Trump Attacks On Public Media Blocked By Judge (But It’s Too Little, Too Late)

A federal judge has ruled that President Trump’s executive order last year defunding PBS and NPR violated the First Amendment, and has issued a permanent injunction insisting that executive branch agencies cannot enforce it. But the ruling may come too late to save what was left of U.S public media.

The original executive order resulted in Congress obliterating the entire Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) budget of $1.1 billion for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. With no money left to function, the CPB voted to dissolve itself last January. PBS noted this week that the Trump EO resulted in mass layoffs and the destruction of kids’ programming before Congress even acted:

“Trump’s executive order immediately cut millions of dollars in funding from the Education Department to PBS for its children’s programming, forcing the system to lay off one-third of the PBS Kids staff.”

In his ruling, US District Court for DC Judge Randolph Moss highlighted how the Trump administration completely made up any justification for the cuts, ignoring the First Amendment and violating the law:

“The Federal Defendants fail to cite a single case in which a court has ever upheld a statute or executive action that bars a particular person or entity from participating in any federally funded activity based on that person or entity’s past speech. Perhaps that is because neither Congress nor any prior Administration has ever attempted something so extreme, or perhaps it is because any prior effort to do so has failed. But the most obvious reason is that any such individual ban, based on past speech, would almost certainly constitute the type of retaliation that the First Amendment prohibits.”

NPR CEO Katherine Maher lauded the ruling, even though it comes too late to save much of U.S. public media:

“Today’s ruling is a decisive affirmation of the rights of a free and independent press — and a win for NPR, our network of stations, and our tens of millions of listeners nationwide. The court made clear that the government cannot use funding as a lever to influence or penalize the press, whether as a national news service or a local newsroom.”

As we’ve noted previously, right wingers and authoritarians loathe public broadcasting because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the often perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based corporate media. A media, if you hadn’t noticed, that is easily bullied, cowed, and manipulated by bad actors looking to normalize, downplay, or validate no limit of terrible bullshit (see: CBS, Washington Post, the New York Times, and countless others).

One of the lasting harms of the cuts will be to already struggling local U.S. broadcasting stations. While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributed over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations.

Many of those news stations operated in places where quality, local news is difficult if not impossible to find. Local papers have usually either closed or been purchased by soulless hedge funds that are buying papers, stripping them for parts, and hollowing out and homogenizing their coverage. Or “local news” is dominated by right wing propaganda pseudo-journalism broadcasters like Sinclair Broadcasting.

U.S. “public broadcasting” was already a shadow of the true concept after years of being demonized and defunded by the right wing, so even calling hybrid organizations like NPR “public” is a misnomer. Still, the underlying concept remains an ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots and corporations alike, because they’re very aware that if implemented properly, public media can provide a challenge to their war on informed consensus (I’d recommend Penn State professor Victor Pickard’s writing on the subject).