The New Yorker:

Republican-backed funding cuts go way beyond NPR and PBS. Radio and TV stations from Alaska to the Allegheny Mountains may never be the same.

By Oliver Whang

When Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, he remarked that broadcasting is built on a collection of “miracles”—undersea cables, satellite transmissions—and that its ultimate aim is “to enrich man’s spirit.” He said that the airwaves “belong to all the people” and should be dedicated to the enlightenment of viewers and listeners. To that end, the C.P.B. would direct federal funding to non-commercial educational, cultural, and public-affairs programming across the U.S. “How will man use his miracles?” President Johnson said. “The answer just begins with public broadcasting.”

The modern movement against the C.P.B. has tended to use less lofty language. In 1994, Newt Gingrich argued that public-media stations had become biased, and that, through the C.P.B., Americans were “paying taxes involuntarily to subsidize something which told them how they should think.” His proposed solution was to “privatize them all.” In February of this year, Representative Claudia Tenney, a Republican from New York, claimed that National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, which receive funding from the C.P.B., had “chosen advocacy over accuracy, using public dollars to promote a political agenda rather than report the facts.” In April, Donald Trump described NPR and PBS as “radical left ‘monsters’ that so badly hurt our country,” and called for them to be defunded. Finally, on July 24th, the Republican-backed Rescissions Act of 2025 was signed into law, clawing back more than a billion dollars in C.P.B. funding that had already been allocated to public broadcasters for the next two fiscal years. (The bill also cut nearly eight billion dollars in foreign-aid funding.)

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