For all its concern about a peaceful transfer of power, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) are probably not planning a story about the three board members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) who have refused to leave the board after Trump removed them in April.
Not so long ago — in 2020 and 2021 — PBS and NPR were spreading propaganda that President Donald Trump was going to make a ruckus before giving Joe “Autopen” Biden the keys to the Oval Office.
Even before the November 2020 election, PBS and NPR tried to get Trump to commit to the results of the election. When he took a wait-and-see approach, the outlets suggested that he would refuse to accept the election results and buck a peaceful transfer of power.
But when his last day in office came in January 2021, Trump exited with class. PBS and NPR did not apologize, nor did the CPB learn from his example.
PBS and NPR receive hundreds of millions from the federal government, much of it through the CPB, “the largest single source of funding for public radio [and] television.” The CPB is a nonprofit created by Congress to provide funding for programming for the public. The three are so intertwined that they are sometimes mistaken for the same entity.
The president has the authority to appoint (with the Senate’s confirmation) and remove members of the CPB board, and so he did. Trent Morse, the deputy director of presidential personnel for the executive office of the president, sent an April 28 email informing Laura G. Ross, Thomas E. Rothman, and Diane Kaplan that the president was removing them, effective immediately.
The fired board members then did what any good leftists would do: rushed (April 29) to court (CPB v. Trump), demanding that the Trump administration be prevented “from taking any steps to implement or give effect to” the “purported removal,” court papers say.
But the court sided with Trump, saying, “the President (as the appointing person) was authorized to remove the three directors at the time he acted.”
In response, Ross, Rothman, and Kaplan put out a press release doing what public broadcasters do best: completely mischaracterizing reality. In a June 8 press release titled, “Court Recognizes CPB’s Independence; Board Members Remain,” the CPB makes no mention that the judge denied their request.
“The three individuals whom the President purported to remove, Laura G. Ross, Thomas E. Rothman, and Diane Kaplan, are, remain, and shall continue to be directors of the Board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” the release said.
And the tacky trio have stuck in their former roles since then, attending board meetings, voting on issues, and drawing pay, according to a complaint filed by the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday.
They even purportedly voted to amend the bylaws, saying no “Director may be removed from the Board by any person or authority, including the President of the United States, without a two-thirds vote of the other Directors confirming such removal.”
This defies common sense. The CPB just argued in court that the president has no authority to fire them but, by changing the bylaws, admits that he does. Moreover the former CPB board members were removed in April and were no longer authorized to make board decisions on May 15 when they voted to change the bylaws.
The Trump administration’s complaint asks the court to have the former board members “ousted and excluded” from the office of board members of the CPB; declare any actions they took after they were canned “null and void”; and order them to refund to the United States any compensation they have received after April 28.
It takes the undeveloped ego of a toddler to pout this long. But if a puppet like Elmo on PBS’s Sesame Street can learn how to share, surely Ross, Rothman, and Kaplan can too. Their turns are over, and if they don’t move out of the way, someone is going to have to put them in a time-out.