President Donald Trump signed an executive order terminating government funding of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service.
As NPR and PBS have become “woke,” according to the administration, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, through which the outlets receive taxpayer funding, must abide by principles of impartiality, Trump directed the corporation and all agencies in the executive branch to stop funding the organizations to “the maximum extent allowed by law.”
Americans have many more news options today than in 1967, when the corporation was founded, and if tax dollars are going to go toward public broadcasting, it should be totally nonpartisan, according to the executive 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,” the order reads. “No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the Government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize.”
The administration described the outlets as “entities that receive tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds each year to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news’” and listed “examples of the trash that has passed for ‘news’” at the organizations in communications it sent out Friday morning.
NPR said the Declaration of Independence contained “flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies” in 2021, a year before it replaced its typical Independence Day reading of the founding document with a conversation about equality, according to the administration. The administration also criticized the outlets for promoting “gender-affirming care,” featuring drag queens in children’s programs and certain views on race and “white privilege.”
The executive order will likely be challenged in court, as many of Trump’s executive orders have been so far, for breaches of executive authority.
The president has signed over 140 executive orders thus far in his second term.
