The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced that it will wind down its operations due to the Republican move to defund local PBS and NPR stations across the country.
The announcement came just over a week after President Donald Trump enacted a rescissions bill clawing back congressionally approved federal funds for public media and foreign aid. Of the $9 billion in canceled funds, $1.1 billion was earmarked for the corporation for the next two years.
“Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,” CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison said in a statement.
Officials at the organization, which was founded more than 60 years ago, say they are focused on helping local stations figure out how to cope with sudden budget shortfalls. Harrison has warned that some stations, particularly in rural areas, will have to shut down without federal support.
PBS North Carolina CEO and General Manager David Crabtree said the CPB news won’t change the mission.
“We remain fully committed … and are actively exploring ways to manage this significant loss while ensuring we continue to provide the essential services our viewers and communities rely on,” Crabtree wrote in a statement.
CPB accounted for about 15 percent of funding to PBS North Carolina, he said. “Its value to our organization—and to public media as a whole—goes far beyond dollars.”
For Trump and other Republican lawmakers, eliminating the corporation is a move against supposed liberal bias, which they allege is a problem at both NPR and PBS. For public media advocates, it’s the end of a noncommercial TV and radio era.
“The end of CPB is the direct result of the deep and corrupt failure of Congress and the Trump administration to invest in informing the American public,” Craig Aaron, co-CEO of the media reform group Free Press, said in a statement.
Aaron expressed hope that publicly-funded media can be reinvented as “a bulwark against authoritarianism that meets the civic needs of all our communities.”
GBH, the public media powerhouse in Boston, put up a sign outside its headquarters last month that read, “Local. Trusted. Defunded.”
“We’re not backing down,” despite the federal funding loss, GBH said in a fundraising push, “but we can’t do it without you. Donate now to keep public media strong and independent.”
