NPR and PBS Funding Cuts Were Decades in the Making

They tried under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. Newt Gingrich gave it a go when he controlled the House, and Bob Dole did, too, when he held power in the Senate.

But for five decades, Republicans failed time and again to choke off federal funding for public broadcasting. Some were afraid of being accused of avicide (for “killing Big Bird” of “Sesame Street”), while others appreciated their local public stations (and the airtime they personally received) — always stopping the party short of turning their threats against PBS and NPR into law.

That they have finally been able to do it now, voting on Friday to claw back $1.1 billion in public broadcasting funds, on one level speaks to the power of President Trump. His threat to support primary challenges against any Republicans who might try to block the cuts all but guaranteed they would go through this time.

Mr. Markey argued that Mr. Trump’s moves against PBS and NPR were part of the administration’s larger campaign to undermine mainstream journalism. It is in line, he said, with the president’s lawsuits against the major broadcast networks and suggestions that the Federal Communications Commission might punish their stations over accusations of liberal bias.

“It’s all part of a plan to intimidate and control the media and how they cover his presidency,” he said.

But the willingness of congressional Republicans to vote for a complete cutoff of federal money to public broadcasting also says a lot about sweeping changes in media, and views of mainstream journalism, since Congress passed the 1967 law that led to the creation of PBS and NPR.

The ascendant ideology of the Trump era is the opposite of the one that spawned the modern public broadcasting system.

Its creation was spurred along by the declaration of Newton N. Minow, chairman of the F.C.C. during the Kennedy administration, that the competition for ratings and ad dollars had turned television into a “vast wasteland” of “game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder.” He beseeched broadcasters to “make a conscientious, good-faith effort to serve the public interest” with higher-quality fare.

His speech was followed by an influential study on “educational television” from the Carnegie Corporation. It concluded that the federal government should finance a system of stations to produce programming that was “of human interest and importance” without regard for the free-market incentives of ratings or ad revenue. The Johnson administration then did just that, in line with its Great Society program.

No sooner was the system established than the Nixon White House attacked PBS for being packed with correspondents and guests who were “anti-administration” or “Kennedy sycophants,” as a Nixon aide, Patrick Buchanan, put it at the time.

Nixon was so “disturbed” that PBS had started a new national news show with the hosts Robert MacNeil and Sander Vanocur — someone on his enemies list — that he requested “all funds for public broadcasting be cut immediately,” White House memos released years later showed.

His administration didn’t follow through. Instead, it toggled between pressure on the independent Corporation for Public Broadcasting to do its bidding and a plan to push more of its budget down to local stations — which, Nixon aides believed, tended to have more conservative management than the national networks run out of New York and Washington.

But in the years that followed, the strength of local public television and radio stations in conservative states was often what saved the federal funding.

In 1995, Mr. Gingrich, then the House speaker, made one of the most aggressive moves since Nixon to “zero out” federal support for public media before he found it politically untenable.

“He was unpleasantly surprised that a lot of conservative politicians from red states resisted,” said Steve Oney, the author of “On Air,” a book on the history of NPR. “In their communities, their public radio and television stations were seen as assets.”

Now, though, Mr. Oney said, “people get their news from anywhere they want, so there’s not the critical-mass support back in red-state America for public broadcasting.”

The explosion in media sources is what Capitol Hill Republicans and their allies point to in justifying this year’s rescission package.

“With cellphones and internet and all that, I think the ability of people almost any part of the country to access all kinds of information sources is, you know, greater than it’s ever been,” Jeff Miron, a vice president of Cato Institute, a libertarian research group, said this week — on none other than NPR.

Public media supporters say the commercial forces that made television a “vast wasteland” still exist in an era of social media algorithms that reward content that attracts the most likes and shares. That’s rarely the hyperlocal issues or deep policy discussions that are the bread and butter of local public television and radio stations, which have their own locally produced programs that run alongside the national shows of PBS and NPR.

Bill Goodman, a former longtime host of “Kentucky Tonight” on KET-TV, which broadcasts statewide from Lexington, recalled watching a recent episode of his old show that devoted nearly an entire hour to an in-depth conversation about Medicaid cuts. The guests engaged in reasoned and intricate arguments from opposite sides of the national debate.

“You don’t find that on commercial television,” he said.

As it happened, as the host of “Kentucky Tonight,” Mr. Goodman gave regular airtime to a citizen-activist, little known at the time, who was concerned with government spending: Dr. Rand Paul.

Mr. Paul, now a U.S. senator, has helped lead a libertarian-leaning revolution within the Republican Party that pushed greater distrust of government bureaucracy. Days before he voted for the cuts, he said that he wasn’t “an enemy of public TV,” but that the government needed to spend less.

But the cuts went a bit far for an earlier would-be slasher, Mr. Gingrich, who later became a supporter of public broadcasting despite his continuing concerns about bias. (He and his wife, Callista, have a documentary on PBS, “Journey to America With Newt and Callista Gingrich.”)

Mr. Gingrich said in an interview on Wednesday that congressional Republicans were now succeeding where he had failed because the perceived — and, in his view, worsening — liberal tilt on national NPR and PBS programs had finally cost them support.

“It’s much easier to mobilize the country to just say, ‘Enough,’” he said.

But he noted that those national networks had the financial wherewithal to live on without government support. He expressed sympathy for smaller stations that provided vital service in rural areas and that would feel the brunt of the hit.

“Those little local stations don’t have real assets,” Mr. Gingrich said, adding that “they ought to be separated out” from the larger cut.

That was not the prevailing view of his fellow party members voting on the package this week.

“If those stations can stick around and make it, I wish them the very, very best,” Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas said on CNN Thursday. But federal funding of public media, he said, was “one of the niceties we can do without.”