In secret, behind locked gates, our Nation's Oldest City dumped a landfill in a lake (Old City Reservoir), while emitting sewage in our rivers and salt marsh. Organized citizens exposed and defeated pollution, racism and cronyism. We elected a new Mayor. We're transforming our City -- advanced citizenship. Ask questions. Make disclosures. Demand answers. Be involved. Expect democracy. Report and expose corruption. Smile! Help enact a St. Augustine National Park and Seashore. We shall overcome!
Saturday, May 03, 2025
Public media ready to fight ‘unlawful’ Trump order defunding PBS, NPR. (WaPo, May 2, 2025)
When President Gerald R. Ford vetoed the Freedom of Information Act in 1974, Congress overrode the veto. The veto was urged by three ambitious young aides -- DONALD RUMSFELD, ANTONIN SCALIA and RICHARD CHENEY, defenders of government secrecy nad presidential power. Ford's veto of the Freedom of Information was swiftly overridden by Congress. I was a seventeen year old freshman intern in Senator Ted Kennedy's office, and I was honored to take the Senate subway to the Capitol, walk past the painting of Lincoln signing the Emancipation proclamation and deliver mimeographed legal-size copies of Senator Ted Kennedy's floor statement to three (3) U.S. Senate press galleries (newspaper, print and TV/radio). Senator Kennedy's first-rate staff, headed by Rhodes Scholar Wm. Carey Parker, helped him combat government secrecy and adopt FOIA into law. See my November 8, 2014 St. Augustine Record guest column, "Are we slaves to government secrecy?"
America would not be America without the Freedom of Information Act.
Likewise, America would not be America without NPR and PBS.
We, the People are both alarmed and laughing at DJT's impotent attack on public media, which shows that he is "typical of his type," as my grandmother would say. DJT is the narcissistic nasty pupil of feculent fascist lawyer ROY MARCUS COHN, Senator JOSEPH R. McCARTHY's brain thug. President DJT is not unlike JOE McCARTHY on steroids, a bitchy 'ole queen in fatman CEO drag. What a moronic mean-spirited miscreant!
Misguided Dull Republicans love to attack PBS and NPR. Since Presidents Nixon and Ford, they've always lost. Their overbearing, overweening desire to censor free speech shows that they have contempt for the First and Ninth Amendments.
We reject all of their works and pomps as unAmerican -- impotent rage and performative perfidy. DJT and his Wrecking Crew of corporate whores, led by ethically-impaired ex-lobbyist for Florida casinos, Chief of Staff SUSAN SUMMERALL WILES, are untethered to truth, unprincipled losers.
As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "Secrecy is for losers -- for people who don't understand the value of the information." Support WJCT. Reject Trumpery, flummery, dupery and nincompoopery. From The Washington Post:
Public media ready to fight ‘unlawful’ Trump order defunding PBS, NPR
Legal scholars say the executive order may exceed presidential authority and violate First Amendment, while local stations fear impact on communities.
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People rally outside the NPR headquarters in Washington on March 26 to demand Congress protect funding for public broadcasters. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end federal funding for NPR and PBS — because of news coverage he called “biased and partisan” — triggered a fierce backlash from public broadcasters that appears poised to expand the White House’s larger legal battleground with the media industry.
Issued Thursday night, the order instructs the congressionally chartered Corporation for Public Broadcasting to cut off direct funding to the venerable public media giants — producers of long-running news shows such as “All Things Considered” and “PBS NewsHour” — as well as any grants to local stations that might underwrite the national broadcasters’ programming.
PBS president and chief executive Paula Kerger said her organization was “exploring all options” to assist its member stations and challenge what she called a “blatantly unlawful” move that “threatens our ability to serve the American public with educational programming, as we have for the past 50-plus years.” NPR vowed to “vigorously defend our right to provide essential news, information and life-saving services to the American public.”
Some legal scholars agreed that the Trump order may exceed the president’s actual powers over CPB — a nonprofit corporation that receives and distributes federal funds but is not a federal agency — and violate the First Amendment.
Meanwhile, a move that seems aimed at media coverage of national politics left local public stations perplexed by how cuts of this magnitude would affect their ability to serve their audiences. Corporate consolidation and shifts in the advertising business have shuttered or shrank many commercial stations; now, some public stations are the primary local news source in their communities.
The staff of WWNO 89.5 in New Orleans has gone “all hands on deck” to cover natural disasters, such as Hurricane Ida in 2021, said general manager Paul Maassen. When people lose power, they may not be able to watch TV or scroll their phones for news, so radio “becomes the de facto way to reach people,” he said in a phone interview Friday.
But a loss of public funding would “really hinder our ability to do that,” Maassen said. “We’ll have to cut back in some areas to continue to operate. We’d like to be able to continue those kinds of services, but this is going to make it that much tougher to do.”
The news landed as WILL-AM 580 in Urbana, Illinois, wrapped up its three-day pledge drive. “You might have heard about the executive order by the Trump administration to eliminate federal funding for public media,” producer Steve Morck told listeners Friday morning, without breaking his chipper cadence.
He noted that AM 580 and its affiliated Illinois Public Media stations had received $1.5 million in federal funding this fiscal year: “Losing that money would compromise the essential service we provide to our community, to you.”
In March, lawmakers grilled the heads of each network over alleged bias at a congressional hearing led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia). Both executives rejected the accusation of partisan slant. Kerger touted the “160 million television and online viewers” that she said “explore the world through our trusted content.” NPR asserted Friday that its “editorial practices and decision-making are independent and free from outside influence.”
The legal wrangling is already underway. On Tuesday, CPB sued the Trump administration after it sent a letter to three board members attempting to terminate their positions, arguing that the White House has no authority over the private corporation.
Leonard M. Niehoff, a First Amendment and media law professor at the University of Michigan Law School, agrees.
“Congress controls the federal purse strings and has approved a budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” he said. “The president does not have the power to undo that budget allocation.”
Created by Congress in 1967, CPB receives about $535 million in federal funds each fiscal year, which it mostly spends on grants to hundreds of stations nationwide. The stations use the grants to create their own programs or buy shows from national programmers like NPR or PBS.
CPB contributes about 1 percent of NPR’s budget and funds a portion of the hundreds of stations that license NPR content, according to the broadcaster. PBS is owned by its local member stations, which are usually partially funded by CPB grants. About 16 percent of its funding comes from the government, the service told The Washington Post in January.
On average, CPB says it provides about one-eighth of local public-station funding, with the remainder coming from alternative sources such as donations and sponsorships.
Niehoff and other legal scholars argue that the Trump executive order is also flawed in specifically criticizing the perceived points of view presented on PBS and NPR.
In a 1984 case, FCC v. League of Women Voters, the Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot condition federal funding on a station’s editorial decisions, according to David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. Cole noted that “Trump’s executive order appears to do the same thing here.”
The order may also run counter to Congress’s “detailed instructions about how the funds the CPB receives are to be distributed,” said Richard H. Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at New York University. “The president can’t order the CPB to act in a way that would be unlawful.”
Local NPR stations nationwide have been sounding the alarm on potential cuts for weeks. South Dakota Public Broadcasting, like other NPR affiliates, created a page on its website to explain to readers how its stations are funded. Blue Ridge Public Radio (BPR), which reported extensively on Hurricane Helene’s devastation of North Carolina in September 2024, has been especially vocal about the importance of local news coverage.
The organization warned of an effort “to destabilize the very foundation of public broadcasting,” in an April statement as talk of CPB cuts circulated. “We shudder to imagine our devastating loss of BPR’s emergency news coverage when it is needed most.”
While the Trump measure appears targeted specifically at PBS and NPR, its ripple effects through the web of local affiliate stations could undermine less famous public media outlets.
“It’s going to make it difficult for a show like mine to survive,” said Jeremy Hobson, host of a independent news talk show funded by the more than 400 local public stations nationwide that air it. As the name suggests, “The Middle” aspires to elevate the voices of people in the middle of the country and “who want to meet in the middle to find solutions to the biggest issues” facing the United States.
“I’m just trying to bring in enough money to make it happen,” Hobson told The Post, “and if a huge part of that money is now in jeopardy because these stations are just going to be trying to figure out what they can do, that’s difficult for a show like this.”
As the CPB board met Friday, some of the sharpest criticism of Trump’s order came from one of his own appointees, Ruby Calvert, who occupies one of the board’s seats reserved for a Republican and currently serves as its chair. She invoked her family’s conservative bona fides, including her brother, a former leader in the Wyoming state legislature.
“Like him, I’m very fiscally conservative and philosophically conservative,” she said, “and I want to note that there are many conservatives who support public media.”
She continued: “I know firsthand the valuable services that public media provides to all Americans involved in urban and rural communities. And my role on the CPB Board is shaped by my Western values, my Republican values, and my fiduciary.”
On Capitol Hill, reaction fell along partisan lines.
“Good Riddance!” wrote Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-New York), who promised to back the president with legislation she dubbed “the Defund Government Sponsored Propaganda Act.”
“NPR and PBS have turned into taxpayer-funded echo chambers for the Left. President Trump is right to pull the plug,” wrote Rep. Ralph Norman (R-South Carolina). “If these networks want to push bias, they can do it without your money!!”
“So many of us know Mr. Rogers’s kind smile and guiding words. His legacy was possible because of PBS,” said Sen. Andy Kim (D-New Jersey). “Choosing to dismantle this legacy is a shameful, shortsighted betrayal of the public good.”
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-New York) accused Trump of “going after Sesame Street, emergency alert systems, rural stations and educational shows for kids.” He added: “This is another attack on free speech and accountability.”
Andrew Jeong and Sarah Ellison contributed to this report.
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