All or Nothing—Cutting the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Benefits the Public

Those of us of a certain age can probably say the phrase from memory. After every show on public television, you would see the list of sponsors that included a major corporation or two, several major liberal foundations, then “the Corporation for Public Broadcasting… and viewers like you.” Now, thanks to Congress and President Donald Trump, the “private” corporation known as CPB will be shedding most of its employees by September and shuttering next year.

Despite the tag line, it was never really “viewers like you” sending in your $50 to get PBS mugs and tote bags that kept all that programming afloat. It was instead taxpayers who were sending a lot of money to the CPB to send to the local public television and radio affiliates and pay mostly liberal advocates to produce programming that benefited the liberal/left worldview.

“In June,” CBS reported, “the House approved a White House request to claw back $1.1 billion in already appointed federal funds from the CPB. The Senate Appropriations Committee’s 2026 appropriations bill eliminated funding for the CPB for the first time in over 50 years.” 

The predictable line that’s been trotted out since Republicans defunded NPR, PBS, and their major funder, the CPB, is that defunding will devastate rural communities who all rely on public television and radio for emergency situations. It’s a pretty absurd claim that shows how far away from real people those collecting the cash are. They seem to believe that rural people all rush to turn on their local PBS or NPR affiliate every time a threatening sky appears.

Maybe it was true once upon a time, but as long as I’ve been around, commercial stations have interrupted their programming to issue warnings of all sorts. And, in a bit of news for the public programming bigwigs, there is this newfangled technology called the internet that now offers the possibility of finding out things just a bit faster than the old habit of adjusting rabbit ears on a television with five stations.

The reality is that the CPB was valued primarily as a pass-through for the public stations and private producers of news, documentaries, and entertainment. And they were always primarily producing material that supported a liberal view, even if some things were non-political or even right-leaning occasionally.

There is no doubt that even conservatives will have some residual affection for the PBS affiliates of our childhood. Whether it was Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers episodes for the kids or British dramas such as Upstairs, Downstairs and some interesting documentaries for the adults, we don’t have to say everything produced with the aid of the CPB was bad.

Nostalgia is not, however, a good reason to keep sending taxpayer money to the CPB. Whatever good projects were funded through the CPB, there is little rationale in a world of almost endless content produced privately to send public money to any group, much less outlets that exercise editorial control, siding almost exclusively with the Democrats and their allies.  

The days of even funding some things that went against liberal consensus are long gone anyway. When President Trump issued an executive order defunding NPR and PBS in May, filmmaker Eli Steele wrote on X (formerly Twitter) about the past and present of those two organizations. “PBS defunded conservative filmmakers long ago. My father [famed academic and writer Shelby Steele] won PBS an Emmy for ‘Seven Days in Bensonhurst’ and made another great one, ‘Jefferson’s Blood’ and PBS’s response? No more $$ for you. I’ve never been able to approach them for funding. You think they would have funded ‘What Killed Michael Brown?’ Or the current ‘White Guilt’ doc?”

You might think that since, like his father, Steele is a black writer and filmmaker of courage, he would be the ideal recipient of funding. But he’s the wrong kind of black man. He doesn’t toe the line to repeat Democratic and left-wing talking points about race—even if, as in the case of Michael Brown of Ferguson fame, what we were all told about the “gentle giant” and what happened to him in 2014 was not true.

Neither documentaries nor news that didn’t serve the purposes of the left side of America have been allowed for a while on TV stations supported by taxpayer dollars. Increasingly, it was only the purposes of the farthest left slice that were aired. Then-NPR business editor Uri Berliner’s famous 2024 essay, “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” detailed how, as late as 2011, the famed National Public Radio still managed to capture a broad swath of America, with 26 percent of their listeners describing themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle-of-the-road, and 37 percent as liberal or very liberal. By 2023, however, things had changed. “We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.” Only 11 percent of listeners were conservative while a whopping 67 percent were liberal.

It’s not surprising to read in Berliner’s account how the perceived need to defeat Donald Trump was central in the radio network’s final spiral into insanity regarding COVID-19 and identity politics. Berliner observed that in the cases of the so-called Russia Collusion and Hunter Biden laptop stories, political need squelched journalistic integrity. When the facts of the case were confirmed even by other supposedly mainstream news outlets, NPR could have admitted what went wrong. “But,” Berliner lamented, “like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.”

Berliner left NPR shortly after his complaints earned him a suspension from his employer. It was clear that his own transparency was a bit too much for a network committed to what he later called “fringe progressivism.”

It still is. That is why the ever-entertaining Louisiana Senator John Kennedy spoke for many Americans in declaring: “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting—the scheme bureaucrats used to funnel taxpayer money to NPR and PBS—will soon be no more. That’s great news for every American who doesn’t want their tax dollars funding left-wing opinion journalism ever again.”

The public does not benefit from having a thousand million dollars (that is, after all, what a “billion” is) sent yearly to be passed on to organizations purporting to be truth-tellers while only allowing what is of benefit to their own increasingly fringe political side to see the light of day.

“Public must mean all or nothing,” according to Eli Steele. The organizations funded by CPB were not going to represent or speak to all of the public. It is thus truly right and just that they receive nothing.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.