Officials with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting say President Donald Trump has no legal authority to order the organization to withhold funding from public media outlets PBS and NPR, despite his signing of an Executive Order late Thursday evening that requires them to do precisely that.
In a statement released early Friday morning, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting said its directives come from the U.S. Congress, which “directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.”
“In creating CPB, Congress expressly forbade ‘any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors,” the organization said, citing a specific federal statute that aligned with its remarks.
Trump said his Executive Order on Thursday was aimed at restoring balance and competition in the news media industry and cutting wasteful government spending by eliminating taxpayer subsidies to PBS and NPR.
“Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary, but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence,” Trump wrote in the order. “At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage. No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize.”
Trump argued that the CPB “fails to abide” by a federal law that prohibits it from providing federal funding to organizations that “contribute to or otherwise support any political party.” In cutting off funding for NPR and PBS, Trump suggests that both distributors of public broadcasting programs act as extensions of a particular political party.
“Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter,” Trump said. “What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”
NPR provides public radio programs to more than 1,000 educational and non-profit radio stations across the country, while PBS is one of several public television programming distributors with hundreds of local TV stations serving as members.
On Friday, PBS CEO Paula Kerger said Trump’s Executive Order was unlawful and, if it were upheld, would seriously damage the organization’s ability to provide programming and support to its member television stations.
“The President’s blatantly unlawful Executive Order, issued in the middle of the night, threatens our ability to serve the American public with educational programming, as we have for the past 50-plus years,” Kerger said. “We are currently exploring all options to allow PBS to continue to serve our member stations and all Americans.”
The statement suggests PBS may sue the Trump administration in an attempt to overturn the Executive Order, something other broadcasters and their workers have done when subject to similar directives over the past few weeks.
Katherine Maher, the former Wikimedia Foundation executive who now leads NPR as its CEO, suggested her organization may pursue the same legal challenges. In the meantime, it is business as usual at NPR, she wrote in a statement on Friday.
“NPR stands by the excellence and commitment of our journalists, staff, and Member organizations to seek out stories that matter to the American public, that reflect every part of the diversity of our nation, and that bring affairs of the world to our audiences,” Maher said. “We stand by our high standards and our colleagues in their pursuit of factual reporting, their work to present issues fairly and without bias, and our effort to seek the humanity and human consequence of every story. We will strongly defend our work and our editorial independence and will continue to tell the stories of our country and the world with accuracy, objectivity, and fairness.”
