from the befuddled-and-distracted dept
The U.S. right wing has won a generational war against education and informed consensus with the closure of the Corporation For Public Broadcasting (CPB), which states it will being shuttering its doors after being unable to survive recent brutal funding cuts by Republicans.
After the White House falsely deemed NPR and PBS a “grift” last April, Republicans successfully pushed for a Senate vote that eliminated the CPB’s entire budget in July. That vote rescinded the $1.1 billion that Congress had allocated to CPB to fund public broadcasting during 2026 and 2027.
In a statement, the CPB said the cuts, which “excluded funding for CPB for the first time in more than five decades,” were impossible to survive:
“Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country,” Harrison said. “We are deeply grateful to our partners across the system for their resilience, leadership, and unwavering dedication to serving the American people.”
Public donations in recently weeks, estimated to be around $20 million, weren’t enough to save the organization.
As we’ve noted previously, right wingers and authoritarians loathe public broadcasting because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the often perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based corporate media. A media, if you hadn’t noticed, that is easily bullied, cowed, and manipulated by bad actors looking to normalize, downplay, or validate no limit of terrible bullshit (see: CBS, Washington Post, the New York Times, and countless others).
One of the real harms of the cuts will be to already struggling local U.S. broadcasting stations. While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributed over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations.
Many of those news stations operated in places where quality, local news is difficult if not impossible to find. Local papers have usually either closed or been purchased by soulless hedge funds that are buying papers, stripping them for parts, and hollowing out and homogenizing their coverage. Or “local news” is dominated by right wing propaganda pseudo-journalism broadcasters like Sinclair Broadcasting.
U.S. “public broadcasting” was already a shadow of the true concept after years of being demonized and defunded by the right wing, so even calling hybrid organizations like NPR “public” is a misnomer. Still, the underlying concept remains an ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots and corporations alike, because they’re very aware that if implemented properly, public media can provide a challenge to their war on informed consensus (I’d recommend Penn State professor Victor Pickard’s writing on the subject).
U.S. media reforms (restored media consolidation limits, media literacy education, bolstered public media funding, creative new funding models for independent journalism) are desperately needed, but authoritarians (and affluent corporate ownership more broadly) positively adore an ignorant and befuddled electorate, easily distracted by propaganda, controversy, and shallow infotainment.
A confused, angry, misinformed and distracted electorate means less informed consensus, which means less organized resistance to their unrelenting pursuit of consolidated power and shitty, unpopular policies that only ultimately serve a small sliver of the the extraction class.
Filed Under: disinformation, journalism, local news, media, news deserts, propaganda, public broadcasting
Companies: cpb, npr, pbs
