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“If the fire comes to the neighborhood and it doesn’t burn your house down, that doesn’t mean that the neighborhood wasn’t totally devastated,” Stewart Vanderwilt, the CEO of Colorado Public Radio (CPR), told me. Nationally, the landscape of public radio has been charred since last July, when Congress stripped more than a billion dollars from public broadcasting, at the behest of Donald Trump, who released an executive order characterizing NPR and PBS as “biased.” NPR prepared to file suit against the Trump administration in federal court, arguing that the stoppage of funds, via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, inhibited freedom of speech, in the form of viewpoint discrimination. CPR and two other Colorado stations, Aspen Public Radio and KSUT, opted in as coplaintiffs—which they were uniquely positioned to do, since they represent a breadth of listener demographics and operate independently of any risk-averse university board of regents. The case went into arguments in December; by January, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it would dissolve—casting the stakes of the case into sharp relief. This week, when highlighting supposed accomplishments of his first year in office, Trump mentioned defunding NPR and PBS: “I guess I heard they’re closed up,” he said. It has been a “long slog,” Katie Townsend, a lawyer at Gibson Dunn, which is representing NPR, told me.
Steve Zansberg, the lawyer for the three Colorado stations, recalled that the government’s justification for taking down public media included, among other things, a piece that NPR had run on “queer animals,” which “suggested the make-believe clownfish in Finding Nemo would’ve been better off as a female, that ‘banana slugs are hermaphrodites,’ and that ‘some deer are nonbinary.’” The story, delivered on an episode of NPR’s Short Wave (“science for everyone”), had noted that Finding Nemo would have been more accurate had it portrayed Nemo’s father transforming into a female, since clownfish often change sex. “I don’t know what it must have been like to be a fly on the wall in the room of DOJ lawyers and White House lawyers to pick these,” he told me. “Joni Mitchell famously said laughing and crying are the same release. You know, I choose to laugh at all of this because it is so farcical.”
Zansberg, who has been working on the case pro bono, was formerly a documentary producer for KQED, the San Francisco public television station; he entered law via a program at Yale funded by the Knight Ridder Foundation for journalists who wanted a better grounding in the legal world. (“Every year, one of the five journalists would jump ship and become a lawyer, figuring, Hey, it pays better and what have you. More security,” Zansberg remembered.) The Trump lawsuit is not, in his eyes, a new fight. In 1992, during a congressional debate about reauthorizing funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, some conservatives aired arguments that the public broadcasting system held a liberal bias; Bob Dole contended that public television aired a “steady stream of documentary cheerleading for left-wing interests.” Zansberg wrote a student legal note at the time about Dole’s take. “The Republicans in particular have, for many, many years, leveled this accusation against public broadcasting,” Zansberg told me—the accusation not being about clownfish, or even gender identity, but public media “spewing propaganda.” He took the case against Trump immediately, he said, in part because it represents a “blatantly unconstitutional order that is so highly offensive to my sensibilities as a First Amendment practitioner.”
Presiding over the case is Randolph Moss, a US District Court judge for the District of Columbia and an appointee of Barack Obama. At the hearing, he wanted to discern the rationale for the lawsuit and the impact of the rescission, given that, after the case got going, Congress had, in fact, made it legal for the administration to defund public media. NPR and the Colorado stations said that, even if this government pulled funding back, others could restore it, in one way or another, and a ruling in Trump’s favor could prevent that from happening in the years ahead. “Plaintiffs’ claims are unripe,” as the defense put it—who knows what may happen in the rapidly ripening future?
Alexander Resar, the Department of Justice lawyer representing the administration, wound an argument around vaccines: “Suppose,” he said, that the Department of Health and Human Services “decided to award annual grants to organizations that were dedicated to promoting news about harmful side effects to vaccines; and suppose that vaccine uptake decreased as a result of this publication; and suppose that that became an issue in the 2028 presidential election; and suppose that a candidate for office, like in this case, said, ‘I think it’s outrageous that the government is funding something that I believe is inimical to the public benefit.’ And then that person won. On day one of their new presidency, if they issued an executive order saying, This is outrageous, I want to cut funding for what I believe is harmful”—then, Resar continued, NPR’s lawyers were saying that this would constitute viewpoint discrimination and unlawful retaliation. Judge Moss interjected: “You would be on much firmer ground, I think, if the president simply said, ‘We just want to get out of the news business.’” To Moss, who cited examples of NPR being characterized by the administration as a “left-leaning organization,” Resar’s argument was “a little bit like saying, We’re going to stop paying the salaries of all Democratic members of Congress because we really think we ought to get out of the business of funding salaries of members of Congress.”
“The government at no point argued that the executive order was constitutional,” Townsend told me. “This is a really difficult order to defend.” She paused. “I would call it indefensible.” (Lawyers for the Justice Department did not reply to my requests for comment.) Townsend summarized the administration’s argument as saying that NPR is government speech: when the government subsidizes speech, it has more control over the content of that speech. “That’s a really bad misreading of the relevant precedent,” she noted. “It certainly is the case that when the government is speaking, it has control. But that’s not what NPR is.” There is no money to gain here: “It’s symbolic,” Breeze Richardson, the director of Aspen Public Radio, told me, and about trying to “make sure the historical record documents this moment.”
Colorado is a notable battleground. When asked why these specific stations joined the case, different people had different answers. Zansberg emphasized the diversity: that the three ranged widely in their audiences and composition—KSUT is a tribal station; Aspen Public Radio, with its unique “women’s desk,” among others, serves a region studded by both billionaires and service workers; CPR is a big nonprofit that 90 percent of the state can hear. Josh Shepperd, a media historian and associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me that “public media,” as a term, began in this state. “Colorado needed something like public media more than even some of the plains states, because it needed to figure out how to surmount the mountains,” he said. “They had to come up with logistics for building up infrastructure for equal access to public education”—reaching every child, under state and regional mandates. “And that was technology. Technology connected the mining towns.”
Today, something much the opposite appeared to be happening, Shepperd observed: “I’ve driven a bunch through the Nebraska panhandle, and let me say, there ain’t nothing there,” he told me. “There’s just brush and rock, you know. And it’s beautiful. But where’s the profitability of broadcasting to those towns of a hundred and fifty people?” What the administration is trying for, he argued, in forcing stations to close down, is directing audiences to national coverage. “And it becomes coded to national ideology coming out of, ironically, DC and New York. If you eliminate all access to local information, people actually don’t see themselves as part of that discourse anywhere in a public forum,” he said. “It isn’t just an affront to localism. It’s an attempt to reengineer thought.”
Shepperd, who is writing a rather timely history of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, sees this moment as part of a larger historical sweep. Before Brendan Carr took over as chair of the Federal Communications Commission, he wrote a chapter of Project 2025 dedicated to the agency. Now Carr is putting that vision into effect. “The FCC,” Shepperd told me, “is clever insofar as they are putting noncommercial stations out of compliance. Then they can give these stations to religious broadcasters, or Sinclair”—which is known to support Trump. Around the same time that Judge Moss was hearing arguments in the case at hand, a conservative law firm called the Center for American Rights filed a comment urging the FCC to “open an inquiry that looks at the future of ‘public’ broadcasting.” Among the requests: “If in fact many local stations will ‘go dark,’ PBS and NPR need to provide wind-down or transition plans and those stations need to give the Commission adequate notice to protect the public.” And: “the Commission should ask whether PBS (and NPR) stations are fulfilling their public-interest obligations as licensees when the public’s elected representatives have just chosen to cut off public funding because of their failure to serve the public well.”
By Shepperd’s estimation, 6 to 8 percent of public radio stations will fail in the next three years—still fewer than the 15 percent he originally expected, since many stations have, in the wake of the funding cuts, experienced surges in philanthropic giving. Aspen Public Radio is among the beneficiaries of donations, Richardson told me, having beaten their hopes for the “resiliency fund” the station set up. But the “question on every public radio leader’s mind today,” she said, was how much of that money a station might expect to see moving forward. Tami Graham, KSUT’s executive director, feels optimistic, and can rattle off numbers about “backfill” and interest and cuts and mounted solar arrays and, in her station’s case, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “Hopefully we’ll hear something fairly soon, and have a reason to celebrate,” she said. Judge Moss, expected to deliver a verdict any day, “knows that this ruling is really important,” she added. “I think he really wants it to stand the test of time.”
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