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Fifty years ago, the radio station that would become KSUT launched from a small room in Durango, Colorado. It had temperature problems and no ventilation. The plan was to provide information, alerts, and programming for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe; KSUT, now an NPR affiliate serving the whole Four Corners region, is one of only eight tribal radio stations in the country. Last week, KSUT emerged victorious—along with two Colorado stations, in Denver and Aspen; NPR more broadly; and PBS—in a suit against the Trump administration that I covered earlier this year. “Everyone is just so proud of KSUT for taking this stand,” Tami Graham, KSUT’s station manager, told me. “It’s quite risky for us, as you know, to do this for fear of retaliation from this administration.”
The lawsuit, which brought KSUT, Colorado Public Radio, and Aspen Public Radio as coplaintiffs with NPR and PBS, stemmed from Executive Order 14290: “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” which Donald Trump signed in early May of 2025. The order mandated that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) stop providing money to NPR and PBS; as a result, in January, CPB was formally dissolved. A fact sheet from the administration lambasted NPR for saying, in one program, that “banana slugs are hermaphrodites”; this, along with other features, illustrated “partisan capture.” Questions were raised, Thomas Evans, NPR’s editor in chief, recalled, about whether the order would “bar member stations from carrying things like Morning Edition. But now that that’s been knocked down, there’s no question about us having a continued relationship.”
Before Randolph Moss, a federal judge in Washington, DC, NPR and the Colorado stations argued that the stoppage of funds was an infringement on their First Amendment rights and clearly represented viewpoint discrimination. The Department of Justice lawyers, for their part, didn’t seem interested in arguing for the order’s constitutionality, Steve Zansberg, the lawyer for the three Colorado stations, told me. “There was never any serious argument that the executive order was anything but blatantly unconstitutional. I suspect the administration knew that but, as in so many other instances, simply didn’t care.” (The Justice Department did not respond to my request for comment.)
The day before April Fools’, Moss released a sixty-two-page ruling chockablock with precedent, including a reference to a successful lawsuit brought by the National Rifle Association against Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York, among others, for viewpoint discrimination. “The First Amendment draws a line, which the government may not cross, at efforts to use government power—including the power of the purse—‘to punish or suppress disfavored expression’ by others,” Moss wrote. “Executive Order 14290 crosses that line.” Essentially, he ruled that Trump had defunded public media unlawfully, and that these three stations, as well as PBS and NPR generally, had been unconstitutionally targeted. Graham, of KSUT, reflected on the feeling of beginning to read through those “extremely thorough” pages: “It’s just nice to see that the judicial side of the court system is actually functioning the way it should be,” she said. “It really is one of the last places that we have to count on.”
A press release from the administration that called NPR’s coverage “trash” was one of a few rhetorical moves cited by Moss in his ruling that he said left “no doubt” that the funding-pull was not simply viewpoint discrimination toward public media or a reaction to stations’ failure to “live up to some yet-to-be-attained platonic ideal of ‘unbiased’ journalism.” Rather, he wrote, Trump “views their speech as unfavorable to him and the Republican party,” and had used his governmental power to wither them. And he had partially succeeded, considering CPB’s demise. Funding would have to come from elsewhere and, as Moss wrote, “no Court order declaring the Executive Order unlawful as applied to the CPB can afford NPR, PBS, or their member stations any meaningful relief.”
“It’s too late,” Josh Shepperd, an associate professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who is writing a history of CPB, told me. Even so, “it’s a statement that probably needed to be made in the name of checks and balances.” Of the ruling, he said, “I wouldn’t say there’s much positive news for public media in the way of recovering funding, infrastructure, or even stopping this administration from interfering with public media. But a court precedent has now been set that the government cannot weaponize financial or compliance issues for punishment of US noncommercial media stations.”
“Look, it’s a moral victory,” Evans said. “But the reality is the rescission was a different mechanism than the executive order, so it doesn’t actually change anything for us, and in fact I’m a bit concerned that we have supporters saying, ‘Oh great, it’s over, the federal funding is coming back,’ which it isn’t.”
Graham told me that on this, KSUT’s fiftieth year of service, she felt support from the people the station serves—rural listeners across the political spectrum—regardless of its affiliation with NPR. It “has everything to do with our local service, our local news and information, our local emergency alerting,” she told me, “and I think there’s a recognition of the value that we bring to the region.” In ten minutes, she’d be having a meeting with staff to discuss the station’s endowment fund and a plan to install ninety-nine solar panels to help sustain the station for the next fifty years. Like other public media stations, KSUT had experienced, in the wake of the funding cuts, a groundswell of donations, both local and from afar. “The proof’s in the pudding,” she said.
Carolina Abbott Galvão contributed reporting to this article.
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