Trump’s threat to defund all US public media has NPR and PBS on the back foot
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President-elect’s agenda and Project 2025 playbook align in stripping Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s license. 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.
