THE MORNING RANT: Public Radio is Being Squeezed Thanks to Trump Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

Before Donald Trump defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (“CPB”) in July 2025, Republicans had long argued for doing just that. Most of them were lying to get our votes, of course, and given the chance to do so, they never did. Republican Representative Paul Ryan famously advocated for gutting CPB funding…until Ryan became Speaker of the House and had control of the purse strings. Suddenly he determined that defunding CPB represented only negligible federal spending, or that it would consume too much political capital, or some other lie as he rubbed his betrayal in our faces.

Defunding public broadcasting is yet another of the innumerable acts that Donald Trump did after decades of surrender-cons (e.g. the legacy GOP) claiming it couldn’t be done.

NPR has long argued that it only gets a nominal amount of its funding from taxpayers. In this NPR from April 2023, in which it was reporting on itself, NPR falsely claimed that less than 1% of its funding comes federal sources. But as The Hill reported in a piece a few weeks later, a great deal of NPR’s funding comes from local public stations, who historically received much of their funding from federal spending.

In other words, the money flow was: Taxpayers → Federal Government → CPB → local stations → NPR.

More specifically, the money that flows from local public radio stations to NPR buys propaganda programming such as “All Things Considered” and “Morning Sedition Edition.” In recent years, NPR has been collecting about $230 million per year from local stations.

Thanks to the defunding of CPB, local stations are staring at a budget crisis, and they are going to have start taking drastic actions to reduce expenses – actions such as terminating NPR programming. This following story about the public radio station in Chattanooga is not an isolated occurrence. WUTC lost $126k of annually recurring federal subsidization, which amounted to about 20% of its annual budget.

“WUTC hopes high-dollar donors will step forward to help close $89K shortfall” [Chattanooga Times Free Press – 10/15/2026]

Chattanooga’s public radio station is looking to make up an approximately $89,000 shortfall or it will have to potentially consider cutting programming or other services, according to station leadership.

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“I would say funding is what keeps me up at night,” general manager Susan Lazenby said Thursday. “I think we have a lot of positive things going on at the station, but without the federal support, it makes it really complicated to pay bills.”

The financial pressures date to July 2025, when Congress approved President Donald Trump’s request to cut $1.1 billion in previously approved funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributed federal funds to public radio and broadcasting stations nationwide.

For the local affiliate, this amounts to approximately $126,000 in annual revenue that is gone, Lazenby said, and it’s not clear if or when it’s coming back. That equates to 20% of the organization’s total annual budget, she said.

I am not going to do a grave dance, because I am still greatly saddened by the loss of what public radio once was in the days before it sold its soul (and much of its programming time) to NPR.

After I graduated from college in the 1980s, the local public radio station was probably my most-listened to station. It was a companion that provided locally-produced shows featuring music that none of the commercial stations played. There were local DJs who hosted eclectic shows full of new-to-me music, especially acoustic, folk, bluegrass, classical and blues. Some DJs would have music from all those genres in the same show! I was a loyal donor for many years, but the expanding NPR lineup and its left-wing programming was like a cancer chewing up the station’s airtime.

My last check payable to the local public radio station was in the late 1990s, shortly before my favorite Saturday morning acoustic music show was replaced by a smug, know-it-all, NPR show titled “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.” Around the same time, I tuned in one July 4th morning, only to hear NPR airing a show about how awful and racist the U.S. is, and how July 4 is such a difficult day for enlightened Americans.

I don’t know if public radio could have survived long-term in the internet era, but by attaching itself to the radical leftists at NPR, it certainly hastened its own demise.

Thanks again to Donald Trump and the current Republican Congress for defunding NPR by defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

My Appearance on American Spectator’s “Continuing Crisis” Podcast

A subject I have written about several times here at Ace of Spades HQ is how Democrat partisans are pumping money into prediction markets to produce more favorable published probabilities for their candidates. That money isn’t an investment – it’s a campaign contribution.

Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay kindly invited me to come on their podcast at The American Spectator to talk about this subject, as well as other topics related to next week’s elections. Here is a link to the podcast which went up yesterday. I’d be honored if you’d give it a listen.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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