ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE On Thursday, while most Americans slept, a decisive blow was struck in a battle long overdue. President Donald Trump, with the swift stroke of his pen, aimed the lance of executive power at the heart of America’s taxpayer-funded media establishment.
While claiming NPR and PBS produce “biased and partisan news coverage,” Trump’s executive order that defunded them represented not merely a budget decision, but a declaration of independence from a half-century of liberal monopoly over the public airwaves—signals that belong to the American people.
Moreover, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was told to “cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and … decline to provide future funding” to NPR and PBS. The mere existence of CPB—a publicly funded non-profit—presents a conflict of interest.
Since Congress funds CPB to the tune of half a billion dollars per year, its status as a “private” corporation, while true, is a bit rich, particularly since its top function is as the primary funding mechanism for both NPR and PBS.
Transparent federal support, distinct from CPB, accounts for about 15% of the annual revenue on the PBS ledger. Similar subsidies constitute about 1% of NPR’s annual budget.
Yet, for decades, those warning about the concentration of power in the hands of media elites were roundly dismissed as alarmists. As the years passed, the media concentrated its power even more. A large subset of the American people continued their hunger for an authority figure to guide them, though it would never arrive in a personage.
We got a host of ringers instead. The architects and ambassadors of liberal orthodoxy found a cozy home in America’s mainstream media. As such, its outsized influence over public opinion has no historical analogue.
While Americans passively allow their own abuse at the hands of the media, they have never cottoned to such cruelty when it comes to government power. What gives?
Perhaps a change is on the horizon.
This week, President Trump did what Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes failed to do. He confronted head-on the entrenched power of public broadcasting, which, for far too long, used the people’s money against the people’s interests.
Thursday’s order struck at the heart of a system that now serves as a mouthpiece for the progressive elite as it unjustly claims the mantle of “objectivity.”
The real significance of this moment, however? It addressed a fundamental paradox in American politics: Conservative votes produce liberal victories.
As Middle America reliably voted for conservative leadership, the cultural and media elite made their long march through our institutions—unopposed—with public broadcasting serving as their taxpayer-funded vanguard.
In 1969, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew delivered his famous “Television News Coverage” speech in Des Moines, where he warned of the “tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men” who controlled the media narrative. The establishment reacted with predictable outrage.
Agnew said this “little group of men … not only enjoy a right of instant rebuttal to every Presidential address, but, more importantly, wield a free hand in selecting, presenting, and interpreting the great issues in our nation.”
Their faces may have changed, but the agenda remains the same. Having been aged in the same fetid barrel for five and a half decades post-Agnew, today’s media may have the appearance of a more recent vintage, but the bottled product provides identical tasting notes: grudge, vitriol, and bitterness.
It comes as no surprise, then, that after the president took direct aim at its power and influence, the media reacted with full-throated hysteria.
Look at the response. PBS President Paula Kerger called Trump’s order “overtly illegal.” NPR promised legal challenges, declaring it represents “an affront to the First Amendment.”
Such indignation reveals a central truth—these organizations believe access to public money is their entitlement, not a privilege subject to the will of the people through their elected representatives. The same media elites spent the last several years denigrating President Trump, questioning his legitimacy, and undermining his agenda at every turn.
Is it any wonder The Donald finally said, “Enough?”
The president’s message told CPB to “cease direct funding to NPR and PBS, consistent with my Administration’s policy to ensure that federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage.” Contra the caterwauling media, this was not an attack on free speech.
It is a defense of the taxpayer.
For generations, public broadcasting operated under the fiction of neutrality as it advanced positions antithetical to the values of everyday Americans. In the late-1960s, middle-class and blue-collar workers in suburban and rural areas of the North, Midwest, and West who had not previously taken an active part in politics began to be disaffected by the hegemony of the media. They showed it with their voting patterns and the Nixon administration noticed a new alliance forming, terming it the “Silent Majority.”
As voting patterns changed, traditional Republicans and the Silent Majority coalesced. This became known as the “New Majority.”
Eventually, “traditional” 20th century Republicans retreated into the arms of the progressives. That happened long ago. The latest defections came from those terminally afflicted by the contagion known as Trump Derangement Syndrome.
There is another piece to this puzzle, however: working-class Southerners. Neglected by the Republican establishment for a century and historically in the camp of the Democrats—well before the Republican Party’s first president waged war on their states—a solid bloc of Southerners has, over the course of the last several decades, found their home in the GOP.
One can’t be sure if it was fortune’s favor, his unique brand of political athleticism, or simply dumb luck, but Trump’s efforts to appeal to these blue-collar, working-class, and Southern voters worked. They became his new base, and they delivered.
Thrice.
Still, the media remains apoplectic, even swinging the Trump interregnum to an aged and feeble Joseph Biden, a man who ultimately proved in over his head when it came fulfilling duties as the nation’s chief executive. If one simply relied upon the media dispatches, however, the Biden administration routinely came out smelling like a rose.
Let us be clear about what public broadcasting is. While at times delivering valuable children’s programming and occasionally coming up with worthy cultural content, its offerings in the news and current affairs realm overwhelmingly reflect the worldview of the coastal elites who produce such regular balderdash.
Consider. How many conservatives sit behind the microphones at NPR? How many traditionalists produce programming for PBS?
The answer: Painfully few.
When conservatives appear on such outlets, they are typically presented as zoo specimens to study or gawk at, rather than as authentic voices deserving—at minimum—equal time. This isn’t journalism. It is ideological gatekeeping funded by the very people whose views are systematically excluded.
Americans are compelled, through taxation, to support a broadcasting system that holds in contempt their deeply held beliefs. Working-class citizens in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—key states in the former “blue wall” now at the heart of Trump’s New Majority—are forced to subsidize programming that regularly mocks their values, their faith, and their culture.
Reflect. Why are the principal adversaries to the social and political values, traditions, and customs of most Americans the selfsame people who now monopolize the communications sector?
Whatever the origin, it has been this way for decades. The people’s airwaves are used to advance an agenda at odds with the people themselves. PBS and NPR argue that they represent a tiny fraction of the federal budget. True, but irrelevant.
The issue is not the amount but the principle. Why should American taxpayers fund a media apparatus that holds their values in contempt? The American taxpayer foots the bill for a media edifice feigning impartiality while pushing propaganda.
As public broadcasting faces its long-awaited reckoning, we must not lose sight of the larger media landscape. The corporate media remains a powerful arbiter of our national conversation, but unlike NPR and PBS, they don’t directly tap the public treasury for their operations.
The alliance between corporate media and public broadcasting nevertheless forms a powerful echo chamber, with the prestige of PBS and the ubiquity of NPR lending legitimacy to the broader liberal media narrative. Breaking this alliance is essential to creating space for genuine diversity of thought in American media.
The CEO of NPR alleged Trump’s order “undermines the First Amendment rights of NPR and local stations across America.” One asks: Since when does the First Amendment guarantee government funding? Does free speech require taxpayer subsidy?
These questions answer themselves.
What Trump did this week was not radical. It was restorative.
If the president seeks to return control of public airwaves to the citizens—forsaking the unelected broadcasters who answer to no constituency beyond their own ideological peers—he is on the right track.
To wit, the task of political leaders is to redirect resources toward the constituents who brought them to power. Trump’s order represents this kind of redirection—away from elite institutions and toward the needs and interests of the forgotten Americans who elected him. Come the tweets from the MAGA crowd, “This is what I voted for.”
The president’s critics claim that by doing this, Trump attacked democracy. In truth, he now stands in defense of the institution, ensuring public resources are forbidden to advance partisan agendas under the guise of objectivity. The airwaves (and perhaps digital streaming packets), after all, do not belong to the media—corporate or “public” —they belong to the people.
This executive order, while significant, is merely one battle in a longer struggle. The CPB is already preparing legal challenges, and Democratic lawmakers will undoubtedly seek to restore funding at the first opportunity. The entrenched power of the media establishment will not surrender without a fight.
However, in the night skies high above the land of opportunity and behind closed doors on Air Force One, something changed. A president finally found the courage to say what millions of Americans have long believed—that public broadcasting, ages ago, betrayed its mandate when it turned into a mouthpiece for liberal orthodoxy instead of a true public forum.
The predictable cries of “censorship” from supporters of both NPR and PBS reveal a fundamental misunderstanding. No one is preventing these organizations from broadcasting whatever content they choose. The question is whether American taxpayers should be compelled to pay for it.
What we are witnessing is the long-delayed assertion of the New Majority’s cultural power. For too long, electoral victories by the right failed to translate into policy changes in our cultural institutions. In fact, they achieved the opposite effect.
Trump’s executive order represents a break with that pattern.
The battle over public broadcasting illustrates a larger truth about American politics: Winning elections is necessary but not sufficient.
Real change requires the courage to confront entrenched interests that have long operated beyond democratic accountability. It is perhaps ironic that President Trump is the first to demonstrate that pluck. For, in his prior career, he was one of them.
By taking on public broadcasting, Trump has not only challenged NPR and PBS, but the entire architecture of cultural power that defined American broadcast journalism for generations.
The American people deserve a media that reflects their values, not just those of a wicked cabal of the bi-coastal elites. Trump’s directive represented the public’s belated claim to the rightful ownership of their property.
If one believes in genuine diversity of thought and the idea that all Americans should see their values represented in the media they fund, then one must not accuse Trump of an attack on democracy. Rather, he affirmed the custom.
The “New Majority” —as forged by Nixon’s unique brand of populism and methodically built through pragmatism and cultural appeal into a coalition of once forgotten Americans—has found a renewed, if unexpected, champion in Donald Trump.
Though the president has reassembled, reconfigured, and reenergized this alliance, one must ask: Will the voice of today’s messenger also be silenced by his enemies in the media?
This article was originally published on The O’Leary Review.
