Public Funding for PBS and NPR is Coming to an End

The annual call to remove funding for PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service, and NPR, National Public Radio, are perennial political clichés that never seem to go anywhere, like efforts to reduce the national debt or simplify the tax code. But this year, the call is louder and more serious. The Trump Administration seems determined to defund them.

“Republicans must defund and totally disassociate themselves from NPR & PBS,” President Trump posted to Truth Social, “the radical left ‘monsters’ that so badly hurt our country.” He posted this on April 1, but he wasn’t fooling. Like other previously seeming immobile pillars of the liberal establishment, PBS and NPR as we know them are in grave danger.

There’s nothing more American than PBS,” Paula Kerger, the CEO of PBS said in a statement this week. Given that she’s in charge of PBS, her opinion isn’t too surprising, even though I can think of dozens of things that are more American than PBS. But it’s definitely an American thing, something I’ve known my entire life. For Americans of a certain age, the idea of killing PBS, and, to a lesser extent, NPR, is akin to slaying the Easter Bunny, or, more appropriately, Big Bird. But lately I’ve found myself wondering if ending federal funding would be the worst thing for these institutions, which have largely used up their public utility. A defunded PBS and NPR might end up being better for America, and even for PBS and NPR themselves.

This Was PBS

For Americans of a certain age, social class, and level of educational attainment, PBS was once an essential piece of intellectual furniture, a nutritious alternative to disposable junk culture. Classical-music lovers could enjoy excellent symphonies and operas. Before the age of premium TV and Britbox, PBS gave us quality novels-as-serialized entertainment, like I, Claudius, Upstairs/Downstairs, The Jewel in The Crown, or Brideshead Revisited, which remain to this day some of the finest products ever aired. For science people, you had Cosmos and Nova. This Old House taught home-repair skills long before HGTV became popular, and Julia Child predated The Food Network by decades. Centrist news lovers could bathe in the blue-gray dullness of McNeil/Lehrer through the turmoil of Iran/Contra, and The McLaughlin Group predated today’s cable TV current-affairs shoutfests.

PBS’s first contact for most viewers were children’s programs. Tremendous gone-but-not-forgotten shows like The Electric Company, Zoom,  321 Contact, Wishbone, and Reading Rainbow actually managed to educate while also entertaining. Mr. Rogers taught a generation to be kind and tolerant, and Sesame Street brought us, well, everything, and may very well be the more important TV show ever made.

But let’s be realistic. Fred Rogers died more than 20 years ago. And Sesame Street hasn’t been public property for a decade. It moved to HBO in 2016, and HBO Max became its exclusive streaming home in 2019. As of this year, the Children’s Television Workshop is no longer producing original Sesame Street material. The brand has gone the way of Mr. Hooper; the last generation of kids who could have possibly learned anything from Sesame Street on PBS is now in high school, and they identify way more strongly with Minecraft and SpongeBob than they do with Bert and Ernie.

As for PBS’s other offerings:

–The news division, which was always a fourth option in its best years, is now an election night eighth-stringer. Frontline produces quality documentaries, but does it need public funding to do so? There are probably 100,000 news-themed YouTube channels with more viewers than PBS News.

–PBS’s last big hit drama, Downton Abbey, now gets annual big-screen movies. And The Gilded Age, Julian Fellowes’s followup show to Downton, essentially the American version, airs on Max. Meanwhile, shows that would have been staples on PBS in the golden age, like Outlander, Bridgerton, The Great, or The Crown, air on streaming services where they can have bigger budgets and show steamier sex scenes. There are always adaptations of Dickens or Eliot or Austen to air, but those have never been exclusively the domain of PBS, and even the ones that were are often now available as part of an Amazon Prime membership.

Perhaps the strongest argument for maintaining PBS funding lies with Ken Burns, who has singlehandedly chronicled all of American history through his documentaries. That is 100 percent PBS product. But does it have to be? At this point in his career, does Ken Burns really require a billion-dollar government subsidy?

Some Things Considered

If PBS represents the musty Antiques Roadshow of American TV culture, NPR is a much more complicated case. Though it depends partially on the federal government for funding, it’s also, when Trump is President, an almost fully-oppositional media force, as left-wing as you can get without calling for an outright revolution. A few weeks ago, NPR CEO Katherine Maher presented a ludicrous testimony in front of Congress in which she said that NPR “delivers unbiased, nonpartisan, fact-based reporting,” while also admitting that it had failed to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story. Anyone who’s followed NPR during the Trump era, and especially during COVID, when it was the house voice of the panicked lockdown left, knows that’s nonsense. NPR is as biased as modern media gets.

Though NPR never was the warm, friendly bath that PBS was, it did provide a genuine service once upon a time, with professorial, lightly feminist feature reporting and an evening emphasis on musical styles and musicians who didn’t get play on corporate radio. We can try to forget that the Garrison Keillor era ever happened, but a Prairie Home Companion was once essential weekend breakfast amusement for Clinton-era families with books on the shelves. NPR was kind and comforting if you were in its demographic. Contemporary interview shows wouldn’t be possible without the trailblazing work of Terry Gross, and Ira Glass wrote the template for narrative podcast reporting. Gross and Glass are both still going, and the Tiny Desk Concert is still a career milestone for musicians of all genres.

But in an era of populist politics and rapidly decentralizing education, the idea of a “national” radio network or a “public” television station feels almost quaint, especially when those institutions reject populist politics and decentralized education. It’s no accident that the Trump Administration is defunding the Voice of America as well. Whatever voice was coming out of that service didn’t represent the America they envision. To a large extent, that’s also true about PBS and NPR.

Both PBS and NPR will continue to exist, even if the government pulls all its funding tomorrow, which it well might. They both have private sources of funding, though some of that funding comes from non-governmental organizations that the government is also defunding. Maybe it will help; maybe they’ll wake up, have to innovate, compete with a diverse quick-fix media ecosystem that didn’t even remotely exist when they appeared at the dawn of time. It’s not a coincidence that young people are in a panic about the potential loss of TikTok. But if PBS goes away for good, they won’t even notice.