Corporation for Public Broadcasting Pulls Its Own Plug

Rather than await its eventual demise due to the Trump administration’s lack of funding, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s board of directors voted to shutter the organization on January 5 rather than try to exist but be “vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse.” After a nearly 60-year tenure as one of the country’s leading funders of public television, the CPB — whose logo is immediately familiar to any and all former PBS-watching kids — will distribute its remaining funds to various public-television and radio outlets as well as national archives that preserve historic media.

This news is not entirely unexpected after Congress approved President Trump’s recession package, which sought to get back the $1.1 billion otherwise allocated to public-media funding. That the CPB’s days were numbered was well-known, but the decision to go out on its own terms — rather than leave a shell of the corporation available for manipulation — is an even more tragic development.

Bigger entities like NPR and PBS will make due with other funds they get, but this shutdown is disastrous for local news outfits around the country. And just because NPR and PBS will continue on doesn’t mean they don’t feel the proverbial walls closing in on them. In the CPB’s final months, America’s Public Television Stations, a nonprofit, put forward a plan that might have saved all of these organizations by encouraging them to save face with the Republican government. Though it initially looked like everyone was in agreement, NPR’s CEO, Katherine Maher, pushed back against this kind of capitulation, which would involve having to state that NPR’s reporting is biased. In September, the CPB awarded a huge grant to Public Media Infrastructure, a media conglomerate that does not include NPR, a decision that led to NPR filing a restraining order against CPB. Though both sides reached a settlement in November, the conflict was an ugly sign of how solidarity between these organizations crumbled in an attempt to persevere. The CPB, however, existed in part to spread the wealth among various broadcasters and media organizations in an attempt to distribute information as far and wide as it could go. Without it, the state of American public broadcasting looks a lot lonelier.