Trump's budget hacksaw leaves public broadcasting on precipice
The elimination of CPB funding, advocated by the "Project 2025" blueprint of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, marks a turning point. Other attempts in the past had met with opposition from lawmakers, including Republicans in rural areas.
Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University in Boston, stressed it is in those very areas where the funding cuts are likely to have "a devastating effect."
For remote communities, "these stations are an absolute lifeline", he said. "This is where people go to find out a tornado is coming," or about other emergency news.
Such arguments were rejected by Heritage Foundation fellow Mike Gonzalez, who wrote the chapter on public broadcasting in the Project 2025 blueprint.
For him, "state and local governments can devise and set up systems that take care of the problem, on a much cheaper basis than the entire public broadcasting apparatus, and without the attendant ills that accompany the present system."
The end of the federal funding is undoubtedly a blow to local news in the United States.
Due to declining readership and the consolidation of titles under larger corporations, more than a third of the nation's newspapers have shuttered since 2005, a loss of 3,300 titles, according to a report from the Medill School at Northwestern University.
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