Trump Wants To Eliminate Corporation for Public Broadcasting

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The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created by Congress in 1967. It distributes funding to 1,500 locally owned public radio and TV stations across the country. In his proposed 2021 budget President Trump calls for the elimination of CPB over a two-year period.

CPB would receive $30 million in FY 2021 for “agency close-out costs,” which would help fund facilities costs, personal liabilities and existing contracts. Over the proposed two-year close out, the White House estimates the total close-out costs will be $58 million. In FY 2020 CPB received $465 million in federal funding.

The President has tried to eliminate CPB before, each time he gets blocked by Congress. The $465 million approved by Congress last year was the first increase in funding the organization had seen in 10 years.

CPB is forward-funded by two years to allow public broadcasters to leverage the federal dollars and to protect content from political interference. CPB received $445 million from Congress for the current fiscal year and expects to receive another $445 million in FY21. CPB is asking for $515 million for FY23.

36 COMMENTS

  1. GET RID OF PBS

    I used to produce television shows for P. B. S. Literally, some of my friends still do. I watched it, sometimes, and I liked it, at times. But definitely, PBS really has to go away, forever.

    It’s not because PBS was-is very awash in extremist liberal orthodoxy. It was-is. It’s not because I don’t want kids to see Sesame Street. I do, I guess. It’s not because Tinky Winky was even gayer-pinker than raspberries in the snow. “He”/”She”/”It” was.

    PBS must go because actually there’s really no point to it at all any more. There is simply nothing that PBS does that couldn’t be done by someone-something else — except for all those things it shouldn’t ever have been doing at all in the first place. The original premise of PBS was to give everyone in America access to television. It might have done that once upon a time, just possibly, just barely. But today in the age of cable tv, and satelite tv, and the WWW-Internet, it is a simply just another dinosaur like, pork barrel-boondoggle, protected by elite, influential-powerful, private-vested-special interests, nostalgia, and inertia.

    Their motto “If PBS Doesn’t Do It, Who Will?” is like a joke waiting for a punch line. It’s the equivalent of asking “If the Department of Sanitation Doesn’t Collect Your Garbage, Who Will?”

    PBS was born out of L. B. J’s ‘the Great Society’ as later “AlGore”-“Egor”-“Igor” ‘like’ efforts to ‘give’ rural?/poor people more “accesses” to revolutionary, new, mass, mediums-technologies (Sound familiar? . . . F. D. R.?). Back then, poor people were too far away from antennas to get TV news and entertainment. So, the governments (state and local governments got big slices of the pork) said, “If the Private Sector Won’t Do it, We Will.”

    Things have changed, vastly. Access for poor/rural? people is simply not a big issue any more. They don’t call satellite dishes the “West Virginia state tree” for nothing. One can see these massive, five-hundred-channel-receiving behemoths on the front lawns of shanty pre fab ‘houses’, and shacks, throughout rural America.

    Defenders point to all sorts of wonderful, and totally not wonderful programs on PBS and say, “Do you all ever really want to do without X, and Y, and Z?” Well, actually, X, and Y, and Z were most often really Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, and Sesame Street. But PBS had learned the public purse strings-scam artist-con game well. So, it also could have said to ‘conservative’ ‘critics’, do you all ever really want to lose Firing Line?, or Think Tank?, or News Desk? They also could have asked effete ‘critics’, do you all ever really want to lose The Three Tenors?, or Great Performances?, or The Civil War? And of course they also could say to all their partners-cronies-henchmen on the Far Left, do you all ever really want to lose weekday, or weekend, PBS Newshours, or Frontline, and all of the many, various, documentaries you made? Obviously, they really didn’t ever have to say this to the Left at all, because the Left had always loved the whole concept of PBS already — even if it had problems-troubles from time to time with its hidden efforts to secretly co-opt-out ‘conservatives’.

    The simple fact is that everything that is popular on PBS can be replicated by the market place and everything that is unpopular it probably shouldn’t ever be doing at all anyway. Sesame Street? They make hundreds of millions of dollars from all the licensings, distributions, sales, of toys, books, dvds, cds, and live shows — sales driven largely by public-government funded infomercials. Ditto Barney. Ditto Teletubbies. Nature documentaries? G ood God, I stay up like a stoned teenager whose parents are out of town watching nature docs on the Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, and TBS’s National Geographic marathons. Cooking and how-to shows? Quick! Turn on PBS right now — my bet is you’ll see some well-fed, foreign-albanian-etc.-born ‘cook’ explaining to a mind-numbed studio audience how to air-dry your leeks, or rutabagas. Cooking shows — the fare on HGTV and the Food Network are exhibit A — make a fortune. Besides, are the rural poor really in ‘need’ of Orthodox-Kosher Jewish Cooking in America-in N. Y. C.? History and biographical documentaries? A&E, Discovery, Biography, Bravo. Financial coverage? Ugh, this is getting tedious now: CNBC, CNN, MSN, etc.

    So what’s left? A bunch of political and news shows, some of which are really excellent and some of which stink. Well, one can have a long discussion about this or a short one. The short one simply states the principle that the U. S. government should not be involved in political reportage — even remotely. It creates complications we don’t need. Witness the ‘relatively’ ‘recent’ messes at WETA and WGBH, the flagship PBS stations in Washington and Boston. It turns out that the two stations were swapping all their funds raisings lists with the Democrat party. Rep. Billy Tauzin (R., La.) was thinking of squashing PBS funding over all the fiascos.

    Now, list-swapping goes on all the time with other non-profit organizations. But one of the things that makes this blunder so embarrassing is that it reveals a secret everyone knows but feels it is impolite to mention. PBS (especially WGBH) and the Democrat party are natural allies. Go kick a ‘conservative’ ‘media-watcher’ in the shins and he’ll tell you how PBS is often a video press release-mouth piece-trumpet for the DNC.

    This is the inevitable consequence of a government-funded television network. One party is going to be less friendly to it than another. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with liberal vs. conservative. I’m sure government-funded networks in many countries are conservative — because they are the babies of right-wing regimes.

    Indeed, if you were to describe how PBS is funded to a stranger from another time, it would sound rather fascist — very velvety fascism to be sure, but fascist nevertheless. Huge corporations-conglomorates give millions of dollars for, and at the behest of, the government, for programmings it publicly-officially-formally sanctions. Big businesses do it largely to curry favor in Washington and good will from the political classes. It should be pointed out that PBS funding is — deliberately — extremely complicated. The very many reasons why, are very long stories, but they amount to defense strategies to make de-funding PBS difficult, to the point of impossible.

    But it doesn’t change the facts that corporations fund NewsHour for the same reasons they fund ABC’s This Week. They want to run commercials for very specific Washington and New York audiences. And, I think that is absolutely fine, laudable even. But why do you need a government network to run commercials for congressmen, bureaucrats, and pundits? Meet the Press does that just fine and it existed very long before PBS. PBS-niks will say that commercialism taints coverage. Sure, that happens. But that’s like one prostitute criticizing another prostitute for taking credit cards. C-SPAN provides a better service to the average voter than anything and everything on PBS combined. And it is a product of the very money-grubbing cable tv-satelite tv companies.”

  2. American Public Television-Public Broadcasting System is a ‘privately owned’/’publicly held’ ‘corporation’/[taxes exempted], gimmicky-fraudulent-racket. They produce/purchase-rent/broadcast, programmings, endless rererans, and never ending unviewable-garbage-junk, and unending, free, public relations-self promotions-commercial advertisements. Also, for example, we dont need to support Brazilian transvestite underwater basket weaving in southern Mongolia, etc. Stop funding all the non ending PBS welfare states, and all the constant PBS very liberal agendas.”

  3. This is a non-story. No president, politician, or party ever gets rid of a government agency. You just mention the idea of eliminating, or even scaling back a program, and the beneficiaries of that program scream bloody murder. Government never shrinks. It grows with every administration. When certain parties are in charge, it may grow slower, but it always grows. The federal government is a gigantic beast that feeds on itself.
    And for the posters calling the President names (“lord, god, tyrant, and dictator): Your name-calling cancels out any point you are trying to make. Consider that a President who takes stands that you disagree with is something less than a dictator, in this republic.

  4. It’s not just CPB. He wants to eliminate anyone and anything that he doesn’t like. This is government of the person, by the person, and for the person, and no one else matters.

    If he could eliminate NBC, CBS, and ABC, he’d do that too. He already tried to prevent AT&T from buying Time Warner & CNN. He has the DOJ investigating Comcast & NBC. He forced the DOD not to do a deal with Amazon. Why can’t anyone see what he’s doing?

    • The Big a I feel you.trump is the devil ,n hitler rolled into one.republicans spurrerd open the devil by not going again him in impeachment.damn pussies😡😡😡😡now trumps going looney like a rampid dog ,who must be stopped .i see what he’s doing n folks here in my building say why doesn’t someone take him out👍👍👍 god help us .

  5. Well we can certainly see the haters here who must be living on the tax payer nips. Dictatorship??? lmbo… Sound like a bunch of Berkeley whiners. Hey lets burn down our neighborhood that will teach em.. Get a real job!

  6. And while we’re at it, maybe the WH can pressure Downing Street, Britain’s Brexit government, to shut down the BBC as well. Who needs alternate voices in an autocratic regime once democracy has been thoroughly eroded?

    • Robb you have no clue what the FCC envisioned local community radio on that band. Even broadcasting schools colleges with world class studios have to just be on campus am or just on the internet, there are very few if any OTA frequencies to give students and community member access to the public airways. CPB PBS needs to return their licenses or at least downgrade their power from 50kw to maybe 1 kw and open up other areas for the public to be involved.

  7. Back in the 60’s 70’s “educational” radio hogged up all the 50 KW FM requencies, creating double or triple coverage of the states…..and left small independent LOCAL communities and colleges without any way to promote LOCAL non commercial artists and people training to be dj’s.

    • And nowadays, the religious hucksters over at the “Educational” Media Foundation are hogging up nearly 800 FM frequencies, many of which are in the noncommercial reserved band! OK, so they are not taxpayer funded. But they feed all of those transmitters from one studio in California with their mind-numbing trash. Why no ownership limits on noncommercial broadcasters as there once were for commercial broadcasters? With today’s post-1996 Telecom Act, training to be a DJ is an exercise in futility. The iHearts and Cumulusses (Cumuli?) of this nation have reduced music programming to voicetracked pap coming out of computers at their stations and mated with homogenized playlists from corporate headquarters.
      At least public radio offers us an alternative to this crap. In my area, the ONLY source of radio news is the local, CPB-funded public FM station…which is also a source of music not heard on commercial radio, such as jazz and classical.

      • Phil: training to be a DJ is an exercise in futility……. Not if you have something very different to offer, training to read cue cards and sound like the next rhubarb oil is gods gift to ageing those jobs are going and gone. So where is the next generation of talk show hosts? not on “public” FM.
        My beef with NPR is its always someone else’s fault the government, republicans, racist white supremacists, Russians and never give equal or any time to prove personal responsibility causes most of the problems. ….”All things considered” is the biggest fake dishonest show title i can come up with. Here is an easy one has any NRA member shot a cop? That will never ever be discussed on a “public” radio station

    • There are independent non commercial stations around the country like WWOZ in New Orleans that do a tremendous amount of local programming and playing of local artists, and stations like KALW in San Francisco, Alaska Public Radio stations and many other non commercial stations around the country that broadcast gavel to gavel meetings of city councils, county board of supervisors and school boards

  8. If NPR was the unbiased news source it was envisioned to be, and PBS stayed out of politics to produce the great programming of which they are highly capable, we would not be having this conversation. Maybe the bias is needed to get the big donations from various foundations. They could avoid this issue simply by refusing the Federal tax money, which they claim is only a small part of their revenue.

    • The majority of government money for NPR goes to stations in small communities, and for specialized stations that play jazz, blues, classical and other music not heard on commercial radio. Cutting the federal tax revenue for CPB will not impact big stations in Boston, NYC, DC, LA and other big cities that can survive solely on donations and corporate grants, but will result in the shutdown of Alaska Public Radio and similar networks in Idaho, the Dakotas, Montana, Maine and other rural and low income regions that don’t have the deep pockets a LA, NY or Silicon Valley listener base

  9. What a spiteful little man. All because he doesn’t feel “supported” by public networks. He couldn’t be any closer to being a dictator. Supporting this move is to support yet another step away from democracy and toward an authoritarian government. Shame on us for allowing him to get as far as he has. Tyrannical SOB.

  10. We can spend billions on unnecessary military projects, but god forbid a fraction of that goes to a public media source that does kiss Trumps rear end st every turn. I’m sure radio executives are salivating at the chance to see public radio go commercial so they have a whole new class of stations to completely screw up and suck dry.

    • have you ever tried to volunteer at a npr station? or try and do a radio show? you can’t they only want you at fundraising time to man the phones….its the farthest thing from a local public radio station.

      • I have. I do a monthly spot where I pick the programming and encourage others to at our wonderful local public radio station. A wide variety of people host many different shows, and newer inexperienced folks are ALWAY welcomed.

        WXPR.com

        • good for you but you are out in the boonies, try doing that in CT or NY or near any city in the south where i lived Charleston Columbia Savannah Augusta….nope the public is not allowed until fundraising time.

  11. PBS should compete with CNN, MSNBC and Fox News without funding from congress.
    If they cant generate revenue like everyone else, then turn off the lights.

    • Do you understand licensing laws *at all*? They are prohibited from competing for ad dollars – and if *that* were changed, the commercial broadcasters would be shouting “UNFAIR!!!” at the top of their lungs.

    • IF that happened you would have no jazz or classical music on the radio in that the people who run commercial radio have deemed these forms of music are not profitable

      Also non commercial stations air gavel to gavel meetings of city councils, county board of supervisors, school boards and other community meetings. Commercial radio likely are not going to provide any coverage of these meetings, let alone gavel to gavel broadcasts.

      Many of these rural and out the way non commercial stations have live people on the air 24/7 as opposed to many commercial stations that are totally automated. In the Northern California wildfire areas, the only source of real time information was the non commercial stations that were on the air with live personnel…the commercial stations in the area had no information about the fires and were broadcasting pre recorded automated music.

  12. Time to take the hand cuffs off of NCE’s and let them sell advertising and provide for themselves! Especially the non-comms who can not get this government funding.

  13. No surprises here. Who possibly needs NPR, PBS and the CPB, when we can rely on Fox News, Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, Salem and the Daily Stormer for ALL of our “information”? We’re in great shape, as long as we have nothing at all negative about Lord-god Trump!

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