The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced Friday that it would undertake “an orderly wind-down of its operations” after Congress zeroed out its funding.
In the press release, CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison said:
Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations. CPB remains committed to fulfilling its fiduciary responsibilities and supporting our partners through this transition with transparency and care.
President Donald Trump has had the CPB on the ropes for months. He attempted to fire three members of its board of directors and to defund National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which the CPB helps fund. (The CPB fought back in court.)
Last month, Congress, with Trump’s endorsement, finally put the CPB out of its misery, passing a rescissions package that included a $500 million reduction in the CPB’s annual funding. The Senate Appropriations Committee, meanwhile, approved legislation that completely defunds the corporation.
Seeing its days were numbered, the CPB had no alternative but to close up shop. The organization told employees Friday that most of them would be let go at the end of September. But, according to its press release, “A small transition team will remain through January 2026 to ensure a responsible and orderly closeout of operations.”
In her statement, Harrison insisted that “public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life.” Similarly, NPR CEO Katherine Maher said her organization “will continue to … [uphold] the highest standards for independent journalism.”
“CPB,” she asserted, “upheld the core values of the Public Broadcasting Act, including support for diverse voices.”
Had the CPB done so, it probably would not now be facing Republicans’ wrath — though it should still have been shuttered because it is unconstitutional. However, as The New American reported in March:
Although the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which created the CPB, requires the corporation to maintain a “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature,” the CPB has always been mired in political controversy.
… From the Nixon administration to the present day, the CPB and its subsidiaries have been reliably liberal. When, in the early years of the 21st century, the CPB board tried to inject some balance into the proceedings in keeping with the corporation’s legal mandate, staffers revolted and complained to the media. Congressional Democrats succeeded in forcing then-CPB board chairman Kenneth Tomlinson to resign. They claimed that his programming and recruitment decisions were politically biased — by which they meant not biased in their favor.
In recent years, the political bias of NPR has become so blatant that a senior editor, Uri Berliner, wrote an article bemoaning it.
… His bosses suspended him over the article, after which he resigned. Among those bosses was CEO Katherine Maher, a self-described “unalloyed progressive” who worked to get out the vote for former President Joe Biden and considers President Donald Trump a “deranged racist sociopath.”
The Daily Caller recounted recent examples of public broadcasting’s slant:
NPR falsely reported in November 2018 that Donald Trump Jr. lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his September 2017 testimony about plans for a Trump Tower in Moscow, which actually referred to an entirely different project.
NPR also downplayed the idea that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, and stopped airing Trump’s coronavirus task force briefings in the Seattle, Washington, area in March 2020.
In 2020, PBS’ former White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor characterized Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore as a love letter to “white resentment” on MSNBC. In 2017, PBS put together an entire panel to educate its viewers on what it means to be “woke” and how to define “white privilege,” and further produced an entire movie called “Real Boy,” which promoted a teenager’s so-called “changing gender identity.”
After news of the CPB’s demise broke, Media Research Center President David Bozell observed on X:
For years, Americans were forced to foot the bill for NPR and PBS, two media arms that insulted the very taxpayers funding them.
When you spend years sneering at America, promoting drag queen story hours, and pushing climate hysteria while claiming neutrality, eventually, the jig is up.
Congressional Republicans, of course, had something to celebrate too.
“PROMISES MADE, PROMISES KEPT,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) wrote on X. “The days of the American people being forced to fund biased political outlets ARE OVER.”
“Proud to lead the rescissions package President Trump signed to finally pull the plug on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” boasted House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.). “No more public dollars for partisan propaganda.”
Not to be outdone by others in the Pelican State delegation, Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) crowed that the CPB “will soon be no more. That’s great news for every American who doesn’t want their tax dollars funding left-wing opinion journalism EVER again.”
In introducing his own CPB-defunding bill in February, Kennedy pointed out that it would be equally outrageous if liberal taxpayers had been forced to bankroll “right-of-center opinion journalism.”
According to The New York Times, PBS, NPR, and many of their popular programs “will survive without the” CPB. But they will have to do so by convincing, rather than coercing, people to fund them.