Media

Jesse Walker | 5.2.2025 12:15 PM

President Donald Trump issued an executive order last night that is supposed to end federal funding for the public TV network PBS and the public radio network NPR. Specifically, he ordered the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to stop its direct subsidies to those networks "to the maximum extent allowed by law" and to revise its grants to individual stations to block them from spending taxpayers' money on PBS or NPR programs. The order also instructs all executive agencies to eliminate any flow of funds to the two networks, and it asks the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate whether the networks are guilty of illegal discrimination.

If you're a totebag-hating Tory who wants to kick Daniel Tiger off the dole, you may be in for some disappointment. That phrase "to the maximum extent allowed by law" did not come from nowhere; this move is guaranteed to run into legal trouble. It also seems, on the surface at least, to be bizarrely timed,........

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