Pulling the Levers of Power: How the Trump Administration Hijacked Public Broadcasting
Once a bipartisan resource, public media is now cast as an ideological threat under the Trump administration’s efficiency campaign.
On May 1, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” instructing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to cease nearly all federal funding for National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The order prohibited local public radio and television stations, and any other recipient of CPB funds, from using federal grants to purchase programming from these public media organizations and mandated a review of existing grants for compliance with the administration’s ideological priorities. The Trump administration’s attempt to cut public media funding is part of their “rescission” strategy—a process to roll back previously appropriated budgets.
The House gave final approval on July 18, 2025, to the Trump administration’s plan to rescind approximately $9 billion in previously allocated funds. This measure included a $1.1 billion cut to the CPB, effectively eliminating all federal support for NPR, PBS, and their member stations. Following this, the CPB announced on August 1, 2025, that it would begin an orderly shutdown of its operations after the Senate-Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill excluded its funding for the first time in nearly sixty years. These actions are part of a broader initiative spearheaded by the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which aims to streamline the federal government, eliminate programs deemed unnecessary by the administration, and reduce bureaucratic inefficiency.
While the administration claims its efforts are motivated by fiscal responsibility and safeguarding taxpayer dollars, critics argue that these moves are politically motivated attempts to silence dissent and reshape the media landscape to favor partisan narratives. Clayton Weimers, Executive Director of Reporters Without Borders USA, told Project Censored, “The administration frames the cuts as ‘efficiency cuts,’ but that is not necessarily the case. They frame it that way because they decided that’s a more palatable way to sell it to the American people. But at the end of the day, public media broadcasting costs the American taxpayer, on average, $1.60 per year, and the level of value that Americans get out of that $1.60 per year is tremendous.”
The CPB, established in 1967 as a private nonprofit corporation, was specifically designed to insulate public broadcasting from political interference, with its charter expressly forbidding government control over broadcasting content while ensuring that over 70 percent of federal appropriations flow directly to more than 1,500 local affiliate stations rather than centralized bureaucracies.
“It’s really important that people understand how public media is funded in this country,” Weimers shared with Project Censored. Local affiliates have the freedom to purchase programming from NPR and PBS that caters to their audiences’ preferences. He explained how Trump’s executive order essentially bans affiliate stations from buying this programming, thereby infringing on their First Amendment rights. Weimers emphasized that “it is up to the individual local independent stations what they want to show their audience on air, and they should make that decision based on what their audiences want to see and what their audience wants to hear, not based on what politicians in Washington think they ought to hear.” He challenged the Trump administration’s claim that public media is a biased tool of his political opponents, “Some of the editorial coverage might lean left and the audience might lean left, but it’s a complete mischaracterization. Public media in this country has over a thousand different broadcast, television, and radio stations. It’s not just any one thing. There isn’t one political line across all of public media.”
Other voices in the media industry echo Weimers’s statements regarding the motivations behind the Trump administration’s CPB rescissions. Victor Pickard, Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, explained to Project Censored that public media was created to address gaps in commercial broadcasting and to ensure that all audiences, especially low-income communities and communities of color, would have access to high-quality, trusted content. Pickard warned that defunding public media will force communities to “learn that lesson once again” about the limitations of commercial broadcasting, which “will never provide all of the information and communication needs of a democratic society.”
Lisa Graves, founder and Executive Director of True North Research, told Project Censored that the Trump administration’s cuts to the CPB are a systematic effort to undermine independent journalism, not address legitimate concerns about bias or fiscal policy. Graves explained that the targeting of NPR and PBS stems from coordinated and widespread disinformation and propaganda being perpetuated by the Trump administration. “These entities are important public investments that help bring national, international, as well as local news into our communities,” Graves told Project Censored. “The administration claims that there is political bias or partisan bias at these outlets, when in fact they are just covering the news. … The attack on public broadcasting is an attack on facts, truth, and journalistic independence. It has to be seen as such.”
This strategy poses an Achilles’ heel: While the rhetoric employed by the Trump administration targets elite, national outlets, the most damaging impact will fall on the hyperlocal media infrastructure already struggling to survive. Many small-town, rural, and tribal affiliates rely on CPB funding and syndicated content from NPR and PBS to fill gaps in local coverage, provide educational programming, and serve communities with little to no other media access, otherwise known as news deserts. Eliminating this support could crater regional journalism ecosystems—leading to programming losses, station closures, and widespread layoffs that ripple down the media supply chain. In many conservative and underserved communities, where public broadcasting often remains the only consistent source of local and noncommercial news, the cuts could unintentionally harm the very constituencies that the defunding narrative claims to serve.
Noting that public media receive only paltry funding from federal sources, Pickard called the defunding of the CPB a “tragic irony,” because it will “hurt individual stations, especially in rural and conservative areas in states such as Alaska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Texas.” He explained to Project Censored that some stations depend on CPB funding for 25–50 percent of their budgets and “will likely go under if federal subsidies are entirely cut, leaving news deserts in their wake.”
The Trump administration frames these funding cuts as fiscal responsibility, but smaller local news outlets view them as politically motivated attacks and part of a campaign to delegitimize public media and the services they provide. NPR and three Colorado public radio stations filed a lawsuit alleging that the May executive order is “textbook retaliation and viewpoint-based discrimination” in violation of the First Amendment. PBS, along with Lakeland PBS in rural Minnesota, also filed a similar lawsuit, disputing claims of bias and asserting that the Constitution forbids the President from arbitrating content. These lawsuits suggest Trump has far exceeded the expansive powers of the presidency, usurping congressional prerogatives and eroding free speech rights.
Seth Stern, Director of Advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, told Project Censored that the Trump administration has adopted what he calls a “throw-it-at-the-wall approach,” where they challenge the Constitution despite knowing most cases will fail on constitutional grounds. However, Stern explained that the strategy behind this approach is to find any legal opening the administration can exploit. “They are looking for the case they win, looking for the one instance where the courts give them an opening, and once they have that opening, they are going to barge through it.”
The Trump administration has adopted a multifaceted strategy to politicize public media by portraying these institutions as adversaries rather than recognizing them as informational resources or allies. Through rhetorical attacks, the administration frames public media and their content as ideologically biased, financially irresponsible, and increasingly unnecessary. This approach is implemented through executive orders and policies that employ loaded language such as “woke propaganda,” citing questionable fiscal justifications like “cost efficiency,” downplaying societal value, and implementing disruptive measures that create instability for essential broadcasting programs, ultimately exploiting public media rather than leveraging its potential for effective public communication.
Experts like Reporters Without Borders’ Weimers contend that the Trump administration has “shown a very strong disposition towards using whatever levers of power they have to punish those who oppose their agenda in any way.” Weimers emphasized to Project Censored that this targeting can affect public media outlets simply for “accurately reporting on what they’re doing.” The implications of these executive actions extend far beyond public media, he cautioned. “There is no reason that that would not also impact nonprofit media that publish content that the Trump administration does not like, even for-profit media.”
Weimers warned of a troubling escalation, characterizing the Trump administration’s campaign against public media as “a slippery slope.” Once the government gains control over public media and broadcast licensees, he argued, “they are one step closer to getting their hands on the rest of the media as well.”
Pickard told Project Censored that while the federal funding cuts will have a “chilling effect” on an already compromised media system, they also open the possibility of “building something entirely new out of the wreckage.” That wreckage is not merely financial—it is the collapse of a decades-old compact between government, media, and the public.
But from that imminent destruction comes a rare opportunity to reimagine public media not as a government-funded institution vulnerable to political whims, but as a truly community-owned resource, insulated from both partisan interference and commercial pressures. Rebuilding cannot depend on Washington reversing course or a future administration restoring support. Instead, citizens must take action: establishing community-supported journalism cooperatives, developing hyperlocal news networks sustained by their audiences, and building media infrastructures accountable to neighbors rather than distant politicians or corporate shareholders. The Trump administration may have dismantled decades of public media investment, but it cannot destroy the fundamental human need for trustworthy, bipartisan information and community connection.
Originally published on https://www.projectcensored.org/trump-admin-hijacked-public-broadcasting/
Digging Deeper on Community Radio: Triple R and Indispensable Airwaves
To get to the venue involves a calming, if early, ritual. Uneasy sleep beforehand, given the morning slot. Eagerness to prepare for the topic to be discussed in the global affairs segment, accompanied by that childish sense of worry that approval means something. Then, getting on a tram to the venue, which, as luck would have it, is positioned just at the end of the tramline in East Brunswick. This is Melbourne, and the destination is one of the city’s most heart-throbbing venues of community radio, Triple R.
The trio of radio hosts on the program Breakfasters has already grown callouses of experience, managing multiple tasks as they go through the music listings and guests with placid ease. Before heading to the green room, the scene is welcoming. Wooden floors, slightly worn, charmingly tatty, with brochures prominently displayed as you enter the building, a solid, expansive structure that accommodates generous space for live music and studios.
Triple R or 3RRR, depending on preference, is one of those community radio stations that sports an influence far beyond the plutocrats of the traditional or commercial radio scene. There are no demagogues to be found, no celebrity functionaries to be lauded. You are not handed a list of forbidden topics or words, much as you would be if running a program for the national broadcaster. The programming is also distinctly free of the venom and spite trafficked on the airwaves of the shock jock stations. While the arterial flow of the station is music, the mix of news and discussions on international and local affairs adds a rich sauce. Those with omnivorous tastes will be hard to disappoint.
Across the vast expanse of Australia, some 450 community radio stations hum away, hoping to offer their listeners alternative platforms with varied content. That very fact is almost singular. The development of such radio, observes David Melzer, himself having had lengthy experience at the helm of Melbourne’s polyglot 3ZZZ, had its roots in a number of factors: those dealing in education, activists inspired by anti-Vietnam War protests, increasing numbers of migrants, and enthusiasts of classical music. “Each of these four groups had one thing in common. They challenged how broadcasting operated in Australia. They wanted control of the airwaves, and they lobbied for it, leading to the establishment of the third tier of broadcasting in Australia.” With the advent of community broadcasting came the increasing role of Indigenous communities and those reluctant to use print media.
Globally, such stations face the corrosive effects of not so much digital disruption as digital appropriation, a process that is also shaping listening habits. Be it such internet-based giants as YouTube and Spotify, and the personalised, podcasting format, where tastes become bespoke affairs, the very idea of the radio as an important part of a day’s routine is being challenged. Not only does this alter the nature of what content is being offered, but it has had behavioural effects. As a co-authored article in the Electronic Journal of Education, Social Economics and Technology published this year contends, “Today’s listeners, especially younger generations, prefer interactive, mobile-accessible content and often participate in content production themselves via social media”.
That said, there is room for some sunny optimism. Community radio in the United Kingdom, for instance, is burgeoning. In September 2024, the country had over 350 licensed community radio stations, a marked increase from the 200 stations broadcasting in 2014. Data from Radio Joint Audience Research published in July this year also finds that over 50 million adults (86% of the UK population) tune in to radio every week, which augurs well for the more specific programming offered by community radio outlets. The streaming behemoths have created an odd sense of detachment, even estrangement, and certain listeners are seeking grassroots comforts. The significance of this is hard to exaggerate, given the nourishment such radio outlets provide in terms of language, cultural pursuits, and the arts.
During those necessary radiothons, when money is sought from the subscribers, the staff place themselves into the hands, ears, and pockets of the listeners, trying to sweetly convince them that another year of financial loyalty is needed. The theme this year for Triple R is “Digging Deeper”, described by the radio station as representing the labours of volunteer presenters who “work hard to dig deeper every single day, uncovering musical gems and unearthing important issues that often do not find airtime anywhere else.” The names of subscribers are read out with hearty enthusiasm and a tease. Renewals are emphasised with pride.
It is almost impossible to believe that an institution such as Triple R has been around for some three decades. The brooding fear is that such a scene will cease before the thieving systems of artificial intelligence or be chewed up by the ghastly listening habits of “influencers” and curated streaming services. Let us hope there is still ample time before that ghastly universe triumphs. Till then, best appreciate the admirable exploits of digging deeper by those able staff in community radio.
