The NPR and Colorado Stations That Took Trump to Court

“It isn’t just an affront to localism. It’s an attempt to reengineer thought.”

If the fire comes to the neighborhood and it doesn’t burn your house down, that doesn’t mean that the neighborhood wasn’t totally devastated,” Stewart Vanderwilt, the CEO of Colorado Public Radio (CPR), told me. Nationally, the landscape of public radio has been charred since last July, when Congress stripped more than a billion dollars from public broadcasting, at the behest of Donald Trump, who released an executive order characterizing NPR and PBS as “biased.” NPR prepared to file suit against the Trump administration in federal court, arguing that the stoppage of funds, via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, inhibited freedom of speech, in the form of viewpoint discrimination. CPR and two other Colorado stations, Aspen Public Radio and KSUT, opted in as coplaintiffs—which they were uniquely positioned to do, since they represent a breadth of listener demographics and operate independently of any risk-averse university board of regents. The case went into arguments in December; by January, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it would dissolve—casting the stakes of the case into sharp relief. This week, when highlighting supposed accomplishments of his first year in office, Trump mentioned defunding NPR and PBS: “I guess I heard they’re closed up,” he said. It has been a “long slog,” Katie Townsend, a lawyer at Gibson Dunn, which is representing NPR, told me.