Better nothing than a MAGA mouthpiece.
Liz Dye at Public Notice (01.07.2026):
On Monday, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting shut itself down. Defunded by Congress and fearing that the Trump administration might pervert the organization to further undermine free media, the board members agreed it was better to salt the earth than leave behind a place for Trump to plant his poisonous, choking weeds. “CPB’s Board determined that without the resources to fulfill its congressionally mandated responsibilities, maintaining the corporation as a nonfunctional entity would not serve the public interest or advance the goals of public media,” reads a statement on its website. “A dormant and defunded CPB could have become vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse, threatening the independence of public media and the trust audiences place in it, and potentially subjecting staff and board members to legal exposure from bad-faith actors.” It’s a tragedy for the American body politic and a triumph for the nihilists who scorn the very idea of independent media and an informed electorate.
We used to be a proper country
In 1967, Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act. The law established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as private nonprofit corporation, tasked with distributing taxpayer money to local stations and subsidizing the production of “programs of high quality, diversity, creativity, excellence, and innovation.” Congress called public television and radio “valuable local community resources for utilizing electronic media to address national concerns and solve local problems.” Acknowledging that market forces will not produce valuable content when not commercially viable, the Act finds that “it is in the public interest to encourage the development of programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities.” And it worked. For almost 60 years, CPB doled out grants to local stations, which provided an alternative to if-it-bleeds-it-leads commercial news programming. Generations of American children watched educational shows like “Sesame Street” and “Reading Rainbow” without having to pay for it by sitting through commercials.
But for decades conservatives have targeted public broadcasting, accusing it of liberal bias. “I personally would privatize them all,” then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in 1994, suggesting that Americans were “paying taxes involuntarily to subsidize something which told them how they should think.” Howls about conservatives killing Big Bird were enough to protect public media 30 years ago. But right-wing opposition hardened over the decades.
Project 2025, the conservative manifesto, likened CPB to the BBC, which it meant as an epithet. In fact, the British Broadcasting Company serves as a considerable source of soft power for Britain, spreading its cultural and news programs worldwide. It also fosters a sense of civic unity and British identity — there’s a reason they call it “Auntie Beeb.” And shows like “Sesame Street” have similarly reinforced American values at home and abroad. But Project 2025 insisted that “public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake,” whining that “the government should not be compelling the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views.” “‘Sesame Street’ is on HBO now, which shows its potential as a money earner,” they snorted, without specifying how poor children, who need educational programming the most, might access the show without a local PBS station. (At least they didn’t suggest that Big Bird should maximize profits by showing a bit more cleavage and accepting product placement.) [...]
They finally killed Big Bird
In a May 1 executive order, Trump ordered CPB to “cease direct funding to NPR and PBS, consistent with my Administration’s policy to ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage.” He also ordered CPB to bar local public media outlets from using federal money to pay for NPR programming like “All Things Considered,” or PBS shows like “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.” Then in July the Republican-controlled Congress voted to zero out all funding for CPB. The bill, which passed the House by just 216-213, clawed back $1.1 billion which had already been allocated for public media. In August, CPB announced that it would shut down entirely by September 30, leaving only a skeleton staff to wind down operations through January. NPR President Katherine Maher projected that some 70 to 80 public radio stations would shut down within a year. But defunding CPB did not revoke the Public Broadcasting Act or the organization’s public charter. The entity still existed, bound by a statutory mandate it had no means of carrying out. The president still had the right to nominate members to its board, allowing him to repurpose the organization for his own ends. And the destruction of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) vividly illustrates what those ends might be.
The CPB board voted to dissolve itself, preventing a MAGA hostile takeover of the organization from happening.
