Leaders of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private agency that has steered federal funding to PBS, NPR and hundreds of public television and radio stations across the country, voted Monday to dissolve the organization that was created in 1967.
CPB had been winding down since Congress acted last summer to defund its operations at the encouragement of President Donald Trump. Its board of directors chose Monday to shutter CPB completely instead of keeping it in existence as a shell.
“CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks,” said Patricia Harrison, the organization’s president and CEO.
This was the home of The News Hour, Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Schoolhouse Rock, Nova, Nature, Austin City Limits, The Joy of Painting (with Bob Ross), Ken Burns’ The Civil War, American Experience, and William F. Buckley’s Firing Line (which aired continuously for 33 years), to name just a few of the legendary programs we all enjoyed on PBS. That some Americans are actually celebrating this incalculable loss would have been unthinkable in the time before Trump. This is an irreparable act of devastating cultural vandalism motivated entirely by political cruelty. But this is an old story. Such things are sadly all too common with the rise of totalitarian fascism.
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