Dawn DeAngelis and Jim Schachter saw it coming.

Schachter, president and CEO of New Hampshire Public Radio, reassured his staff on Friday morning that an executive order signed by President Donald Trump the previous evening was “mainly political theater,” part of a “whole slew of actions that the administration and some members of Congress are attempting to advance their goal of eliminating federal funding for public media and to advance, more broadly, their attacks on press freedom in the U.S.”

The mandate, titled “Ending taxpayer subsidization of biased media,” orders the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to cease providing direct and indirect federal funding to NPR and PBS and to cut off the media outlets’ access to community service grants for the year. Trump’s executive order comes after NPR CEO Katherine Maher and PBS CEO Paula Kerger testified at a DOGE subcommittee hearing in March, where Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called for the defunding of both organizations.

While member stations in larger media markets may not suffer significant revenue losses from axed federal funding, many rural stations fund up to 50% of their budgets with federal dollars allocated through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and, consequently, stand to lose a large portion of their revenue, experts say.

At the only public radio station in New Hampshire, Schachter said the news outlet receives only a small fraction of its funding from the CPB, about 6% of its revenue. Nonetheless, he is developing a contingency plan, as is DeAngelis, vice president and chief operating officer of New Hampshire PBS.

NHPBS estimates that about 18% of its annual budget, or $1.3 million, is at risk.

“We're preparing as much for the eventuality of something happening, but also the fight,” DeAngelis said.

The funds NHPBS receives through the CPB are utilized to support the station’s technology infrastructure, including the Emergency Broadcast System, which is used to issue emergency and amber alerts, and to allow the station to pay its PBS annual dues.

Congress has forward-funded CPB funding to PBS and NPR stations for the 2025 and 2026 fiscal years, DeAngelis explained, and her station has already received and spent the funding for FY25, which ends June 30, 2025. The funds that are in question, if the executive order were to stand, are FY26, FY27 and FY28.

The executive order was especially mystifying to DeAngelis, considering her station’s role in producing non-news programs and nonpartisan children’s entertainment. In the U.S., 50% of children who are homeschooled and those without access to preschool learn the fundamentals from PBS programming, she said. 

“If you look at what PBS does, it educates, it informs, it engages,” DeAngelis said. “I cannot rationalize [the executive order]. It’s not based in fact. It’s not who we are.”

Schachter, like DeAngelis, said the executive order’s very premise — that neither NPR or PBS “presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens” — is false. But, knowing that past is prologue, he wasn’t as surprised by the Trump administration’s assault on public media.

The CBP was created by Congress in 1967 with the specific intention, Schachter said, of insulating public media from political interference. Every conservative president since then, beginning with Richard Nixon, has tried to fell the organization and cripple the stations it funds to no avail.

For many years, public broadcasting enjoyed modest growth, even as the print journalism industry contracted.

“Even as newspapers found it increasingly difficult to come up with an economic model that worked for them, it seemed that public media and public radio, in particular, were almost immune to those problems. A lot of it had to do with the distribution model — people are stuck in their cars listening to the radio,” explained Dan Kennedy, media ethics expert and journalism professor at Northeastern University. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing shift to working from home, public radio began suffering losses in regular listenership, bringing economic problems beyond the threats made by Trump. Even so, public media continued to offer, through fundraising from donors and, recognizably, viewers and listeners “like you,” free quality journalism.

“We are operating in an era where the best, most reliable news has fallen behind pay walls, and if you can’t afford to pay for news or if you’re not inclined to pay for news, you end up being increasingly subjected to misinformation and disinformation,” said Kennedy. “It seems to me that public radio in particular has remained as an incredibly vital and important source of reliable news and information that you don’t have to pay for.”

Kennedy pushed back on the notion that NPR and PBS’s news coverage exhibits a political slant.

“Objectivity is the fair-minded pursuit of the truth — it’s not balance,” he said.

From where he stands, Schachter believes NPR has made strides to speak a more politically inclusive language and root out bias, wherever it might exist.

After former NPR editor Uri Berliner departed the organization, writing in a right-wing publication that the station had begun platforming “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population,” NPR announced an initiative to implement additional layers of editing. It expanded its Standards and Practices team and created a group of senior editors called the “Backstop” whose work would be “24/7 to ensure that all coverage receives final editorial review,” according to an Inside NPR memo from May 2024.

Regardless of whether allegations of bias are warranted, the executive order likely will not take effect without legal challenges.

In a brief statement, Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, said “CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority. Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.”

“In creating CPB, Congress expressly forbade ‘any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors…’ 47 U.S.C. § 398(c),” the statement concluded.

 

Rebeca Pereira can be reached at rpereira@cmonitor.com