Values Matter Most), Laura Ingraham and Larry Elder (National Desk), Tony Brown (Tony Brown’s Journal), William Bennett (Adventures From the Book of Virtues), Milton Friedman (Free to Choose, Tyranny of the Status Quo), Fred Barnes (National Desk, Reverse Angle), Morton Kondracke (Reverse Angle, American Interests) and Tony Snow (The New Militant Center). (With the exceptions of McLaughlin’s and Friedman’s shows, all of these received CPB funding.)

Bill Moyers, a news media titan who died on June 26, hosted “Now.” He had been Johnson’s press secretary, but Moyers later became an outspoken progressive journalist.

Moyers’ show was allowed to remain on the air because it was “balanced” with two conservative shows: the “Journal Editorial Report,” produced by the Wall Street Journal, and “Unfiltered,” which was hosted by Tucker Carlson, who left in June 2005 to host a show on MSNBC. 

Cowardice In Public Broadcasting

Too much of this history is absent from the coverage of the demise of the CPB. Yet it is important to recall because any time that public media may have attempted to shuffle programming and represent a broader spectrum of political perspectives, the CPB was in trouble because it would obviously appear “biased” to Republicans or seem like it was shifting “left.” 

In 2024, after former NPR business editor pseudo-whistleblower Uri Berliner accused NPR of “progressive” bias, NPR added “11 new oversight positions” that would review all content. CPB also appropriated $1.9 million in additional funds for “editorial enhancement” funding at NPR. 

Alicia Montgomery, who worked in several leadership roles at NPR, pushed back on Berliner’s critique. She contended that NPR staff were “encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton.” 

Out of an “abundance of caution that often crossed the border to cowardice,” Montgomery further contended that NPR “encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planting a flag there, and calling it objectivity.”

The culture war over public broadcasting reached its fever pitch thanks to Trump, Elon Musk’s DOGE, and the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

Doomed From The Beginning?

There is an argument that U.S. public broadcasting was doomed from the beginning. It was embraced as a means of promoting American exceptionalism to international media consumers through Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, etc. But as for public media directed at Americans, according to McChesney, that remained a “marginal phenomenon” due to media owners and commercial entities, which defeated a broadcast reform movement in 1934. 

McChesney argued that commercial broadcasters allowed public media as it produced programming with less audience appeal and served poor and marginalized audiences that were of no interest to them. They ensured funding remained limited to keep media consumers paying for cable, and now, streaming services. 

Still, the crisis today was the same crisis facing public broadcasting in 2004.

“Never lavishly funded or supported, the system struggles to survive in a fairly small niche of the media market,” McChesney observed. “Its most vociferous critics charge that public broadcasting is a dubious institution in principle and now has become a bureaucratically ossified relic of a bygone era made irrelevant by the plethora of new cable channels and Internet websites.”

“These critics argue that the market, combined with new technologies, can do a superior job of serving the public interest—and with no public broadcasting subsidy to boot. Because public broadcasting retains an element of political support, especially among the influential upper middle class, its existence is accepted by most of its critics, but only if it remains marginal and poorly subsidized,” McChesney added. 

The demise of the CPB goes beyond the loss of tens of thousands of media jobs that were funded by a nonprofit corporation, which behaved more like a corporate media institution than an outfit committed to producing media that was in the public interest. It may represent an end to the idea of the U.S. government funding media institutions once and for all. 

Hamilton Nolan, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, made the case in July for recognizing the value of publicly funded journalism. 

If we want to see a robust level of news reporting exist in this nation—comparable to what we had in the twentieth century—we will need public funding for journalism. Not the paltry $1.1 billion that Congress just yanked from public broadcasting, but tens of billions of dollars, enough to prop up the ubiquitous local and regional reporting that is vital to a functioning democracy. You can arrive at this conclusion not by ideology, but by a straightforward process of elimination. Advertising revenue funded the journalism industry of past generations. Tech platforms like Google and Facebook figured out how to extract most of that revenue, leaving media companies in need of other funding streams. Nonprofit news outlets? There are great ones, but there is not enough donor money to go around. Subscriptions? Ditto. My Substack is earning me a living, but not the hundred other reporters I worked with in my last newsroom. The government is the funder of last resort. Unless journalism gets public funding, the profession will continue to decline for the foreseeable future. Anything else, I’m sorry to say, is magical thinking. 

Indeed, it feels like we are in the death throes of American journalism. Trump’s defamation lawsuits paired with stunning levels of media capitulation, FCC Chair Brendan Carr wielding regulatory powers to stifle the press, the increased adoption of AI, and the defunding of public broadcasting all come at a time when the industry continues to hemorrhage jobs. 

The space for working professionally as a journalist is drastically shrinking. The First Amendment could offer journalists some modest protection, but their bosses care more about bribing Trump and other government officials to leave their businesses alone. 

Alas, media and political elites who hold the levers of power feel no responsibility to fight for investigative reporting or public interest journalism—leaving us to fend for our survival.

Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.

https://scheerpost.com/2025/08/03/the-corporation-for-public-broadcasting-shutdown-a-grim-ending-for-publicly-funded-media/

 

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.