Variety: Trump White House Seeks to Cease Federal Funding to PBS, NPR With New Executive Order

Story from Variety:

The Trump White House issued an executive order Thursday evening that called for a block on all federal funding to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), alleging that both organizations have engaged with “biased and partisan news coverage.”

The order instructs the board of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting to “cease direct funding to NPR and PBS” to the “maximum extent allowed by law.”

Paula Kerger, the president and CEO of PBS, called the order “blatantly unlawful” in a statement Friday.

“The President’s blatantly unlawful Executive Order, issued in the middle of the night, threatens our ability to serve the American public with educational programming, as we have for the past 50-plus years,” she said. “We are currently exploring all options to allow PBS to continue to serve our member stations and all Americans.”

The CPB also issued a statement on Friday, in which it said that it is “not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority.”

“Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government,” a spokesperson said. “In creating CPB, Congress expressly forbade ‘any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors…’ 47 U.S.C. § 398(c).”

In the order, the administration noted that under the CPB’s governing statute, the group may not “contribute to or otherwise support any political party.” The White House also accused government funding of news media to be “not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence,” arguing that the media landscape has become more “abundant” and “diverse” since the CPB was founded in 1967.

The CPB distributes funds to local public radio and TV stations, which in turn pay license fees to air NPR and PBS programming. The Trump order purports to instruct the CPB to halt “indirect” funding of NPR and PBS by local stations using CPB funds.

The CPB and three board members — Tom Rothman, Diane Kaplan and Laura Ross — sued the Trump administration on Tuesday to block an order that purported to fire the three members. The lawsuit argued that the CPB was created as an independent agency in order to insulate it from politics, and that board members are not federal officials subject to removal or control by the president.

“CPB Board members cannot be affected, controlled, or disturbed by the actions of the government,” the lawsuit states.

Each of the three board members was appointed to a six-year term by President Biden. A hearing on the lawsuit is set for May 14.

“CPB’s Board Members are essential to the governance of CPB, a private, non-profit corporation, that funds more than 1,500 independent, locally owned and operated public television and radio stations across the country, providing universal access to free, high-quality content that educates, informs, and tells our American story,” a CPB spokesperson said Tuesday.

President Trump has signed more than 140 executive orders since taking office back in January, holding the record for the most such enactments issued by a newly elected president in their first 100 days in office.