Yo, Ernie! Take a walk. And while you’re at it, take your pal Bert and the whole diverse Sesame Street bunch. Who needs a Ken Burns and all of his documentaries? NOVA? Same thing. Frontline? You want to broadcast “left wing” programming, forget federal funding. At least, that is what President Trump believes of public TV and radio.
On May 2nd, Trump signed an executive order defunding NPR and PBS. He and the White House defended the move by saying that NPR had ignored Hunter Biden stories and had also avoided assigning blame on China for the COVID virus.
In targeting PBS, the White House said it also was too left leaning. As an example, it cited a Valentine’s Day story on “queer animals” and featured stories embracing a teenager’s transgender journey.
Both NPR and PBS have long been targets of conservatives. But now they not only have a compliant president who sees political gain in standing with them but an unfiltered megaphone-wielding firebrand in Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
“They can hate us on their own dime, not the American people’s hard-earned tax dollars,” Greene said in her attack on the broadcasters.
Three Colorado radio stations, including KCPR in Centennial, Ignacio’s KUTE and Aspen Public Radio, have joined an NPR lawsuit to stop the administration’s planned funding cuts.
“It’s a real threat,” said Gilbert Bailon, executive editor of Chicago Public Radio’s WBEZ, of the latest effort to cut funding from the two broadcast entities. “The difference this time is that he (Trump) has Congress in agreement.”
Bailon is perhaps the highest-ranking Latino in American journalism. His career has included serving as executive editor of both The Dallas Morning News and St. Louis Post-Dispatch before transitioning into public radio. He is also past president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and headed the Missouri paper when it received the National Press Foundation’s Benjamin C. Bradlee Editor of the Year award for coverage of the Ferguson, Missouri, fatal shooting of Michael Brown.
Bailon said the anti-journalism fever is fueled by the right’s desire to connect the media with stories that are topical. “If you do a story on immigration or gays or the trans movement,” he said, “you’re involved in their lifestyle. It’s the belief that that is all we’re doing.” In fact, Bailon said, doing these stories is just doing the job, a job that goes well beyond stories the right might consider salacious.
“If you listen to NPR, most of it (our coverage) is local news with no cultural bent. It’s what happened at city hall…vibrancy of local communities,” Bailon said. What the right does, especially the loudest voices, he suggested, is “cherry pick.”
NPR, in Chicago and other markets, said Bailon is basic news gathering, journalism. “We try and provide context. That is what I would tell them.” Good journalism, he said, “is not a culture war…but some people are in their own bubble.”
But executive orders in and of themselves are not binding. A president has no authority to defund NPR or PBS. Funding or defunding is the role of Congress. Executive orders are merely direction or suggestion by a president on what Congress should do.
Both NPR and PBS have filed suit aiming to block any cutoff of federal funds. At stake is more than $1.1 billion the two broadcast entities receive annually in government funding. But should Congress act on Trump’s executive order, said KUNC’s Sean McKee, it would be crippling but not paralyzing.
“At KUNC,” McKee said, “we receive a small portion of our funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting…approximately 6-8 percent of our total revenue,” which is in line with the money CPB doles out to its 300-plus broadcast entities. The vast majority of budget comes from “listener support, local underwriting and sponsorships, grants and community partnerships.”
The KUNC CEO/Chief Operations Officer also bristled at the suggestion that NPR and his Greeley-based station are ‘left leaning.’ “Our goal is to inform, engage, and provide the public…with the tools needed to make informed decisions.” KUNC, he said, recently reported on “Democratic efforts to conduct secret ballots.” The station, he said, will continue to remain balanced in its reporting.
Bailon said it’s just too easy for Trump, Taylor-Greene and the right to paint NPR or PBS as ‘the liberal media.’ In fact, the label is absolutely false. “Our role is serving the public,” he said. As an example, WBEZ printed and shared on-line a voter’s guide in Spanish and English. “We are in the business of verified information. We fact check.”
While Trump and his supporters fall back on liberal bias in seeking to cut funds, others see a pattern that belie his words. As proof, they site his campaign to whitewash U.S. history of America’s centuries of slavery, his stated desire to abolish the 14th Amendment which guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the country, his orders to erase the contributions of African-Americans, Latinos and other minorities to the country and wiping away any DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and efforts in federal government.
Trump has also attacked the work of the Smithsonian Museum, the planned American Women’s History Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Each is accused of offering “improper ideology.” The term, said The Hill, a conservative Washington D.C., paper, is “not defined,” but is code for “anything Trump doesn’t like.”
But Trump’s campaign, said veteran journalist and past president of the Society of Professional Journalists, Rebecca Aguilar, is a muscular effort to dilute the truth. “He fears truth,” she said. “The only way he can stop the truth from reaching the public, including his MAGA supporters, is to take away the money.”
The Dallas resident who regularly hop-scotches the country speaking on journalism and the First Amendment said she hopes “Americans step forward and donate to these two media platforms to show the president cannot control us.”
