President Donald Trump’s new executive order attempting to end public funding of National Public Radio and PBS could badly damage the reach of two vital American media networks. It’s a move straight out of the authoritarian playbook — and comes at a time of acute distress in the media market.
As NBC News reports, the executive order directs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to “cease federal funding for NPR and PBS.” The order could be challenged in court on First Amendment grounds, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting put out a statement saying that “Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.” The CEOs of NPR and PBS also say they’re exploring their options for challenging the administration.
Trump’s executive action against PBS and NPR is just one more plank of his authoritarian agenda.
Trump has long sought avenues to cut off support to public broadcasting, which is actually a time-tested Republican culture war target. Shortly after he took office this year, his new head of the Federal Communications Commission launched dubious probes into NPR and PBS. The CPB is already suing the administration over its attempt to fire its board members. Now, in accordance with the authoritarian checklist sketched out in Project 2025, Trump is escalating this campaign by trying to starve the networks of funds while calling them “left-wing propaganda.”NPR and PBS have vast reach: NPR stations collectively broadcast to more than 40 million listeners a week, and PBS has more than 130 million viewers on traditional television a year. While most of their funding doesn’t come from the federal government, losing access to that money would have a transformative effect on them — and their tens of millions of listeners and viewers.
PBS’ chief executive Paula Kerger recently said in an interview that about 15% of the network’s budget comes from federal funds, while the rest comes from viewers. But she emphasized the reach that the federal funding enables. “The idea behind this public-private partnership is that there are many stations in communities that, without the federal support, the stations would not exist,” Kerger said. “I have been to really extraordinary stations in small parts of the country in places like Granite Falls and in Cookeville, Tennessee, where you just see that the public media stations are such an important part of the fabric of those communities.”
According to NPR, it “receives about 1% of its funding directly from the federal government, and a slightly greater amount indirectly; its 246 member institutions, operating more than 1,000 stations, receive on average 8% to 10% of their funds from CPB.”NPR put together a document in 2011 that outlined the significant consequences of being cut off from federal funding. The New York Times, which obtained the report — written as a “secret plan for the worst” — notes, “Most NPR member stations operate at, or barely above, break-even.” The report estimated that about a fifth of member stations would close and up to 30% of listeners would lose access to NPR programming. As the Times notes, in some rural areas where populations don’t have access to broadband internet, those stations serve as one of the few reliable ways to get emergency information.
Trump’s executive order states, “Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options.” While it’s true that today’s media landscape is “diverse,” it’s also experiencing a funding crisis that has killed jobs and outlets across the industry, ravaged local news coverage and made many surviving media operations incredibly unstable. Economic strains on the media sector are precisely why the latest World Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters Without Borders, described U.S. press freedom as having hit a historic low. In other words, at a time when the country should be experimenting with more ways to publicly subsidize independent media, Trump is trying to torpedo them. Trump’s executive action against PBS and NPR is just one more plank of his authoritarian agenda. As he bullies universities, law firms and nonprofits on various flimsy pretexts, Trump is likewise pursuing a litigious agenda against the media sector to devastate independent news and education for the American public. As with his other actions, this attack — even if unsuccessful legally — seems engineered to discourage NPR and PBS from pursuing the kind of accurate, fact-based coverage of his administration that could make it look bad. It’s common for presidents to verbally attack the press for what they view as unfair coverage. But trying to defund the media is the conduct of an autocrat.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
