Trump's MAGA Wants To Kill US Public Broadcasting Because It Symbolizes a Better World

The Trump Administration has announced its intention to withdraw over $1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the organization that supports public broadcasting in the United States in the form of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).

Although federal funding makes up only a small portion of the overall budgets for these organizations—a combination of private donations, corporate sponsorship, state financing makes up a larger part—the funding is vital for public television and radio in smaller local markets where public or corporate support is difficult to obtain. The cuts would likely kill off those smaller stations and weaken those in larger markets.

In effect, the last traces of public media would disappear from large sections of the United States, leaving them entirely in the hands of corporate media.

This attack on U.S. public media is perhaps the least surprising news imaginable. When I was interviewed last month here in Sweden after Trump effectively shut down Voice of America (VOA), I was asked what could be next on the Republican media agenda. I didn’t hesitate in my response: next would be the de-funding of the nation's public broadcasting system. To me, it wasn’t a question of if…but when.

In its classic form, public service broadcasting of the type we have here in Europe treats the inhabitants of the country not as potential consumers, but as actual citizens.

The threat to kill public broadcasting in the U.S. is not the same as the killing of Voice of America. Through stations such as Radio Free Europe, VOA had always had been the mouthpiece of the U.S. state. It was part of global U.S. soft power, promoting the nation's foreign policy and economic interests. It was anything but objective, independent journalism.

PBS and NPR, on the other hand, are something entirely different. They represent an alternative model for how media in the U.S. could be…or, at least, could have been. Created in 1967 under President Lyndon Johnson, and decades after private media giants ABC, NBC, and CBS had been allowed to take near-complete control over U.S. broadcasting, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was meant to provide U.S. citizens with a non-commercial media alternative.

Unlike their European counterparts, however, which began as well-financed monopolies in the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. public media were born weak. They were never meant to challenge the power of U.S. corporate media.

For the past half century, U.S. public broadcasting has existed at the margins of the national media ecosystem, producing high-quality educational programming and decent news that attracted a predominantly well-educated, urban audience. Low levels of federal funding meant that U.S. public broadcasting, again unlike European counterparts such as Sweden's SVT or the UK's BBC, was forced to take money from corporations in order to survive. When I lived in the U.S., PBS took so much "sponsorship” money from oil companies such as ExxonMobil that it was jokingly referred to as the “Petroleum Broadcasting System.”

So, why kill off the last remnants of a media system that attracts only a tiny fraction of the U.S. audience and gets the majority of its financing from non-government sources?

Simple. Because of what it represents.

The Trump administration and its oligarchy of advisors have as their central goal to destroy or undermine any and all institutions in U.S. society that either suggest an alternative to private, corporate control or provide a counter-argument to the myth that the “free market” is the best option for structuring U.S. society: from education to health care to media. The very idea that the state could in any way contribute to the greater good is horrific and must be crushed.

In its classic form, public service broadcasting of the type we have here in Europe treats the inhabitants of the country not as potential consumers, but as actual citizens. In modern societies, absolutely soaked in the logic of consumption, there needs to be at least a few spaces where your value is seen as inherent and not related to how much disposable income you have.

Here in Sweden, for example, that includes not just public broadcasting, but things like universal healthcare and university education. The logic is simple: being informed, being healthy and being educated should not be privileges restricted to those who can afford it. And, a well-informed, healthy and well-educated society benefits everyone.

Public broadcasting in the U.S. is in need of serious reform. And, public broadcasting in Europe isn’t perfect. But, despite their various flaws, their value can be found not only in what they produce in terms of content, but in what they tell people about how society can be structured. That working alternatives exist and can co-exist. That it’s possible to have a free market, but at the same time recognize there are some elements of society too important to be left to the mercies of corporations, billionaires, and profit margins.

For people like Trump and Musk, these non-commercial spaces of citizenship are viruses eating away at profits. But they aren’t the virus.

They are the vaccine.

Care About the Climate Crisis? The World Is With You

A superpower in the fight against global heating is hiding in plain sight. It turns out that the overwhelming majority of people in the world—between 80% and 89%, according to a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies—want their governments to take stronger climate action.

As co-founders of a nonprofit that studies news coverage of climate change, those findings surprised even us. And they are a sharp rebuttal to the Trump administration’s efforts to attack anyone who does care about the climate crisis.

For years—and especially at this fraught political moment—most coverage of the climate crisis has been defensive. People who support climate action are implicitly told—by their elected officials, by the fossil fuel industry, by news coverage and social media discourse—that theirs is a minority, even a fringe, view.

That is not what the new research finds.

What would it mean if this silent climate majority woke up—if its members came to understand just how many people, both in distant lands and in their own communities, think and feel like they do?

The most recent study, People’s Climate Vote 2024, was conducted by Oxford University as part of a program the United Nations launched after the 2015 Paris agreement. Among poorer countries, where roughly 4 out of 5 of the world’s inhabitants live, 89% of the public wanted stronger climate action. In richer, industrialized countries, roughly 2 out of 3 people wanted stronger action. Combining rich and poor populations, “80% [of people globally] want more climate action from their governments.”

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication—which, along with its partner, the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, is arguably the global gold standard in climate opinion research—has published numerous studies documenting the same point: Most people, in most countries, want stronger action on the climate crisis.

A fascinating additional 89% angle was documented in a study published by Nature Climate Change, which noted that the overwhelming global majority does not know it is the majority: “[I]ndividuals around the globe systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act,” the report states.

In other words, an overwhelming majority of people want stronger action against climate change. But at least for now, this global climate majority is a silent majority.

Taken together, the new research turns the conventional wisdom about climate opinion on its ear. At a time when many governments and companies are stalling or retreating from rapidly phasing out the fossil fuels that are driving deadly heat, fires, and floods, the fact that more than 8 out of 10 human beings on the planet want their political representatives to preserve a livable future offers a much-needed ray of hope. The question is whether and how that mass sentiment might be translated into effective action.

What would it mean if this silent climate majority woke up—if its members came to understand just how many people, both in distant lands and in their own communities, think and feel like they do? How might this majority’s actions—as citizens, as consumers, as voters—change? If the current narrative in news and social media shifted from one of retreat and despair to one of self-confidence and common purpose, would people shift from being passive observers to active shapers of their shared future? If so, what kinds of climate action would they demand from their leaders?

These are the animating questions behind the 89% Project, a yearlong media initiative that launched this week. The journalistic nonprofit we run, Covering Climate Now, has invited newsrooms from around the world to report, independently or together, on the climate majorities found in their communities.

Who are the people who comprise the 89%? Given that support for climate action varies by country—the figure is 74% in the U.S., 80% in India, 90% in Burkina Faso—does support also vary by age, gender, political affiliation, and economic status? What do members of the climate majority want from their political and community leaders? What obstacles are standing in the way?

The week of coverage that started on Tuesday will be followed by months of further reporting that explores additional aspects of public opinion about climate change. If most of the climate majority have no idea they are the majority, do they also not realize that defusing the climate crisis is by no means impossible? Scientists have long said that humanity possesses the tools and knowhow necessary to limit temperature rise to the Paris agreement’s aspirational target of the 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. What has been lacking is the political will to implement those tools and leave fossil fuels behind. The 89% Project will culminate in a second joint week of coverage before the COP30 United Nations climate meeting in Brazil in November.

While it’s impossible to know how many newsrooms will participate in this week’s 89% coverage, early signs are heartening. The Guardian newspaper and the Agence France-Presse news agency have joined as lead partners of the project. Other newsrooms offering coverage include The Nation, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, and Time magazines in the U.S.; the National Observer newspaper in Canada; the Deutsche Welle global broadcaster in Germany; the Corriere della Sera newspaper in Italy; the Asahi Shimbun newspaper in Japan; and the multinational collaborative Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism based in Jordan.

We believe the current mismatch between public will and government action amounts to a deficit in democracy. Can that deficit be addressed if the climate majority awakens to its existence? Would people elect different leaders? Buy (or not buy) different products? Would they talk differently to family, friends, and co-workers about what can be done to build a cleaner, safer future?

The first step to answering such questions is to give the silent climate majority a voice. That will happen, finally, this week in news coverage around the world.

This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

To Honor the Earth, Let Us Tear Down the Walls in Our Hearts

Let Earth Day be every day! Let it transcend the present state of politics and our economic hierarchy. Let it open us to the future we long for but do not yet envision.

We live on one vulnerable, extraordinary planet. We are not its overlords; we are part of an evolving circle of life, which we are still trying to understand. And we can only understand it if we also value it, ever so deeply. Earth Day is also Love Day.

Oh God, let it flow beyond the invisible borders we have created. To that end, I call forth the late Pope Francis, who died two days ago as I write—a day before Earth Day 2025. He was 88. Unlike most world leaders, he saw the need to transcend the present worldview—including religion—that currently holds the planet hostage.

The necessary changes humanity must make are collective, but also individual, at least in the sense that we must open our hearts and look for solidarity... with one another, with all of life.

As Nathan Schneider, a University of Colorado professor and contributor to the Jesuit publication America Magazine, noted recently in a Democracy Now interview, Pope Francis was insistent on linking major political issues, such as protecting the planet’s ecosystem and halting the war on migrants. “Justice for both,” Schneider said. We must “counter the idea of disposability.”

This is a cry from the depths of our soul. Value the planet. Value all of humanity. We have to reach beyond the world we think we know and, as the Pope put it, according to Schneider, “learn from the periphery.”

The migrant crisis and the climate crisis are intertwined. The Pope “called for solidarity across borders. He called for taking down the idols of our world—the things that we think are real that really aren’t: borders created with imaginary lines.”

That is to say: Tear down that wall, this is a wall we’ve built in our own hearts. Planet Earth is a single entity; our complex differences are interrelated. Yes, conflict is inevitable, but dehumanizing those with whom we disagree is never the answer. Yes, this is an inconvenience for those in power—and for those who want, and feel entitled, to use up the planet for personal gain. Humanity, as Pope Francis understood, is at an extraordinary transition point: beyond exploitation.

As Cynthia Kaufman writes:

The forces that are tearing apart the fabric of our world are part of a global set of practices that have developed over the past 500 years that allow people and companies to pursue profit for its own sake without regard for the needs of others. Over those centuries, destructive practices based on capitalism, slavery, colonialism, and particular forms of patriarchy have been woven into the ways that politics, economics, and culture function...

Rather than trying, under these difficult circumstances, to reestablish a new accord with the exploitative systems that dominate our world, the time is ripe to dig deeply and try to uproot those systems at their cores. That will involve building alternative ways of meeting our needs, fighting against the structures that support the current system, and rethinking our understanding of our social world. If a new accord between capital and labor is not likely to be established any time soon, our best hope is to work to build a social world based on principles of solidarity.

Principles of solidarity? This is a huge leap for the part of humanity that assumes itself to be in control of the future. Kaufman is not talking about an alliance of good guys against bad guys, but solidarity in a total way: solidarity with the planet and its extraordinarily complex ecosystem. “Solidarity” values continuous learning, understanding, and protecting, not simply controlling. That is to say: environmental stewardship.

According to the Earthday website:

It is widely acknowledged that Indigenous people, despite making up just 5% of the global population, protect a significant amount of the planet’s remaining biodiversity. Traditional Ecological Knowledge is a term for the collective Indigenous knowledge and beliefs about nature and man’s place in it, and serves as an alternative to the more objective and resource-oriented Western worldview of the environment as something to be exploited.

I would put it this way: Planet Earth has a soul.

I say this in a non-religious way, without a sense of explanatory understanding, just a sense of wonder. The planet itself is alive. And life itself should be what we value most, not... money (the invisible god).

As Earthday notes:

Like the Maōri, many Indigenous communities consider themselves “guardians” of their local environmental resources.

Within the 2.7 million square miles of the Amazon Rainforest, there are approximately 400 distinct tribes which call the rainforest home. The Guajajara tribe, in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, are particularly known for their fierce protection of their local forests from illegal loggers, and continue to risk their lives daily for their home.

Let Earth Day push our awareness beyond the invisible borders we have created and beyond the invisible god who holds us hostage. I don’t say this with a simple shrug but, rather, without knowing how this will happen—just that it must. The necessary changes humanity must make are collective, but also individual, at least in the sense that we must open our hearts and look for solidarity... with one another, with all of life. This is what I have called empathic sanity. Real change is impossible without it.

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