Perhaps it was inevitable.
“REPUBLICANS HAVE TRIED DOING THIS FOR 40 YEARS, AND FAILED….BUT NO MORE,” Donald Trump boasted of the GOP roasting Big Bird.
Now, they’ve finally done it after all these years, cut a billion dollars that effectively eliminates the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
I will mourn the destruction of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a profoundly wrongheaded and unnecessary attack on civility, decency and quality journalism, for the rest of my days. The reasons are personal, cultural and journalistic.
My start in broadcasting was behind the microphone of a college radio station in eastern South Dakota. I did the morning show, a little music, mostly news and sports and the weather of course. I believed even then that non-commercial radio could do the kinds of things that ratings dependent, used car dealer and marijuana dispensary supported AM or FM stations never could or would do.
I once broadcast a livestock show and a track meet. Not at the same time. As a college senior I covered the South Dakota legislature, providing daily interviews and news reports back to my home base, but also to stations all over the state who wouldn’t or couldn’t have their own “man in Pierre.”
The experience shaped my outlook on news and public service. And what is happening to public broadcasting makes me sad and damn mad.
“This is, in our view, the misuse of taxpayer dollars,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said in justifying the elimination of federal funding for public broadcasting. “They’re not objective. They pretend to be so.”
Johnson likely never took a journalism course. What horse pucky from a sanctimonious little man of destruction.
I remember on the first day of one of my college courses the instructor, a former long-time reporter who knew of what he spoke, said rather bluntly: “Objectivity is impossible, but fairness is not.”
The ideologues on the far right aren’t into fairness. They’re all for free expression until they don’t like what you say, or what you report and then it’s labeled “woke” or “biased.”
That college station where I learned so much is likely to suffer crippling reductions in staff and programming. Or worse.
“I don’t think this is about bias in media,” Julie Overgaard, the executive director of South Dakota Public Broadcasting (SDPB) said after the House of Representatives affirmed the Senate’s slashing of funding for CPB. “I think this is about trying to shutter and change people’s access to information, to public safety, to education, to things that make a big, big difference.”
She’s spot on.
As the South Dakota Searchlight reported:
In addition to news coverage, [SDPB] provides live video and audio feeds of legislative and state government meetings, educational content, cultural programming, high school activities broadcasts, and emergency alerts across the state.
A great deal of that, maybe most of that, will now go away, voted out of existence not in the interest of service to constituents, but because congressional Republican have ceded their Constitutional authority over the federal budget to an arrogant and passionate group of far right ideologues intent on destroying America’s hard won global leadership in higher education and scientific research, and now independent, fair public broadcasting.
These ideologues also want to defund public schools and tell smart students from around the world to stay away from the nation’s best colleges and universities. It’s not the bias they want to kill; it’s the commitment to information in a discerning society.
Destroying public broadcasting saves small change, but it’s big for shuttering minds. And what’s not objective about “Antiques Roadshow,” or Ken Burns on the Civil War or the incredible science program, NOVA, or a spectacularly well reported NPR program like “Marketplace.”
Every western Republican save one, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all representing vast areas of rural America, voted to kill or dramatically reduce public broadcasting funding.
South Dakota’s all GOP delegation knew what the cuts would mean for their constituents, and they did it anyway. Same with Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. ¹
“Collectively, the stations in the public media network give 99% of the U.S. population access to public broadcasting,” High Country News reported recently. “Nearly half of CPB grantees are rural, and together they employ close to 6,000 people.”
Cliff Bentz, the Republican congressman from most of Oregon (at least in terms of acres) has two stations in his sprawling district that will be hard pressed to stay on the air. One of the stations is on the Warm Springs Reservation in eastern Oregon.
Over the last week that station’s website has been full of information about a nearby wildfire, the largest burning in the country. Wildfire information, as Stephen Colbert might say, has a well-known liberal bias.
“From the Community Calendar to 6 local newscasts weekday mornings, from language lessons to local news, cultural, educational and informational programming – you can rely on KWSO to inform, educate and entertain,” the station says.
Well, probably not now after their congressman’s vote.
Other Republicans like Idaho’s Mike Simpson used the CPB vote to display the depth of their hypocrisy and the totality of the hold Trump has on people like Simpson. The eastern Idaho congressman is one of the top appropriators in the House, and up until last week he claimed to be a champion of public broadcasting and a defender of the constitutional role of Congress in making spending decisions.
In the department of rich irony, Simpson, in February was presented with the “Champion of Public Broadcasting Award” from the nation’s public TV stations. In presenting the award the group president said:
Congressman Simpson has been an unwavering supporter of the essential value of local public broadcasting stations and the important role stations like Idaho Public Television play in communities throughout the nation, especially in serving rural communities. He has always been an effective champion of public broadcasting, and we are proud to have earned his enduring support.
We are extremely grateful for Congressman Simpson’s ongoing, strong commitment to ensuring all Americans have access to the essential local services provided by public television stations, from emergency alerts and warnings, to high-quality, educational resources and local programming and events that foster community connections. We are honored to present Congressman Mike Simpson with the 2025 Champion of Public Broadcasting Award he so richly deserves.
Enduring, ongoing, strong. Yeh, Right.
Simpson voted to kill Big Bird – twice. And, of course, he originally voted for the money he has now decided to eliminate. ²
Republicans who have killed the funding for public broadcast claim they need to get the federal budget under control, and they’re right – they do. Spending public dollars, however, is about establishing priorities.
Here’s one priority from the recent Republican legislation that took an axe to rural hospitals and food assistance – an enormous tax break for Silicon Valley investors who got rich on technology start up companies.
The “qualified small business stock exclusion,” has been around for a while, but the GOP Congress just made the tax break much fatter for founders and investors who cash out stock and skip out on paying taxes. Much fatter to the tune of $17 billion over ten years.
The CPB budget, in contrast, amounts to one one-hundredth of a percent (0.01%) of the federal budget. It really is about priorities.
Perhaps even worse than a decision to kill CPB after nearly 60 years is the admission for a number of Republicans that they didn’t really know what they were cutting in Donald Trump’s recession bill.
“Please give us specific information about where the cuts will come,” said Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker, who, of course, voted to let the White House do what it wanted. “Let’s not make a habit of this. Let’s not consider this a precedent.”
Good luck with that.
Congress is dealing, after all, with a guy with the budget acumen of a genius who bankrupt a casino and a director of the Office of Management and Budget – the real president, it seems – who is hell bent on destroying pretty much everything, now including Sesame Street.
I can’t leave this without another reflection on the bias accusation, a charge thrown at me many a time when a viewer just didn’t like a guest, a show, a subject or felt their own, often blinkered point of view got short shrift.
It’s less a reflection on my humble career than on the broader public broadcasting mindset that in my years of hosting public affairs programs – I did thousands of interviews – I had a mandate to interview interesting and significant people of every political persuasion. Smaller market commercial TV has rarely, if ever, done the same on that scale or depth.
So I did 30 minutes with William F. Buckley, one of the most fascinating guests ever. And I should note Buckley’s TV show was carried for years on PBS.
I interviewed a guy named Reed Irvine, the founder of Accuracy in Media, a group that regularly bashed almost every news organization in the country.
I interviewed many conservative corporate and business leaders, including William Agee, who drove the company once known as Morrison-Knudsen off a cliff after being brought in to save it, and John Fery, a nice guy who built Boise Cascade into a wood products giant and was just a bit to the right of Herbert Hoover.
I covered the Idaho legislature for many years, anchoring a daily show from the statehouse that overwhelmingly featured – no big surprise in Idaho – Republican legislators, even some who voted (for a year) to end state support for public television. I’m still proud that a very conservative guy with a mind as big as his wallet stepped in to underwrite our broadcast.
Here’s something that gets lost in the purely partisan strum und drang of Republican justifications of killing things like public broadcasting: it’s not just about closing some rural NPR stations or starving out of business a PBS station in rural America.
This is part and parcel of an ultra-conservative effort to destroy sources of vital, independent and fair journalism – all across the media landscape.
There are many, many proof points for the fact that authoritarianism has come to the United States in the shape of the current administration and it’s bootlickers in Congress, but killing off independent sources of news, information and entertainment is about as fascist adjacent as it comes.
As important as public broadcasting is to me and to millions of Americans, killing CPB is just one step of many … and they will continue.
As Paul Farhi wrote yesterday in The Atlantic:
Ever since he launched his presidential campaign in 2015, Trump has fulminated against “the fake news.” But only in his second term has Trump gone beyond such rhetoric to wage a multifront war on media freedom with all of the tools at his disposal: executive actions, lawsuits, a loyal regulatory bureaucracy, a compliant Republican majority in Congress and a sympathetic Supreme Court. Each of his actions has been extraordinary in its own right; collectively, they represent a slow-motion demolition of the Fourth Estate.
The principal question isn’t just whether anyone can stop Trump, but whether anyone in power really wants to.
Make no mistake this is all about shuttering and changing people’s access to information, to public safety, to education.
It’s what authoritarians do.
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