The Trump Administration has announced its intention to withdraw over $1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the organization that supports public broadcasting in the United States in the form of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).
Although federal funding makes up only a small portion of the overall budgets for these organizations—a combination of private donations, corporate sponsorship, state financing makes up a larger part—the funding is vital for public television and radio in smaller local markets where public or corporate support is difficult to obtain. The cuts would likely kill off those smaller stations and weaken those in larger markets.
In effect, the last traces of public media would disappear from large sections of the United States, leaving them entirely in the hands of corporate media.
This attack on U.S. public media is perhaps the least surprising news imaginable. When I was interviewed last month here in Sweden after Trump effectively shut down Voice of America (VOA), I was asked what could be next on the Republican media agenda. I didn’t hesitate in my response: next would be the de-funding of the nation's public broadcasting system. To me, it wasn’t a question of if…but when.
In its classic form, public service broadcasting of the type we have here in Europe treats the inhabitants of the country not as potential consumers, but as actual citizens.
The threat to kill public broadcasting in the U.S. is not the same as the killing of Voice of America. Through stations such as Radio Free Europe, VOA had always had been the mouthpiece of the U.S. state. It was part of global U.S. soft power, promoting the nation's foreign policy and economic interests. It was anything but objective, independent journalism.
PBS and NPR, on the other hand, are something entirely different. They represent an alternative model for how media in the U.S. could be…or, at least, could have been. Created in 1967 under President Lyndon Johnson, and decades after private media giants ABC, NBC, and CBS had been allowed to take near-complete control over U.S. broadcasting, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was meant to provide U.S. citizens with a non-commercial media alternative.
Unlike their European counterparts, however, which began as well-financed monopolies in the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. public media were born weak. They were never meant to challenge the power of U.S. corporate media.
For the past half century, U.S. public broadcasting has existed at the margins of the national media ecosystem, producing high-quality educational programming and decent news that attracted a predominantly well-educated, urban audience. Low levels of federal funding meant that U.S. public broadcasting, again unlike European counterparts such as Sweden's SVT or the UK's BBC, was forced to take money from corporations in order to survive. When I lived in the U.S., PBS took so much "sponsorship” money from oil companies such as ExxonMobil that it was jokingly referred to as the “Petroleum Broadcasting System.”
So, why kill off the last remnants of a media system that attracts only a tiny fraction of the U.S. audience and gets the majority of its financing from non-government sources?
Simple. Because of what it represents.
The Trump administration and its oligarchy of advisors have as their central goal to destroy or undermine any and all institutions in U.S. society that either suggest an alternative to private, corporate control or provide a counter-argument to the myth that the “free market” is the best option for structuring U.S. society: from education to health care to media. The very idea that the state could in any way contribute to the greater good is horrific and must be crushed.
In its classic form, public service broadcasting of the type we have here in Europe treats the inhabitants of the country not as potential consumers, but as actual citizens. In modern societies, absolutely soaked in the logic of consumption, there needs to be at least a few spaces where your value is seen as inherent and not related to how much disposable income you have.
Here in Sweden, for example, that includes not just public broadcasting, but things like universal healthcare and university education. The logic is simple: being informed, being healthy and being educated should not be privileges restricted to those who can afford it. And, a well-informed, healthy and well-educated society benefits everyone.
Public broadcasting in the U.S. is in need of serious reform. And, public broadcasting in Europe isn’t perfect. But, despite their various flaws, their value can be found not only in what they produce in terms of content, but in what they tell people about how society can be structured. That working alternatives exist and can co-exist. That it’s possible to have a free market, but at the same time recognize there are some elements of society too important to be left to the mercies of corporations, billionaires, and profit margins.
For people like Trump and Musk, these non-commercial spaces of citizenship are viruses eating away at profits. But they aren’t the virus.
"NPR and PBS aren't perfect. But they, and more importantly the hundreds of public stations across the country, are vital to a healthy democracy," wrote on journalist.
A leader of the advocacy group Free Press Action Fund, the 501(c)(4) arm of Free Press, on Monday denounced a plan by the Trump administration to reportedly ask Congress to take back more than $1 billion in already approved funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the congressionally funded and created company that supports public media in the United States.
The request to yank CPB funding, which would impact the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS),National Public Radio (NPR), and their local member stations across the country, will be part of a broader package to rescind already approved funds and is also expected to impact funding for the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the U.S. Institute of Peace, according to Politico, which cited an anonymous White House official.
Congress had already approved $535 million in federal spending for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. If Congress agrees to the White House's request, the decrease in funding will tally about two years worth of CPB funding, nearly all of which goes to public broadcasters such as NPR and PBS, according to The New York Times.
The Trump administration plans to submit a rescission request in the coming weeks, according to the Times, which anonymously quoted two people briefed on the plan. According to Politico, to approve the request, the ask would need to clear the House and the Senate, which are both Republican-controlled, by only a simple majority vote.
Free Press Action co-CEO Jessica J. González, reacted to the news in a statement Monday: "The Trump White House may not like public media—and that's no surprise given the president's frequent attacks on any journalism that holds his administration and its cabal of billionaires accountable. But Trump's views are out of step with those of the majority of Americans, who overwhelmingly support federal funding for public media."
According to a Pew Research Center survey from March, Americans are more likely to support rather than oppose continued federal funding for NPR and PBS. Twenty-four percent of U.S. adults say Congress should remove government funding from NPR and PBS, 43% say NPR and PBS should continue receiving federal funding, and 33% say they are unsure.
"President Trump and his loyalists want to take another cherished public service away from the American people," González said. "We will ensure that members of Congress will hear a similar outcry in the coming days and weeks, and encourage people to, in-person, tell their elected representatives and senators to support public broadcasting as they return home to face constituents over spring recess."
According to the Times, PBS gets about 15% of its budget from federal funding. NPR has said only 1% of its funding comes from federal sources, but its individual member stations would be more heavily impacted by a reduction in CPB funding.
PBS and NPR have been in the Trump administration's crosshairs for months. In late January, the Republican Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr launched an investigation into NPR and PBS. In March, leaders from NPR and PBS were summoned to testify before the U.S. House Oversight Committee's Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee. Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who chairs that subcommittee, concluded the hearing by saying that Republicans on the committee will call for the "complete and total defund and dismantling of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting."
On Monday, the Trump White House published an article arguing that taxpayers have been subsidizing NPR and PBS even though the they have been spreading "radical, woke propaganda disguised as 'news.'" The release included examples of the alleged propaganda.
Former "Here and Now" co-host Jeremy Hobson reacted with dismay on Monday to the news that Trump wants to yank funding for the CPB.
"As someone who has worked in public broadcasting since I was a kid, and has always tried to be factual and fair, this makes me sad. NPR and PBS aren't perfect. But they, and more importantly the hundreds of public stations across the country, are vital to a healthy democracy," he wrote on X.
Just like Tom Paine, and until the very end, Bob saw hope in the people who were rising up and demanding a future defined by their humanity, as opposed to corporate power.
Bob McChesney, who died on Tuesday at the age of 72, first introduced himself to me almost 30 years ago, on the set of a public television news program in Madison, Wisconsin. Bob was a distinguished University of Wisconsin professor who was gaining an international reputation for his groundbreaking analysis of the threat to democracy posed by corporate control of media. Raising his arguments in books, speeches, and frequent C-Span appearances, he was well on his way to becoming one of the great public intellectuals of his time. I was a young newspaper editor who had earned a slim measure of recognition for my advocacy on behalf of investigative journalism and press freedom.
The program was framed as a debate about the future of journalism. Bob was positioned as the doomsayer, warning about how media consolidation was killing journalism. I was expected to counter that the future was actually bright. As it turned out, neither of us wanted to follow the script. Instead of arguing, we both agreed that profit-obsessed corporations were destroying American journalism, and that this destruction would pose an ever more serious threat to American democracy.
It wasn’t a particularly satisfying exchange for our hosts that evening, but it was the beginning of a collaboration that would span three decades. Bob and I cowrote half a dozen books and dozens of articles, joined Bill Moyers for a series of PBS interviews that would examine threats to journalism and democracy, and did our best, with more allies than we could have imagined in those early days, to stir up a reform movement that recognized the crisis and endeavored to set the stage for media that serves people rather than corporate bottom lines.
Bob, with his remarkable intellect and even more remarkable capacity for communicating his vision of a media that served citizens rather than corporations, was always the driving force. His research and his insatiable curiosity helped him to see the future more clearly than any scholar of his generation, with such precision that Moyers would compare him to both Tom Paine and Paul Revere. As new political and societal challenges arose in an ever more chaotic moment for America and the world, Bob explained how they should be understood as fresh manifestations of an ancient danger: the concentration of power—in this case, the power of the media, in the hands of old-media CEOs and new tech oligarchs, all of whom cared more about commercial and entertainment strategies than democratic and social values.
Bob, with his remarkable intellect and even more remarkable capacity for communicating his vision of a media that served citizens rather than corporations, was always the driving force.
Bob took the “public” part of “public intellectual” seriously. You knew he wanted to swing into action when he’d say, “We need to put our heads together…” That was his call to write another book, organize another national conference on media reform, or rally another movement to defend the speak-truth-to-power journalism that the founders of the American experiment understood as the only sure footing for representative democracy.
Bob kept issuing the call, even as a series of health challenges slowed him down. He was still doing so a few days before his death following a year-long fight with cancer. His was a life fulfilled in the best sense of the word. He died a happy man, holding the hand of his beloved wife, Inger Stole, and reflecting on time spent with his daughters, Amy and Lucy.
Our last conversations recalled friends and colleagues who had answered his calls to save journalism and renew our democracy: Craig Aaron, Victor Pickard, Josh Silver, Kimberly Longey, Russell Newman, Derek Turner, Ben Scott, Joe Torres, Tim Karr, Matt Wood, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Michael Copps, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and too many others to name. Bob loved scholarship, loved activism, and loved collaborating with people who made connections between the two—sharing writing credits with former students at UW-Madison and later at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with unions of media workers and, perhaps above all, strategizing with the team at Free Press, the media reform group he co-founded in 2003 to advocate for diversity in ownership, robust pubic media, net neutrality and always, always, democracy. Bob was frustrated by the oligarchical overreach now on display in the Washington of Donald Trump and Elon Musk—a development he had predicted with eerie accuracy. Yet he remained undaunted to the end, still spinning out fresh ideas for upending corporate control of media, getting Big Money out of politics, and ushering in a new era of freewheeling debate and popular democracy.
That was the essence of Robert Waterman McChesney. He was a globally respected communications scholar who was wholly welcome in the halls of academia, yet he was never satisfied working within an ivory tower. He was a rigorous researcher into the worst abuse of corporate and political establishments. Yet he refused to surrender his faith in the ability of people-powered movements to upend monarchs and oligarchs and, in the words of Tom Paine, “begin the world over again.”
Bob regarded Paine—the immigrant pamphleteer who rallied the people of his adopted country to dismiss King George III and the colonial enterprise, and who spent the rest of his life demanding that this new United States live up to the egalitarian promise of liberty and justice for all—as the essential founder of the American project. Like Paine, Bob believed that with information and encouragement, grassroots activists could carry Paine’s legacy forward into the 21st century. Countless people heeded his call.
“Bob McChesney was a brilliant scholar whose ideas and insights reached far beyond the classroom. He opened the eyes of a generation of academics, journalists, politicians, and activists—including mine—to how media structures and policies shape our broader politics and possibilities,” explained Craig Aaron, the co-CEO of Free Press. “While McChesney spent much of his career charting the problems of the media and the critical junctures that created our current crises, he believed fundamentally in the public’s ability to solve those problems and build a media system that serves people’s needs and sustains democracy. His ideas were bold and transformative, and he had little patience for tinkering around the edges. Rather than fighting over Washington’s narrow vision of what was possible, he always said—and Bob loved a good sports metaphor—that we needed to throw the puck down to the other end of the ice.”
Bob examined the relationship between media and democracy with scholarly seriousness. Yet he coupled that seriousness with a penchant not just for sports metaphors and references to rock-and-roll songs but spot-on cinematic analogies, which invited Americans to recognize the crisis. Speaking to Moyers about how America’s media policies were forged behind closed doors in Washington, by lobbyists and politicians, Bob succintly defined that process: “Pure corruption. This is really where Big Money crowds everything else out. The way to understand how policymakers make media in this country [is to watch] a great movie: The Godfather: Part II. There’s a scene early in the movie where all the American gangsters are on top of a hotel roof in Havana. It’s a classic scene featuring Hyman Roth and Michael Corleone. They’ve got a cake being wheeled out to them. And Hyman Roth is cutting up slices of the cake. The cake’s got the outline of Cuba on it, and they’re giving each gangster a slice of Cuba. And while he’s doing this, Hyman Roth’s [talking about how they can work with government to carve up Cuba in ways that make them all rich]. That’s how media policy is made in the United States.”
The accessibility of his speech—the way it turned something as potentially obscure as communications policy into a readily understandable issue—was Bob’s genius. He wanted to upend the money power and tip the balance toward systems that would empower working-class people—as opposed to billionaires—to shape the future of media: with strategies for giving citizens democracy vouchers that they could use to support independent media, and a host of other remedies. Like his friend Bernie Sanders, Bob believed it essential to have a media free enough from corporate influence to speak truth to economic and political power, boldly critique the excesses of capitalism, and raise the alarm against creeping oligarchy.
The accessibility of his speech—the way it turned something as potentially obscure as communications policy into a readily understandable issue—was Bob’s genius.
This was the premise that underpinned an academic career that saw Bob author or co-author almost 30 books—including the groundbreaking Rich Media, Poor Democracy, his 1999 manifesto on how the decay of journalism would lead to a collapse of democratic norms, and 2013’s Digital Disconnect, his essential assessment of the danger of allowing Silicon Valley billionaires to define online communications. Many of the same themes ran through examinations of the shuttering of newspapers by corporate conglomerates that left communities as news deserts, of the destructive influence of political advertising on the national discourse, and of the failure of political and media elites to bring citizens into debates about automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Noam Chomsky, whose own work on the media’s manufacturing of consent had profoundly influenced Bob’s scholarship (along with that of Ben Bagdikian, the journalist who wrote The Media Democracy), became Bob’s most ardent champion. “Robert McChesney’s work has been of extraordinary importance,” explained Chomsky. “It should be read with care and concern by people who care about freedom and basic rights.”
Bob’s research—and the books, lectures and activism that extended from it—earned him Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize, the Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award, the Newspaper Guild’s Herbert Block Freedom Award (for “having done more for press freedom than anyone”), and the International Communications Association’s C. Edwin Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy. It also gained him a hearing from thoughtful members of Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission. Even if they did not always follow his advice, progressive officials recognized the wisdom of his analysis and incorporated it into their work. That’s one of the reasons why, in 2009, Utne Reader named Bob as one of “50 visionaries who are changing your world.” Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, simply referred to Bob as “the conscience of the media in America.”
Bob’s last words to me, though they were a bit more labored due to his illness, were a repeat of his constant call to action: “Let’s put our heads together…”
Lewis wrote those words the better part of two decades ago. Bob remained that conscience, even as “media deserts” spread their arid path across America, as disinformation and misinformation overwhelmed the Internet, as propagandistic advertising warped our politics and as democratic expectations were undermined. It was all as he had predicted. But he was not inclined toward “I told you so” rejoinders.
Rather, Bob kept the faith that popular movements would push back against the decay, and the chaos, just as they had in the Progressive Era, the New Deal years, and the 1960s. “You’ve got to look in the mirror and understand that, if you act like change for the better is impossible, you guarantee it will be impossible,” he would say. “That’s the one decision each individual faces.”
Bob looked in that mirror confidently and courageously throughout a life of scholarship and activism. Some of our last conversations were about the huge crowds Bernie Sanders was attracting for his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, and the thousands of Americans who have been showing up to challenge Republican members of Congress at town hall meetings. Just like Tom Paine, Bob saw fresh hope in the people who were rising up and demanding a future defined by their humanity, as opposed to corporate power. This might, he suggested, be the opening for a new surge in activism for journalism and democracy, a surge that might “begin the world over again.”
Bob’s last words to me, though they were a bit more labored due to his illness, were a repeat of his constant call to action: “Let’s put our heads together…” In other words, let’s make a plan. Let’s do something. That was his charge to those of us who cherished Bob McChesney’s mission and his spirit. We honor him best by accepting it.
