Donald Trump Trying To Kill NPR, PBS, Wikipedia, Puppies, Everything Else You Like
Wait wait, don't defund me!
Donald Trump on Thursday issued an executive order demanding that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) stop funding National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. The order also ordered CPB to make sure no funding for local public radio and TV stations goes to purchasing content from NPR or PBS, which could effectively kill off public TV and radio if the order survives court challenges.
On a separate track, Trump’s (acting) US Attorney for the DC District, Ed Martin, last week sent a nastygram to Wikipedia accusing it of spreading “propaganda” and probably violating its tax-exempt status because it’s so mean and unfair to conservatives.
Both moves are exactly the kinds of suppression of press freedom you’d expect under an authoritarian regime, which we suppose might be the most obvious thing we’ve written all week. If there’s one thing the MAGA Right can’t stand, it’s information that contradicts Trump. But the rightwing obsession with going after public media and Wikipedia isn’t solely about wanting to consolidate control over information. Like so many Trumpian culture-war “policies,” it’s driven by a deep well of resentment and revenge, a desire to get even with the snooty elites who must be punished for liking things that Real Americans don’t.
Do Righties Even Know We Call NPR ‘Nice Polite Republicans’?
The pretext for going after public media is that NPR and PBS are supposedly “biased” in their news coverage, but the rage is aimed every bit as much at the latte-sipping EV drivers (even worse if it’s a Volvo EV!) whose car radios seldom leave the left side of the FM dial. (Or wouldn’t, if car radios still had dials.) PBS and NPR appeal to the wrong kind of Americans, if you can call them Americans at all, so they must be eliminated.
Whoever wrote Trump’s EO — Stephen Miller or an AI trained on his collected cranial oozings — said that public broadcasting had long ago outlived its usefulness, so it’s now time to put it out on an ice floe for the good of everyone:
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 Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.
In a lovely bit of doublethink, the order explains that if we do have federally funded broadcasting, it must be both 100 percent neutral and must dance to any tune the executive branch chooses.
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.
Why, no, there’s not really any attempt to reconcile all those contradictory claims. Whatever PBS and NPR air is bad and wrong, so they must be extirpated. That said, an accompanying “fact sheet” alleges that public TV and radio are basically in cahoots with Democrats, because didn’t that one former NPR editor say so?
The document — quite a specimen of propaganda in its own right — repeats a load of supposedly “biased” coverage from NPR and PBS, including — as evidence of the now-banned discussion of LGBTQ existence — an 11-minute NPR podcast feature on “queer animals” which pointed out the completely true fact that “banana slugs are hermaphrodites,” which we are sorry, they just plain are, even if they move too slowly to take part in Pride parades. Also, some PBS programs have depicted transgender people as real human beings, which is very unfair to the Right.
The “fact sheet” also recapitulates the rightwing hissy over that time Sesame Street and CNN did a town hall about racism, and now that’s illegal too, you know. Or as the unbiased fact sheet put it very objectively, the town hall “aimed presenting children (sic) with a one-sided narrative to ‘address racism’ amid the Black Lives Matter riots.”
Yes, that’s from the White House complaint about public broadcasting’s bias.
In the face of constant rightwing political attacks over the last few decades, both NPR and PBS have taken steps to insulate themselves from defunding threats by increasingly relying on donations from their audiences, as well as from private foundations and corporate underwriters. NPR itself gets less than one percent of its funding comes from taxpayers.
But that’s just the funding for the networks. Local public TV and radio stations that carry programming from NPR, PBS, and other sources have to pay for it, and they are far more dependent on funding from CPB, especially in smaller markets where stations don’t have the listener base of those in large cities. As a result, if the order prohibiting local stations from using CBP funds to carry PBS and NPR content holds up in court — thankfully, a very big if — it could result in hundreds of smaller public stations going silent, taking away the only local news sources their communities still have.
Fortunately, the executive order is illegal as fuck, yet another attempt by Trump to withhold funds that Congress has already allocated. In fact, to help shield public broadcasting from political threats, CPB is officially a private nonprofit, though it’s funded by taxpayers. Its budget is funded two years in advance to further protect it against retaliation, but Trump hopes to claw back $1 billion of its current allocation to fund tax cuts for billionaires.
Ed Martin’s Dumb War On Wikipedia
And then there’s the dumb accusations against Wikipedia from Ed Martin, Trump’s choice as US Attorney for the DC District. The good news is that there may not be enough Republican votes in the Senate to confirm him. But even in his acting role, he’s acting like he’s some kind of private eye, threatening Wikimedia, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, with loss of its nonprofit status, for doing bad things.
In a letter last week, Martin accused Wikipedia of “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public,” because anyone can post edits to the open-source encyclopedia, even non-USA persons, which is how it’s designed. The way the place works is that if somebody posts crap information to the site, other editors can remove the crap and replace it with more reliable information from reputable sources.
Martin whined that this was really unfair, claiming that
“Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States.
He alleged that allowing just anyone to edit articles, anonymously, amounts to “masking propaganda that influences public opinion” which is somehow a violation of Wikimedia’s tax-exempt “educational” status, so maybe the Justice Department will just have to step in and do something!
This is where we point out that the DOJ doesn’t normally determine whether a nonprofit actually qualifies to be a nonprofit, since that’s the IRS’s job. But Martin has a culture war to fight on behalf of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, so why shouldn’t he do some prosecutin’ outside his remit?
Martin also alleged that Wikimedia’s board of directors “is composed primarily of foreign nationals, subverting the interests of American taxpayers,” darkly hinting that that too was illegal somehow. Worse, he claimed that “information received by my Office demonstrates that Wikipedia’s informational management policies benefit foreign powers.”
It’s a pretty creepy attempt to intimidate a nonprofit online encyclopedia, if you ask us. But again, rightwing weirdos have been complaining about Wikipedia for decades, saying that it’s terribly unfair to rightwing blog outlets just because they lie a lot. Elon Musk has taken to calling the place “Wokipedia,” and especially dislikes that articles about him and his companies are insufficiently flattering.
Also, Musk offered Wikipedia a billion dollars to change its name, to “Dickipedia,” proving that he is the wittiest man on the Right and lefties are nervous. For some reason it chose not to. Somehow, Martin didn’t cite that as evidence of illegal bias, the end.
[White House (executive order) / NBC News / White House (‘fact sheet’) / HuffPo]
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As this story went up, NPR was at that very moment running a piece on how immigrants from autocratic countries see Trump. some folks in the piece even say he's not an autocrat, but most say he is, so wow so much bias. (Story was clearly finished and edited prior to the EO, which isn't mentioned in the piece)
Oh horror and shock, look at the terribly biased headline: "People who fled authoritarian regimes say Trump's tactics remind them of home"
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/01/nx-s1-5340754/trump-authoritarianism-u-s-hungary-turkey-orban-erdogan-duterte-maria-ressa
LOL, apparently the last person with a dual role as Secretary of State and national security adviser was . . . Henry Kissinger