| By the end of this week, Congress may have voted to cut $1 billion from public radio and TV broadcasting, potentially decimating how rural communities get their news — and expanding President Donald Trump’s war on the media. Trump has made clear that these cuts are in large part because he thinks the coverage isn’t friendly enough to him. “If you go after these shows and companies just because you don’t like their coverage, that’s incredibly concerning,” said Tom Jones, a senior media writer with the journalism nonprofit Poynter and the author of the Poynter Report. “You’re moving toward ‘Let’s eliminate all media we don’t like’ and eventually you get to ‘Let’s just have state media.’ I know that seems hyperbolic, but that seems to be the playbook.” Here’s what’s going on. Republicans are trying to cut billions that Congress already approved This is separate from the tax package they passed earlier this month. That package will add trillions to the debt, and to help pay for it, Republicans are trying to cut $9 billion more of government spending that Congress previously approved. They are working to pass a controversial proposal to cut billions in foreign aid as well as money that goes to the nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has supported publicly funded news stations including NPR and PBS for decades. Republicans say it will help save money. (Which media experts say isn’t broadly true.) As he pressured Republicans to vote for it, Trump made clear in social media posts that defunding media was the main reason for this bill: “It is very important that all Republicans adhere to my Recissions Bill and, in particular, DEFUND THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING (PBS and NPR), which is worse than CNN & MSDNC put together.” “What we are talking about here is one-tenth of 1 percent of all federal spending,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said Thursday morning on the Senate floor. “But it’s a step in the right direction.” Opponents counter that it’s a drop in the bucket in paying for Trump’s tax cuts and is really more about pushing Trump’s ideological agenda. “The purported ‘savings’ of $9 billion from this package amounts to less than one-quarter of one percent … of the deficits added by the Big Ugly Bill,” the advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen declared. This bill, referred to as “rescissions” in Congress, narrowly passed the Senate early Thursday morning, with two Republicans voting against it alongside all Democrats. Now the House will try to pass it with just Republican votes by Friday. Congress hasn’t pulled back money it had already appropriated since 2018, and before that in 1992. Republicans are in essence using a parliamentary tool to undo with 51 votes what took 60 votes in the Senate to do in the first place, explained Molly Reynolds, a congressional budget expert with the Brookings Institution. “The administration and many congressional Republicans genuinely don’t want to spend this money,” she said. What loss of funding means for public broadcasting Without federal funds, local stations may go dark, Poynter reported. And especially in rural areas where public news is sometimes the only local news, that could mean that they can’t let people know about emergencies. As the Senate was debating the bill, three local Alaskan stations sent out an alert about a tsunami warning after a 7.3-magnitude earthquake hit off the coast. “Some colleagues claim they are targeting ‘radical leftist organizations’ with these cuts, but in Alaska, these are simply organizations dedicated to their communities,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) posted on social media as she voted against the bill. “Their response to today’s earthquake is a perfect example of the incredible public service these stations provide. They deliver local news, weather updates, and, yes, emergency alerts that save human lives.” After the deadly Texas floods earlier this month, in which local leaders failed to evacuate campers until it was too late, climate scientists told me that emergency warnings are especially important as a warming world brings more extreme weather. Trump is ratcheting up his war on the media in his second term Trump has spent his entire time in national politics denigrating and trying to degrade the media. In his second term, he’s transforming his words into actions. As he pushes for funding cuts to public media, the Trump administration is trying to fire Democratic board members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. His administration has opened investigations into ABC and NBC News. CBS News’s parent company settled a lawsuit Trump filed that media experts said was largely frivolous. So did ABC News. The president is controlling press access to him and blocked the Associated Press from certain White House events. He gutted the Voice of America and is having it instead air programs from the pro-Trump One America News. “The role of a free and independent press in a healthy democracy is under direct attack, with increasingly aggressive efforts to curtail and punish independent journalism,” New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned in a recent speech. As I wrote in a newsletter earlier this year, press freedom is freedom. Experts say this type of interference is a big step toward the government controlling the flow of information and, in an authoritarian state, much of the rest of society. “We’ve never had a time when a White House so brazenly and so ruthlessly decided it was going to decide who covers them,” Ron Fournier, a former Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, told The Washington Post’s Justine McDaniel earlier this year as Trump limited reporters’ access to him. “What we’re heading to here is, for the first time in the nation’s history, the White House being able to decide who covers the president up close. And that’s not good for anybody. We’re not starting down a slippery slope; we’re near the bottom of it already, and folks need to wake up.” | 
