Are NPR and PBS doomed? Despite the Trump administration’s sound, fury and executive orders aimed at cutting off federal funding for public media, “defunding” is not a sure thing.

It is far from clear that President Trump’s May 1 executive order “ending taxpayer subsidization of biased media” will survive legal challenge. It instructs a legally independent nonprofit organization, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as to what it must do. Nor is it clear that another means toward that end — firing many of the current CPB board members — will survive its own legal challenge.

The real test for the most serious effort to defund public media since its creation in 1967 has come in Congress. The House last week passed the White House’s $9.48 billion spending rescission package, including its request to claw back $1.1 billion funds that Congress has already appropriated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes those funds to NPR, PBS and local stations. Federal public media funding will survive only if the Senate doesn't go along.

For that to happen, PBS and especially NPR — which stirs the greatest animosity — must change their........

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