CPB Is Dead, But We Need Public Media More Than Ever

Ari Paul

As a proportion of GDP, US spending on public media was already minuscule compared to that of many other  countries. (Chart: Media Inequality & Change.)

Federal funding for public broadcasting officially ends today, the beginning of the new federal fiscal year. With the Republican-directed rescission of already-allocated funds to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Project 2025 dream of pulling the plug on PBS and NPR has been realized. As a percentage of GDP, the United States already spent dramatically less on public media than nearly every other democracy; now it joins the authoritarian and hybrid regimes that keep a tighter grip on media content.

It's a major blow, but public broadcasting won't just disappear. As FAIR (5/11/24) and many others have noted, the CPB provided a fairly small—if not insignificant—percentage of the budgets at PBS and NPR. Those most immediately and deeply impacted are the small, mostly rural stations that serve as some of the last sources of local news and information in the country's quickly expanding news deserts. Public media journalist Alex Curley (Semipublic, 6/13/25) estimates that more than 30% of public TV and radio stations won't last another year unless budget holes from federal funding are plugged in some other way.

Some major foundations have stepped in to offer at least temporary life support to those stations and the public broadcasting network as a whole. The Public Media Company, with funding from longtime media funders like the Knight, Ford and MacArthur foundations, is creating a bridge fund to funnel as much as $50 million to at-risk stations this year (New York Times, 8/19/25). Individual donations to public media also surged this year, increasing by roughly $70 million as of July. But together, that's still only a fraction of $535 million a year that had been allocated to the CPB. The harsh reality is that the country's public media won't be the same, and many under-resourced communities will lose their only local news outlet.

'Poisoning America for 60 years'

The New York Post (7/18/25) wrote that "liberal to far-left opinions ran through all public media-sponsored news, documentaries, commentary and even featured programming"—something decades of FAIR studies have looked for and failed to find.

Right-wing media are mostly tickled. The New York Post editorial board (7/18/25) celebrated: “Taxpayers will no longer have to pay for the toxic, biased propaganda that federally funded media have been poisoning America with for the last 60 years.” It added:

We live in a free country. People can produce and consume all kinds of programming for their enjoyment. And if it’s good, it will find a paying audience. But there’s simply no reason for our taxes to support it. Audiences that want that programming can fund it themselves.

“Freedom of the press should mean freedom from government control that comes via funding,” wrote Andy Kessler in the Wall Street Journal (7/27/25). “The First Amendment’s press freedoms should be absolute, including freedom from government-funded outlets.”

Howard Husock (Wall Street Journal, 9/23/25), a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a Republican member of the CPB board from 2013 to 2017, was less delighted. He correctly noted the need for local news, but worried that the skeletal remains of public broadcasting will become bastions of left-wing ideas.

"Conservatives must resist the temptation to declare victory and walk away from this fight over local news coverage," Husock wrote. "Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting wasn’t the end of it. The local news landscape is too important to leave to donors seeking to promote their own left-wing ideology."

“Every community in the country needs nonpartisan shoe-leather news coverage of city halls, public schools, police departments and high school sports. No neighborhoods or points of view should be overlooked,” Husock continued. His concern is public broadcasting's "story selection that is veiled advocacy," citing coverage of "national progressive agenda items like income inequality, abortion and climate change." His solution? Get right-wing foundations into the local news funding game, to "promote true journalism, not activism."

'Help us see America whole'

The Wall Street Journal's Howard Husock (9/23/25) seemed rather more worried that the right would lose control of public broadcasting.

Husock is right that every community needs local news reporting. The fundamental purpose of journalism in a democracy is to hold the powerful to account; without journalistic scrutiny at the local level, corruption increases and democratic participation decreases. It's no surprise that Murdoch-owned papers would largely pretend the free market can provide all the reporting that's needed, but the billionairification of US news, and its accompanying kowtowing to the Trump regime, show how crucial it is that journalism not simply be controlled by the highest bidder.

Even beyond the inevitable problems with the corruption of corporate or billionaire-owned news media, in a highly unequal society, journalism at the local level simply can't be consistently produced by the free market: It's precisely the most under-resourced communities that face the greatest news deserts, and relied most heavily on CPB funding for their local media.

Husock is also right that the retreat of the federal government from public media is likely to shift public media journalism to the left. FAIR has always held public broadcasting up to the highest scrutiny (Extra!, 3–4/95, 11/10; FAIR.org, 6/1/99, 10/19/10, 2/18/11), and showed how it frequently failed to live up to the standard set for it by the 1967 Carnegie Commission Report that served as its founding document: to be “a forum for controversy and debate” that would “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard,” and “help us see America whole, in all its diversity.”

While the CPB was ostensibly an independent institution (though its board was presidentially appointed and Senate approved), it never got enough federal funds to free NPR or PBS from the pressure to also lean heavily on corporate underwriting. Public broadcasting's real bias isn't toward the left; it is the same bias toward corporate and political elites—and away from true challenges to entrenched power—that plagues corporate media. And the constant Republican threats to its funding (FAIR.org, 6/8/06, 5/11/24) have ensured that NPR and PBS were always bending over backwards to offer a platform for the right (FAIR.org, 10/24/24).

'Journalism, not activism'

Mother Jones (9–10/25): The Informing America Foundation "boasts of funding a network of thousands of platforms that have quietly shaped public opinion by stoking an array of right-wing conspiracy theories."

Where Husock misleads is in his suggestion that the right is absent from local journalism—and that more right-wing funding would "promote true journalism, not activism." For decades now, the right has dominated talk radio; today, this is often the only local news option in many rural areas.

And as genuine local newspapers are squeezed out across the country, pro-GOP content masquerading as local news is taking over. Right-wing funders have produced a sprawling network of thousands of hyper-local sites that publish primarily identical national stories with a clear ideological bent, but purporting to be local outlets, which gives them a sheen of credibility (Mother Jones, 9–10/25). The right has also funded a free wire service that helps resource-starved local news outlets fill out their coverage—with right-wing misinformation that local readers take to be legitimate news (Media Matters, 6/20/23).

The Jimmy Kimmel controversy highlighted the reach of conservative media that often fly under the radar. Even after ABC, under massive public pressure, brought back the Trump-targeted late night show Jimmy Kimmel Live!, viewers in over 60 local markets still couldn't watch the show. Nexstar and Sinclair, two conservative media companies that control local television stations around the country, continued the blackout for several days more (Variety, 9/24/25, 9/26/25).

It also highlighted the importance—and vulnerability—of media that aren't in the tank for Trump. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr had threatened ABC’s license after Kimmel made critical comments about the MAGA reaction to the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk (Deadline, 9/22/25), and the comedian’s brief exile from screens became the talk of the nation (USA Today, 9/22/25). The New York Times (9/24/25) reported that Carr “has promised to continue his campaign against what he sees as liberal bias in broadcasts.”

It’s clear, as FAIR (2/26/25) predicted from Carr’s stated policy goals in the conservative policy document Project 2025, that the job of the FCC under the Trump administration is to police the airwaves, like any loyal censor in an authoritarian regime, and flush out any words, stories or opinions not approved by the state. “President Donald Trump has suggested his administration should revoke the licenses of broadcast TV stations that he said are ‘against’ him,” said CNBC (9/19/25). That means that any public broadcasting outlets that survive the death of the CPB may still be in the administration's gunsights.

Eliminating the CPB, then, could be both a loss and a gain for public media. There's no sugarcoating the lost journalism jobs, station closures and programming cuts. And yet public media will also be freed from the ideological leash that always kept it from serving as the true public watchdog it was meant to be. It will continue to have a target on its back—and we will need public media now more than ever.