Here’s something which is a long time coming, but will almost certainly end up in court: the longtime burr in the saddle of conservatives, that being the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is finally getting stripped of the government swag which sustains it in a media market which has absolutely zero excess demand for its products.

Here’s the order…

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1. Purpose. National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) receive taxpayer funds through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options. Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.

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. The CPB’s governing statute reflects principles of impartiality: the CPB may not “contribute to or otherwise support any political party.” 47 U.S.C. 396(f)(3); see also id. 396(e)(2).

The CPB fails to abide by these principles to the extent it subsidizes NPR and PBS. Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter. What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.
I therefore instruct the CPB Board of Directors (CPB Board) and all executive departments and agencies (agencies) to cease Federal funding for NPR and PBS.

Sec. 2. Instructions to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (a) The CPB Board shall cease direct funding to NPR and PBS, consistent with my Administration’s policy to ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage. The CPB Board shall cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding.

(b) The CPB Board shall cease indirect funding to NPR and PBS, including by ensuring that licensees and permittees of public radio and television stations, as well as any other recipients of CPB funds, do not use Federal funds for NPR and PBS. To effectuate this directive, the CPB Board shall, before June 30, 2025, revise the 2025 Television Community Service Grants General Provisions and Eligibility Criteria and the 2025 Radio Community Service Grants General Provisions and Eligibility Criteria to prohibit direct or indirect funding of NPR and PBS. To the extent permitted by the 2024 Television Community Service Grants General Provisions and Eligibility Criteria, the 2024 Radio Community Service Grants General Provisions and Eligibility Criteria, and applicable law, the CPB Board shall also prohibit parties subject to these provisions from funding NPR or PBS after the date of this order. In addition, the CPB Board shall take all other necessary steps to minimize or eliminate its indirect funding of NPR and PBS.

Sec. 3. Instructions to Other Agencies. (a) The heads of all agencies shall identify and terminate, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, any direct or indirect funding of NPR and PBS.

(b) After taking the actions specified in subsection (a) of this section, the heads of all agencies shall identify any remaining grants, contracts, or other funding instruments entered into with NPR or PBS and shall determine whether NPR and PBS are in compliance with the terms of those instruments. In the event of a finding of noncompliance, the head of the relevant agency shall take appropriate steps under the terms of the instrument.

(c) The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall determine whether “the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio (or any successor organization)” are complying with the statutory mandate that “no person shall be subjected to discrimination in employment . . . on the grounds of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex.” 47 U.S.C. 397(15), 398(b). In the event of a finding of noncompliance, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall take appropriate corrective action.

Sec. 4. Severability. If any provision of this order, or the application of any provision to any agency, person, or circumstance, is held to be invalid, the remainder of this order and the application of its provisions to any other agencies, persons, or circumstances shall not be affected thereby.

Sec. 5. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

DONALD J. TRUMP

THE WHITE HOUSE,
May 1, 2025.

A press release from the White House defends it in a pretty comprehensive fashion…

Last night, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order ending the taxpayer subsidization of National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) — entities that receive tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds each year to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as “news.”

Here are some examples of the trash that has passed for “news” at NPR and PBS:

• NPR ran a story titled “Cannibalism: It’s ‘Perfectly Natural,’” in which an author described eating another human’s placenta: “It was really the prep that made it taste good. Granted, the [husband] was a chef and so he knew how to prepare it osso bucco style and used a really nice wine I had brought. It smelled great. It didn’t taste bad.”
• In 2021, NPR declared the Declaration of Independence to be a document with “flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies.”
  • In 2022, NPR scrapped its decades-long Independence Day tradition of reading the Declaration of Independence on air to instead discuss “equality.”
  • NPR subsequently issued an “editor’s note” warning the Declaration of Independence is “a document that contains offensive language.”
• NPR apologized for calling illegal immigrants “illegal.”
• NPR sounded the alarm about young men who abstain from masturbating to pornography.
• NPR featured a Valentine’s Day story centered around “queer animals,” in which it suggested the make-believe clownfish in “Finding Nemo” would’ve been better off as a female, that “banana slugs are hermaphrodites,” and that “some deer are nonbinary.”
• PBS devoted a panel to what it “mean[s] to be woke” and “white privilege.”
• NPR routinely promotes the chemical and surgical mutilation of children as so-called “gender-affirming care” without mentioning the irreversible damage caused by these procedures.
• In 2021, a PBS station aired a “children’s program” that featured a drag queen named “Lil’ Miss Hot Mess.”
• NPR educated the nation on the “whole community of genderqueer dinosaur enthusiasts” and “trans-ceratops.”
• Then-PBS White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor characterized President Trump’s patriotic 2020 Mount Rushmore speech as a love letter to “white resentment” that promoted the “myth of America.”
• NPR reported on the “cousin of diet culture” known as “healthism, which is the idea that we have to be healthy” — as if that was a bad thing.
• NPR assigned three reporters to investigate how the thumbs-up emoji is racist.
• NPR suggested doorway sizes are based on “latent fatphobia.”
• PBS produced an entire movie celebrating a transgender teenager’s so-called “changing gender identity.”
• NPR absurdly claimed “limited scientific evidence of physical advantage” exists between male and female athletes.
• NPR lamented that “animals deserve pronouns, too.”
• NPR ran a feature titled “What ‘Queer Ducks’ can teach teenagers about sexuality in the animal kingdom.”
• In 2023, PBS’s Washington Week roundtable covered up Joe Biden’s clear mental decline, with far-left “journalist” Jeffrey Goldberg claiming Biden was actually “quite acute.”
• NPR dedicated an entire segment to the “population of anthropomorphic animal enthusiasts known as ‘furries.’”
• PBS produced a documentary making the case for reparations.
• NPR disparagingly referred to pro-life Americans at the March for Life as “anti-abortion rights activists.”
• NPR explored “the racial origins of fat phobia.”
• NPR management asked its editors to avoid the term “biological sex” when discussing transgender issues.
• PBS show Sesame Street partnered with CNN on a one-sided narrative to “address racism” amid the Black Lives Matter riots.

NPR and PBS have zero tolerance for non-leftist viewpoints:

• In 2020, NPR refused to cover the explosive Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the runup to the election, baselessly claiming its “assertions don’t amount to much” and writing they “don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
• When a 25-year veteran NPR reporter and editor spoke out about the network’s obsession with liberal causes, they suspended him.
  • The editor found that registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans 87 to zero in their newsroom.
  • NPR prolifically reported on the Russian collusion hoax, with the editor describing “[Adam] Schiff talking points” as “the drumbeat of NPR news reports.”
• NPR CEO Katherine Maher once called President Trump “racist,” shared a photo of herself wearing a “Biden for President” campaign hat, serves on the board of a Soros-funded activist group, and described “reverence for the truth” as a “distraction.”
• In 2023, a study found that congressional Republicans saw 85% negative coverage while congressional Democrats saw 54% positive coverage on PBS’s flagship news program.
• According to a 2024 study, PBS news staff used 162 variations of the term “far-right,” but only six variations of “far-left.”
• Media bias rating agency AllBias — which surveyed nearly 24,000 readers — found NPR’s bias aligns with “liberal, progressive or left-wing thought and/or policy agendas.”
• NPR repeatedly dismissed the theory that COVID-19 originated in a lab — a conclusion now deemed likely by the FBI, CIA, and Department of Energy.
  • April 2020: “Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory Of Pandemic Emergence”
  • May 2020: “As Trump Pushes Theory Of Virus Origins, Some See Parallels In Lead-Up To Iraq War”
  • May 2021: “Many Scientists Still Think The Coronavirus Came From Nature”
  • March 2023: “Virologist says COVID origin report could make it harder to study dangerous diseases”
  • September 2024: “New research points to raccoon dogs in Wuhan market as pandemic trigger. It’s controversial.”
• A 2024 Media Research Center study found that PBS’s coverage of the Republican National Convention was 72% negative, while coverage of the Democratic National Convention was 88% positive.

There’s no question about NPR and PBS’ left-wing bias. It’s been a joke for a long time.

We’ve noted, moreover, that beyond the fact these are propaganda outlets for the socialist worldview, they’re sinecures for pretentious layabouts which offend the sensibilities of people who actually participate in the new media sector which has made them obsolete. We talked about Louisiana Public Broadcasting and Sen. John Kennedy trying to put a stop to the fat checks they pull in from the federal government to produce…not a lot, at the end of the day:

You don’t need 800K a year to put on cooking shows. Chef Alden B posts a few episodes every few months making Louisiana food and he’s got 240,000 YouTube subscribers, and nobody’s giving him $800,000. Louisiana Cookin’ Magazine has a YouTube channel with a once-a-week episode, and the production values are TV quality.

That’s what Kennedy is talking about.

What we’re getting here, abetted of course by the corporate TV media for no reason other than ideology, is the plaintive wail of the government bureaucrat that they just can’t put on their meager cable-access-channel-quality offerings without millions of dollars a year in funding.

It’s utterly ridiculous. New Media operations with a fraction of WYES’ budget are informing and entertaining many multiples of their audience.

Guess how many X followers WYES-TV has.

As of this writing? 2,112. That’s an utterly ridiculously low number. And they haven’t posted to their X account since 2022.

It’s a little better on Facebook; they’ve got 18,000 followers there. And they regularly post stuff on Facebook about…Mardi Gras parades and their fundraising events.

The Hayride has triple WYES’ X following, and I’ve done a lousy job promoting that account. We have 24,000 followers on Facebook.

And we have practically no budget at all. We eat what we kill. These guys have the better part of $10 million coming through the door and they can’t even hit The Hayride’s numbers on social media?

I’m using social media as a metric for connecting with the community because that’s generally how it’s done these days. These guys barely even bother.

So how many locally-produced shows are we talking about here?

WYES’ website says they have….two. There’s Peggy Scott Laborde’s “Steppin’ Out” show, which is about restaurants and bars and so forth, and there’s Marcia Kavanaugh and Errol Laborde’s “Informed Sources” show, which is a political show with a pretty definitive ideological bent that doesn’t generally win a lot of elections in Louisiana.

That’s it. That’s what WYES does every week.

Sure, they’ll show documentary series here and there, like the one on Dooky Chase they’re still touting after six years since they produced it. But as for continuously-running programs, for $7-8 million or so a year, you get…two shows.

Fox 8 did the best they could to advocate for the bankrupt federal government to continue funding this, but it’s utterly ridiculous. And from a New Media perspective it’s offensive. These guys are barely even trying, and they’re being showered with government swag, and independents like us are hustling to keep the doors open daily.

Kennedy is right. If WYES can’t survive a 13 percent budget cut putting on two regular shows a week, plus the occasional documentary which is almost always underwritten by some foundation or corporate philanthropy or other, then there is zero reason for anybody to care about their problems – regardless of how much energy Fox 8 is willing to do to white-knight for them. Enough already.

Do we expect the funding for TV and radio stations like these to go away immediately? No. This is a signal, though, that there shouldn’t and perhaps even probably won’t be any funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the big beautiful bill – and with Trump knocking out CPB’s funding essentially through an impoundment, he’s inviting a lawsuit by whatever leftist hogs at the trough might try to go to war over the issue.

What could be fun is if this turns out to be the test case for whether the 1975 Impoundment Control Act, which restricted presidential powers of impoundment, is constitutional. Trump’s people don’t think it is, and they make the point that the passage of that act was the point at which the federal budget began careening out of control.

If that’s how it goes, we’d be fine with it. Either way, it’s long past time somebody took a hard line in getting rid of federal dollars for state-run media when we have so many outlets for every sort of content under the sun. We’ll thank the president for taking this stance.