- Defunding by Congress led to the agency's eventual shutdown decision.
- Agency leaders emphasize protecting public media's integrity through dissolution of the agency.
- Trump's administration accused NPR and PBS of having a liberal bias.
Leaders of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting voted on Monday to dissolve the organization that has been around for over 50 years.
The CPB is a private agency that has distributed funding to NPR, PBS, and hundreds of local public television and radio stations across the country since it was created in 1967, per The Associated Press.
Since Congress acted to defund CPB’s operations last summer, the agency has been winding down. On Monday, the board of directors voted to shut it down completely instead of keeping it running as a shell.
“CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks,” said Patricia Harrison, the organization’s president and CEO, in a statement.
For years, Republicans have accused public broadcasting’s news programming of carrying a left-wing bias, but those criticisms weren’t turned into action until the second Trump administration.
Ruby Calvert, head of CPB’s board of directors, called the federal defunding of public media “devastating.”
“Even at this moment, I am convinced that public media will survive, and that a new Congress will address public media’s role in our country because it is critical to our children’s education, our history, culture and democracy to do so,” Calvert said, according to the CPB’s statement.
The CPB was providing financial support to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting in order to preserve historic content. It has also worked with the University of Maryland to preserve its own records.
“For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans — regardless of geography, income, or background — had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling,” Harrison said in a statement.
How did we get here?
In July, Congress passed a package of funding cuts that stripped CPB of more than $1 billion in funding. CPB was created in 1967 by Congress to help support over 1,500 local radio and television stations across the U.S., per The New York Times.
CPB also helped fund popular programs such as “Sesame Street.”
In August, the board of directors began winding down the agency’s operations.
After the CPB lost its federal funding, the corporation’s executives discussed keeping the organization alive but in hibernation, in case Congress eventually voted to restore the federal funds.
In Monday’s statement, the agency said that keeping it dormant could result in “political manipulation or misuse” and threaten the life of public media, per The New York Times.
The organization’s leaders added that without the financial resources to fulfill its responsibilities, keeping the corporation as a nonfunctional entity wouldn’t serve the public interest or advance public media, according to NBC News.
In a statement made on Monday, the CPB said it would be distributing all its remaining funds.
Only a portion of the funding for public broadcasting stations around the country came from the CPB’s federal funding, and after those funds were lost, donations from listeners and philanthropists have increased. It is unclear how long the increased support of these stations will last.
Trump and his right-wing allies have criticized PBS and NPR for years. Earlier this year, the president sent a memo to Congress, telling them to cut the CPB’s funding.
In July, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “Any Republican that votes to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or Endorsement.”