Here is the text of the statement issued Friday by Katherine Maher, CEO of NPR, in response to President Trump’s executive order instructing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stop funding public media.
Last night, President Trump issued an Executive Order seeking to cease all federal funding to NPR and PBS. NPR is unwavering in our commitment to integrity, editorial independence, and our mission to serve the American people in partnership with our NPR Member organizations. We vigorously defend our right to provide essential news, information and life-saving services to the American public. We will challenge this Executive Order using all means available.
America’s founders knew that an informed public is essential to a functioning democracy, and that commitment to serve an informed public is the heart of NPR’s mission. With the creation of the Public Broadcasting Act, Congress explicitly forbade ‘any department, agency, officer or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision or control over educational television or radio broadcasting.’
This independence has informed the role of public broadcasting in the American interest for more than half a century, and is core to our relentless commitment to editorial independence and integrity in our service today.
The president’s order is an affront to the First Amendment rights of NPR and locally owned and operated stations throughout America to produce and air programming that meets the needs of their communities. It is also an affront to the First Amendment rights of station listeners and donors who support independent news and information.
This is not about balancing the federal budget. The appropriation for public broadcasting, including NPR and PBS, represents less than 0.0001% of the federal budget. Although federal funding is an essential aspect of public media, significant financial support comes from listeners, underwriters, and philanthropic grants.
Every $1 of federal funding generates $7 from local sources, enabling stations to produce local journalism, support local and regional music and arts, and develop creative, informative and entertaining programming for distribution across the nation. The local-national partnership between NPR and its Member stations is essential to maintaining the viability and strength of a nationwide public media network.
NPR stands by the excellence and commitment of our journalists, staff and Member organizations to seek out stories that matter to the American public, that reflect every part of the diversity of our nation, and that bring affairs of the world to our audiences. We stand by our high standards and our colleagues in their pursuit of factual reporting, their work to present issues without bias, and our effort to seek the humanity and human consequence of every story.
We will defend our work and our editorial independence and will continue to tell the stories of our country and the world with accuracy, objectivity and fairness.
