Cnn
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President Donald Trump signed an executive decree on Thursday to direct the public broadcasting company to put an end to federal funding for the two largest American public broadcasters, which faced a series of attacks of The legislators of the White House and Republicans accusing them of biased reporting.
The ordinance requests the CPB board of directors to terminate the direct funding of national public radio and the public broadcasting service to the “maximum measure authorized by law and refuses to provide future financing”. He also orders the board of directors to take measures to “minimize or eliminate” indirect funding at NPR and PBS.
THE The Executive Decree also orders the Secretary of Health and Social Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to investigate the NPR and the PBS for a possible discrimination in terms of employment, and it asks the heads of all other federal agencies to “identify and terminate” any direct or indirect funding of media organizations, as allowed by law.
The order follows previous attacks against public broadcasters by the Trump administration and the eminent Republicans.
Each year, the CPB disperses $ 535 million in taxpayers from public radio and television stations nationwide, the stations offer free and universal access to educational programs, emergency alerts and a wide range of news and cultural content.
This includes stations with PBS and NPR, as well as certain less known public media. The White House said she would soon ask the Congress to recover the money already allocated to CPB in the next two years.
Without federal funding, certain local stations may be forced to leave the air, especially in rural areas which are republican bastions. In many cases, “these are the latest broadcasters belonging to locally in these communities,” said ED Ulman last month, CEO of Alaska Public Media.
Earlier this week, the CPB filed a complaint against the Trump administration after three of its five members of the board of directors were terminated by e-mail. The three members of the board of directors who received emails – Laura G. Ross, Thomas E. Rothman and Diane Kaplan – were appointed by the president of the time, Joe Biden in 2022 (Ross was initially appointed by Trump in 2018 and then renewed by Biden).
The congress specifically implemented the company as a private entity “to offer maximum protection against interference and foreign control”, according to a law adopted in 1967. The legislation expressly prohibits the government from exercising “any direction, supervision or control over educational television or radio.”
