The White House is starting the process of eliminating federal funding for the public media

The NPR Correspondence: The Trump Administration is Leasing US Intellectual Property to a Non-Profit U.S. Institute of Peace

Disclosure: This story was adapted for the web by Mallory Yu. It was edited by Managing Editors Gerry Holmes and Vickie Walton-James. Under NPR’s protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

Earlier this month, on social media platforms, Trump blasted the two primary public broadcasting networks, posting in all caps: “REPUBLICANS MUST DEFUND AND TOTALLY DISASSOCIATE THEMSELVES FROM NPR & PBS, THE RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS’ THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY!”

USIP employees fired by the Trump administration are now suing him. The plans to lease US intellectual property headquarters to the U.S. Labor Department were said to be underway by the Justice Department attorney. The judge overseeing the case has not yet ordered a temporary restraining order against the transfer of assets, although she said that the administration had adopted a “bull in a china shop” approach.

The White House was aided by Washington, D.C. police officers and had succeeded in forcing their way into the U.S. Institute of Peace. The Institute, while funded by Congress, is an independent nonprofit like CPB.

NPR and PBS in the era of the Voice of America: The Case against the CPB and the U.S. Department of State

Those lawsuits claim that Trump has overstepped the powers of the presidency, has trampled on due process and eroded free speech rights.

In New York, a judge has placed a temporary restraining order on presidential adviser Kari Lake’s attempt to shut down the federally owned Voice of America. In Washington, D.C., another judge ruled the government had to keep sending funds that Congress already had committed to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

The networks say the agency and Congress have encouraged them to increase their private financial support. They’ve worked hard for many years to get their spots in line with FCC guidelines. The news organizations supported by the U.S. government have moved into the center of the scrutiny of the administration.

A House Oversight subcommittee hearing that took place in late March is thought to have spurred the president’s move. NPR and PBS’ chiefs were summoned to testify by the panel, who said the networks’ coverage is biased against conservatives.

Over its five and a half decades of existence, public broadcasting has mostly enjoyed bipartisan support, allowing it to survive periodic conservative pushes to strip the system of taxpayer dollars.

“Without PBS, without NPR, you wouldn’t hear stories — news stories, public affairs stories, community stories — from Alaska,” Alaska Public Media CEO and President Ed Ulman said. “You wouldn’t see them on the PBS NewsHour. This is vital. It’s vital for Alaskans to know that they’re connected to their nation, and that what we do in Alaska matters to our nation.”

In a statement, NPR said: “Eliminating funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would have a devastating impact on American communities across the nation that rely on public radio for trusted local and national news, culture, lifesaving emergency alerts, and public safety information.”

NEUMAN: Well, NPR receives about 1% of its funding directly from the federal government, but hundreds of NPR member stations across the country get a larger percentage, and they would be hit harder. And since those stations use some of the federal money they get from CPB to pay a fee to NPR to carry programs such as ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, the indirect impact on NPR could be greater. Since television is more expensive than radio, PBS gets a larger chunk of the pie from CPB – about 15% of its funding.

Congress allocated $535 million for the CPB for the current fiscal year — an amount affirmed in a recent stop-gap bill passed by the Republican-controlled U.S. House and Senate. The Congress appropriated funding for the two-year cycle of theCPB’s budgets, which means that they will be funded through Sept 30, 2027.

PBS CEO Paula Kerger: The Policy of the Public Radio Broadcasting Company (PBS) Subcommission on a Video of a Performer in Drag

PBS CEO and President Paula Kerger was questioned about the video of a performer in drag singing a children’s song for a young audience. (Kerger testified that the video was posted on the website of PBS’s New York City member station and never aired on television.)

Maher spoke with All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly to talk about the memo. NPR’s policy is to cover itself as we would any other organization. NPR had no input on the questions that were posed for this interview.

Some Republican lawmakers, however, vented about what they saw as biased reporting. “You can hate us all on your own dime,” said the chair of the subcommittee that held the hearing. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., complained about NPR’s coverage of how he structured his investments with a shell company.

“We serve the public interest. It is our mission, and not just in our name. It said public media stations represent a proud American tradition of public-private partnership for our shared common good.

NPR produces the award-winning news programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered, while PBS is best known for its nightly PBS News Hour and high-quality children’s programming, such as Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.

The White House is proposing that the federal government eliminate all funding for public radio and television.

The administration plans to send the memo to Congress when it reconvenes from recess on April 28, which will open a 45-day window in which the House and Senate can either approve the rescission or allow the money to be restored.

The Official Record of NPR Programming. Is it Better to HATE Us than You Can, or Can You Hate Us on Your Own Dime?

Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. The transcript can be changed to correct errors or to match audio. Audio can be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The audio record of NPR programming is the authoritative record.

NEUMAN: Yeah. Congress appropriated more than $1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting over the next two years. And a reminder, that’s the nonprofit, congressionally chartered body that partly funds NPR and PBS and other public media. The funding for public broadcasting would be cut immediately and then in the next two years, through the end of the fiscal year in 2027.

Bill: We don’t dislike anyone in public media. We believe in reaching out to people of all different levels of political persuasion and belief set if we report on the news. And we want to be able to hear the voices of the American public reflected on public media in the same way.

Kelly: Just to put the question to you quite bluntly, to quote the words of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman who was running the subcommittee hearing where I know you were just summoned to testify last month, she said, “look, you can hate us on your own dime.” You say, what.

Public Broadcasting: A mission that we’re all about? Katherine Maher: Public broadcasting as a mission for the U.S. public radio network

I believe that public funding allows us to carry on with a mission that reflects all Americans. Most commercial channels are able to reach certain audiences that they want to reach and we have an obligation to try to serve everyone across the country. Now, we won’t always be able to serve everyone, every belief set, every need, every interest, but we need to serve as broad an audience as possible. That’s the point of public broadcasting, is to be able to put the public in conversation with one another and to operate off a shared set of conversations about what’s going on in the world.

Make the case. Why should any tax dollars support public broadcasting when there are plenty of other news organizations around, when anyone, frankly, these days can produce programming on their iPhone?

Maher: That’s correct. The budget that we receive is about one percent. It goes to support things like body armor for journalists covering conflict overseas, extra support for our presidential national elections, all the sorts of things that we want to invest in to ensure that we’re able to report on issues that matter to the public. But generally speaking, most of our operating budget comes from our membership fees, and that’s what allow our members to be able to receive programming. It comes from underwriting support. Private and audience member donations make up the majority of the money. Federal funding makes up a much bigger percentage of the budgets of member stations.

Katherine Maher: The biggest effect would be on the NPR network, which are the 246 stations around the country that [our audience is] probably listening to us on, right now. Those are our member stations, and they receive about 100 million of the 121,122 million that goes to public radio every single year. So the big impact would be on rural stations, stations in geographies that are quite large or complex in order to be able to receive broadcast or infrastructure, costs are very high. Some stations are having to cut back on services, or even go away altogether.