Do Americans think the government should fund NPR, PBS, and Big Bird?
Critical Analysis
Find answers to the following questions using the visual above, any links below, your big brain, and your knowledge of American government and politics:
According to the data from the visual above, what portion of Americans say that National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) should continue to receive federal funds?
According to the data from the visual above, how does political party affiliation impact support for NPR and PBS?
Based on your knowledge of the ideology of the two major American political parties, explain the partisan divide regarding state funding for public radio.
Public radio and television are called “public” because they receive some of their funds from the government. Whether they are called “public” or not, identify three other things that are publicly funded in the United States.
Authorized by Congress in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which has received $535 million annually in recent federal budgets. The CPB helps to fund NPR and PBS both directly and through individual local public media stations, many of which pay NPR and PBS in the form of membership or programming fees. For every public dollar provided, stations raise nearly seven dollars from donors, including state and local governments, universities, businesses, foundations and individual viewers and listeners. How would CPB losing $535 million impact public radio and television?
The President is threatening cuts to CPB. President Donald Trump recently said he would “love to” end public funding for the public broadcasters. and has recently made dramatic cuts in the budgets and workforces of many government agencies. The Trump administration on Thursday said that 10,000 employees of the Health and Human Services Department would be dismissed, as part of a major reorganization designed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Explain, how much you think the Trump Administration will pay attention to the Pew Research survey above when formulating policy on NPR and PBS?
List one reason that it is beneficial for the U.S. government to support public media, and one reason that it is not, then share your own opinion of whether NPR and PBS should continue to receive federal funds.
The heads of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service testified in a heated congressional subcommittee hearing on Wednesday amid a renewed Republican effort to defund U.S. public media. “NPR and PBS have increasingly become radical leftwing echo chambers,” said the Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene during her opening remarks, accusing NPR of having a “communist agenda”. The hearing, called “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable”, was chaired by Greene who is head of a “delivering on government efficiency” group within the House oversight committee. While Republicans accused the leaders of PBS and NPR of using publicly funded media to push left-wing views. The broadcast officials defended their programming as unbiased. Democrats mocked the hearing as an inquisition. Robert Garcia, a California Democrat, asked jokingly: “Is Elmo now, or has he ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” (If you don’t know, Elmo is a character from PBS). Public broadcasters have been through this before: In 1969, testimony by Fred Rogers helped stave off plans to cut PBS’s funding. How does the subcommittee hearing illustrate the concept of bureaucratic oversight?
What do you think will happen to public broadcasting?
Trump has been quite clear that he admires authoritarians in other countries by the way he talks about Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, and Viktor Orban in Hungary. If you look at the leaders of countries who have taken over countries that, at least at the beginning, were democracies, or somewhat democracies, and moved them toward more authoritarian forms of government — that includes Hungary, Narendra Modi and India, Recep Erdogan and Turkey and Putin — they’ve seen higher education as a threat. And so they’ve shut universities or put themselves in control of those universities. Another move authoritarian leaders make is to consolidate power by attacking and shuttering independent media. Along with this attack on NPR and PBS, President Trump has expanded his battle with the press by suing multiple media outlets, eliminating the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), and restricting media access to the Oval Office and Air Force President Trump's new head of the Federal Communications Commission has ordered an investigation of NPR and PBS, with an eye toward unraveling federal funding for all public broadcasting. Why do you think the Trump administration is trying to silence independent media?
Write and Discuss
Take ten minutes to write about the question at the top of the page and then discuss with your classmates.
Act on your Learning
Contact your member of Congress and let them know what you think about public funding for NPR and PBS.
Get Creative
Imagine that you are designing a gravestone for NPR. Include the following on the gravestone: dates, accomplishment, and the cause of death.
