A judge’s recent ruling regarding federal funding for NPR and PBS does not restore the more than $1 billion that public stations lost last summer.
A federal district court judge this week ruled that President Trump’s executive order to defund NPR and PBS violated the broadcasters’ First Amendment rights. He found it to be “unlawful and unenforceable.”
“In his ruling, Judge Randolph D. Moss of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said ‘the First Amendment draws a line, which the government may not cross, at efforts to use government power – including the power of the purse – ‘to punish or suppress disfavored expression’ by others,’ ” according to an NPR report.
KSMU and Ozarks Public Television together lost $1.3 million per year when Congress voted last summer to rescind funding, a decision that ultimately led to the dismantling of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Ozarks Public Broadcasting General Manager Rachel Knight said President Trump last May issued the executive order to try to prevent federal government departments or agencies from giving funds to NPR or PBS. She called it “sort of a first attempt to defund the public media system, and that was immediately challenged in court.” Later that year, the president sent the recission request to Congress, which it passed and the president signed. “So, the funding was removed through that mechanism,” she said, “and that remains in place.
Since then, OPB supporters have stepped up to help fill the gap, and that’s made up for the loss in the first year, according to Knight. “But it’s important for people to know that what we lost was $1.3 million annually.”
She said she’s grateful for the community support that has helped cover expenses in the first year, but she said that support must continue. OPB has made significant cuts to its already tight budget, so the gap going forward won’t be as large, but Knight said, “it will require kind of sustained increased fundraising from our community to ensure the stations can continue operating.”
Listener contributions are extremely important for public media, according to Knight. “The stations that are able to survive this transition and thrive are the ones that communities step up to support,” she said.
While she’s “very grateful” for the community’s support thus far, she said, “we need folks to be engaged for the long term.”
Even though the $1.1 billion for public media that was lost by the recission vote won’t return anytime soon, if at all, Knight said this week’s ruling matters. There are other, much smaller pots of money that flow into the public media system through educational grants or infrastructure funding, she said, “and this executive order created a real lack of clarity around whether public media could accept funds from these other sources.” The ruling provides clarity on that, according to Knight. While there’s nothing in the pipeline for OPB for educational grants due to the ruling, the stations could see Federal Emergency Management Agency funding return to harden emergency alert infrastructure.
And Knight called this week’s ruling a win for First Amendment rights. “So, essentially what this is saying is like, the government cannot use federal funding to suppress viewpoints that it does not like, and this is a really important case that affirms those First Amendment protections.”
