Trump’s threat to defund all US public media has NPR and PBS on the back foot

On the campaign trail this year, Donald Trump routinely criticized US media. The president-elect called for CBS to be stripped of its broadcast license after it aired an interview with Kamala Harris, refused to participate in an interview with 60 Minutes and routinely called journalists the “enemy of the people”.

But perhaps no American media has attracted as much ire from the president-elect as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – a non-profit corporation created by federal law in 1967 to distribute funding to public media organizations like PBS and NPR.

“NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social in April. “THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!”

As the Trump prepares to take office next month, public media organizations – such as NPR and PBS, which have aired longtime favorites such as Curious George and All Things Considered – are readying themselves for funding cuts and other attacks against their programming. After Trump was re-elected in November, NPR member stations circulated a report warning that “it would be unwise to assume that events will play out as they have in the past” where funding is concerned, the New York Times reported Friday, and PBS board members received an update from political consultants earlier this month.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly called for the federal government to cut all funding to public media. In March 2017, Trump called for Congress to cut all funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the first proposed budget of his presidency – a call he repeated throughout his presidency.

In response to a 2020 effort to defund public media, the PBS president and CEO, Paula Kerger, issued a statement noting that “PBS and our member stations have earned bipartisan Congressional support because of the vital role that public television plays in homes and communities across the country. For 50 years, PBS has served as a trusted source for educational and thought-provoking programming, including school readiness initiatives for children, support for teachers and caregivers, public safety communications and lifelong learning across broadcast and digital platforms.”

But the conservative playbook Project 2025 has continued echoing conservative calls to cut funding to PBS and NPR, stating that the new Trump administration should strip public media of federal funding and licenses for noncommercial education stations.

“Not only is the federal government trillions of dollars in debt and unable to afford the more than half a billion dollars squandered on leftist opinion each year, but the government should not be compelling the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views,” Mike Gonzalez, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow, wrote in the document, repeating a common conservative refrain that public media leans to the left.

In recent months, Trump allies such as Elon Musk have taken up the call to defund public media. In April 2023, NPR moved off Twitter after Musk labeled the news organization “state-affiliated media”, the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia and China. After NPR quit the platform, Musk posted a tweet saying “Defund @NPR”.

In November, shortly after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Musk coauthored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with Vivek Ramaswamy (the two have been tasked with leading a “department of government efficiency”, an agency Trump claims he will create). In it, the pair identified the $535m Congress allocates each year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as one line item they would cut to reduce federal expenditures. As recently as this week, Musk posted on X that “legacy media must die”.

Although these attacks against public media are growing more concerted, they’re not new. Every Republican administration has aimed to defund public media since the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was founded.

American public media traces its origins to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, passed under Lyndon B Johnson’s administration. A public-private partnership, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting connects 1,190 public radio stations and 356 public television stations with federal grants, allowing those stations to maintain editorial independence and also raise funds from members and sponsorships. Today, 99% of the US population lives within listening range of at least one public media station.

Yet, the US spends considerably less on public media than its peer nations. A 2021 study from the University of Pennsylvania found that Germany spends $142.42 a person on its public media, Norway spends $110.73, the UK $81.30, and Spain $58.25, while the US spends just $3.16.

In 2005, while defending against a Bush administration attempt to defund public media, then representative Ed Markey said: “What parents and kids get from public TV is an incredible bargain. The question is not: ‘Can we afford it?’ but rather: ‘Can we afford to lose it?’”

Although Republican-sponsored bills to eliminate federal funding of public media are already before Congress (including the No Propaganda act and the Defund NPR act), two details may slow those efforts: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is funded two years in advance and many local public media stations run emergency alerts, a crucial system that would have to be transferred elsewhere.

Efforts to defund public media are likely to affect local newsrooms the most in rural areas where Trump was the favored candidate, as federal grants can make up a significant portion of a member station’s budget.

“The most vulnerable stations serving the most vulnerable people are going to be the ones that are hurt the hardest,” Eric Nuzum, a former NPR executive and a co-founder of the audio consulting and production company Magnificent Noise, told the New York Times. “We’re talking about very rural parts of the United States.”