Media scholar talks with The Long Island Advocate about the latest attack on public media
By Mario Murillo
The Trump administration’s cost-cutting axe against public institutions has found a new target. On April 14, the White House announced it will ask Congress to cut more than $1 billion slated for public broadcasting in the United States. If this goes through, this would essentially eliminate almost all federal support for NPR and PBS.
The plan is to request Congress to rescind $1.1 billion in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or CPB, monies that have already been approved by Congress in previous appropriations. The CPB is the taxpayer-backed company that funds public media organizations across the U.S. If Congress were to nix these funds, that would amount to about two years of the organization’s subsidies, nearly all of which goes to public broadcasters, including NPR, PBS and their local member stations, including many small, rural community-licensed stations.
Mario Murillo’s LIA Interview with Dr. Victor Pickard
Ending government support for public media has been a priority for conservative Republicans for decades. Currently, PBS and NPR are under investigation by the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for purportedly broadcasting commercial advertising on its airwaves. Meanwhile, the presidents of both networks were recently attacked at a Congressional hearing by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia, who called public media the “anti-American airwaves,” targeting what she claimed is public media’s “liberal bias.”
Now, with the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) sledgehammer being applied to a wide range of public-serving institutions, from the Agency for International Development to the National Institutes of Health, it looks like this time, the anti-public media movement finally will get its way. That is, only if Congress complies with the request.
If members do not approve the cut request, the funds must be allocated and spent as initially intended. It’s important to point out that federal funds allocated to the CPB account for a small portion of the larger budgets at NPR and PBS, which generate up to 85% of their operating budgets through private sponsorships and donations. Most of the government-allocated funding goes to local member stations, which rely on it to pay for their small staffs, maintenance and programming costs.
Dr. Victor Pickard is a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality and Change Center. He’s the author of several books on media, journalism and democracy, including “Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society” (Oxford University Press, 2020), and “America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform” (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
He writes regularly for the Nation Magazine, where his latest piece is titled We Must Save Public Media to Change It. Dr. Pickard spoke recently about this situation with The Long Island Advocate for this piece.
Professor Mario A. Murillo is vice dean of the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication.
