President-elect Donald Trump’s condolence message after President Jimmy Carter’s recent passing at age 100 included a line that has the potential of reverberating throughout 2025 and beyond. Trump noted, while recognizing that Carter “truly loved and respected our Country, and all it stands for,” he also “strongly disagreed with him philosophically and politically.”
Exhibit A is the looming battle ahead that the Trump Administration will wage against federal funding for public broadcasting. Trump has been a long-time opponent. Early in his first term, his proposed budget to Congress recommended no allocation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which distributes programming money for both PBS and NPR. Subsequent Trump-submitted budgets included comparable requests, although none were enacted.
As he prepares to assume office again, Trump’s passion seems to have intensified. His all-caps Truth Social message last April expresses his views succinctly. “NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM!” THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!”
He now has gathered additional support for his position, too. Project 2025, a lengthy policy playbook prepared last year by the Heritage Foundation, is sure to be closely read by the incoming Trump Administration. “Not only is the federal government trillions of dollars in debt and unable to afford the more than half a billion dollars squandered on leftist opinion each year, but the government should not be compelling the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views,” Mike Gonzalez, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow, wrote there.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy also are on board as leaders of the new Department of Government Efficiency aimed at finding ways to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. Both already are on record recommending that the annual line item of $535 million for CPB be eliminated as soon as possible.
Clearly, these signs point to a real battle ahead to maintain continuing federal funding for public broadcasting, which likely will be opposed by a Republican-led House and Senate so that Trump’s end game now seems more possible than ever. NPR member stations already have been warned that “it would be unwise to assume that events will play out as they have in the past,” and PBS board members are being briefed by political consultants about lobbying on Capitol Hill when the 119th Congress begins working this month.
A powerful counterargument to the growing political headwinds may reflect a Back to the Future approach. In October 1977, during his first term in office, President Carter sent a message to Congress that has resonance nearly a half-century later. He noted that “a strong and varied public broadcast system has a crucial role to play. Because it is free of the scramble for ratings, public broadcasting has room for experimentation and risk-taking. Public broadcasting is for all Americans. It can meet the needs of audiences that number in the millions but are seldom served anywhere else.”
Equally important, this message asserted that “[f]inancial stability is needed if public broadcasting is to provide better programs for more citizens and protect those programs from political pressures. …This Administration will not try to stifle controversy on public television and radio. No President should try to dictate what issues public broadcasting should cover or how it should cover them.”
The simple case that the late president made back then will need to be amplified on a bipartisan basis once again to help forestall today’s powerful defunding momentum. “[P]ublic broadcasting has set new standards in children's programs, drama, music, science, history, and educational services. Its coverage of local, state, and national hearings, its documentaries, and its in-depth news analyses have helped make government more understandable. … Public broadcasting has done more than simply entertain us. It has encouraged us and our children to think and to act. It has also pioneered in such technical innovations as captioning for the deaf and satellite broadcasting.”
All sides will be watching to see if Carter can prevail over Trump in this stark political and philosophical divide. Stay tuned, indeed.
Stuart N. Brotman is the former president and CEO of The Museum of Television & Radio in New York and Los Angeles (now The Paley Center for Media).
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