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“Legacy media must die,” Elon Musk posted on his own media site, X -- the nation’s biggest and most influential social media source for political news.
Now that he is orchestrating the president’s budget cutting plans for “government efficiency,” it should come as no surprise that, in the process, Musk wants to kill public broadcasting. He has his sights both on radio (NPR) and TV (PBS), by eliminating their government funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which totals $535 million this year.
It seems a little like shooting fish in a barrel, considering Musk paid $44 billion -- more than 80 times as much -- when he bought Twitter in 2022.
But cutting funds for public broadcasting threatens more than the production of beloved shows like Sesame Street and All Things Considered. Public broadcasting consists of a network of public service stations across the country that produce local news and educational programs, as well as serving as the backbone for the nation’s emergency alert system.
Over 1,000 public radio stations across the United States carry NPR programming, including many of the most rural areas, and over 98 percent of Americans live within listening distance of at least one of these stations. “The most vulnerable stations serving the most vulnerable people are going to be the ones that are hurt the hardest,” said former NPR executive Eric Nuzum. “We’re talking about very rural parts of the United States.”
Send a direct message to your members of Congress today: Public broadcasting is a valuable resource well worth the public investment. Protect funding for NPR and PBS now!
NPR spokesperson Isabel Lara notes that public broadcasting is important for local journalism, including coverage of sports and culture, as she says, “Cutting public media funding means cutting funding to local communities.”
Federal funding for public broadcasting has been threatened in the past without ultimately being cut, but the increased scale and intensity of the criticism by Trump and Musk has NPR itself reporting “it would be unwise to assume that events will play out as they have in the past.”
Musk and fellow Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) czar Vivek Ramaswamy say they intend to cut $2 trillion in government spending. That’s a full one-third of the government’s total spending of $6.1 billion in 2023.
But only 16% of this total $6.1 billion went toward all of the nation’s non-defense “discretionary” programs that would even be eligible for cuts without eviscerating Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And Musk’s SpaceX company depends on billions in defense funding that neither he nor Congress is likely to be willing to cut.
NPR and PBS are low-hanging fruit to the billionaire bean-counters. The broadcasters’ entire budgets, and then some, could be covered many times over with cuts to the Pentagon budget or a common-sense wealth tax on the fortunes of billionaires like Musk and Ramaswamy.
Send a message to Congress: Save NPR and PBS! Maintain full funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting now.
Thank you for helping to preserve this national treasure!
- Amanda
Amanda Ford, Director
Democracy for America
Advocacy Fund
