Defunding public media: Is losing the next ‘Downton Abbey’ worth it? | Opinion

Editor’s note: Welcome to Double Take, a regular conversation from opinion writers Melinda Henneberger and David Mastio tackling news with differing perspectives.

MELINDA: We cannot be too surprised that so many American media owners, as opposed to those of us who see ourselves as farmworkers for democracy, are now competing to see who can debase himself most completely in selling out to Donald Trump. Because with some noble exceptions, tensions between owners and newsrooms have always been there. If someone other than the Graham family had owned The Washington Post during Richard Nixon’s presidency, the Watergate might have been known only as that apartment complex on the Potomac just down the block from the Kennedy Center.

Most recently admitted to the Hall of Shame is Paramount, which paid $16 million in protection money to settle the president’s unwinnable lawsuit against CBS for doing this terrible thing called editing: They ran one part of Kamala Harris’ long answer to a question about Benjamin Netanyahu on a preview of “Face the Nation” and another part of it on “60 Minutes.” I only fully appreciate the absurdity of Trump’s suit was because I heard the two parts of her answer on our local NPR station, KCUR.

Reading it was one thing, but hearing it another. The NPR story also drove home the excellent point that for Trump’s $20 billion claim — which was that the interview was deceptively edited in order to interfere with the election — to have had any validity, then viewers in Texas, where the suit was filed, and which is a state Trump carried, would have to have turned on him because of the difference in those two clips. In a race that Trump won nationally.

Of course I say this today because I am 4,000% or so against Trump’s plan to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which will hurt the news deserts of rural America the most. Trump wants to renege on funding $1.1 billion already appropriated for public broadcasting, and $8 billion already appropriated in foreign aid. And I guess he will get his way because the Senate just caved, again, in the early hours Thursday, so now it goes back to the House for their usual quick “yes sir.”

DAVID: National Public Radio doesn’t do much beyond helping upper class white people cocoon away from any exposure to icky conservative ideas. But before we get to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting cuts, let’s talk about the foreign aid.

There was some good news this week: The Senate stopped cuts to George W. Bush’s program to give medicine to people with HIV in Africa that has saved tens of millions of lives. That’s an example of foreign aid funding at its best.

As far as the rest of the cuts, I don’t think our foreign aid does that much good. Some even say it does more harm than good. It can undermine foreign countries’ self-sufficiency, make their local food producers less profitable and provide endless opportunities for graft as nonprofits and locals maneuver to get their cut of the funding, regardless of whether our goals get accomplished.

At one point, countries with corrupt governments were more likely to get aid than ones with stable, honest government. Even after we changed our policies in the early 2000s to focus aid through nongovernmental organizations and give it in ways that we hoped would reduce corruption, some research found we had no effect. For all our spending, even under Joe Biden, our popularity in Africa was pretty mediocre, slipping behind the brutal dictators in China.

MELINDA: Why on earth were we cutting lifesaving PEPFAR to begin with? For all our spending, ha; we’ve ignored Africa for years under both parties — actually, since W. was president — while China moved in. We have been idiots to turn Africa over to China and your answer is to do so even more completely? Our spending on foreign aid never exceeded more than 1% of the federal budget.

If you don’t want “forever wars,” as I seem to recall you do not, then you should favor planting more carrots rather than yanking them out of the ground. Trump also just fired 1,300 diplomats in an already hollowed out State Department, so who needs soft power I guess. That money is supposed to for one thing aid in desperately needed conflict resolution.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who voted against the bill, said they didn’t even know what foreign aid they were voting to cut. Not because they hadn’t had time to read it but because the OMB hadn’t bothered to fill them in. But we do know they were voting to cut off their own …heads.

There is a constitutional argument here, too, as some sellouts themselves acknowledged: Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi told The New York Times that they were “perhaps approaching a disregard for the constitutional responsibilities of the legislative branch under Article 1.”

You passed Disregard a few exits back, and just kept on going.

DAVID: You’re right that the Trump administration has broken the law in its decisions to stop spending money that has been passed into law by Congress often through the bipartisan compromise needed to get 60 votes in the Senate. Congress is supposed to have the power of the purse, not the president.

This rescissions bill didn’t have that 60 vote hurdle. The cuts had to get only 50 votes plus the vice president’s to pass Tuesday, and the House needs a bare majority to pass the final version, which they have to do by sometime Friday. That will at least give legislative backing to some of Trump’s unilateral cuts. Like adding back the AIDS cuts, that’s a step in the right direction.

Long after this bill is passed into law, though, we’ll be debating the future of the CPB and most controversially, of National Public Radio. I think most of the legacy press, like you and me, tends to tilt to the left, but NPR is far worse. For that reason, I object to my tax dollars going to them just as I’d object to the government forcing me to buy a subscription to right-wing outlets that can be short on facts, such as Breitbart or The Daily Caller.

Let me give you an example. Everybody knows that the mainstream press, legacy and new-media alike, fumbled coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop late in the 2020 election between Trump and Joe Biden. NPR was the worst of the bunch, telling listeners that they wouldn’t cover Russian disinformation and then running a media analysis that argued The New York Post was on thin ice with the story. David Folkenflik, who is normally among the best at NPR, even attacked the Post reporter on the story. This isn’t the kind of news that needs or deserves a taxpayer subsidy. It certainly doesn’t provide anything really different than the rest of the press.

MELINDA: Is there anything that doesn’t go back to Hunter’s laptop?

That comparison doesn’t work because every story on the conservative outlets you mention comes from the same point of view, and that isn’t true of NPR, which mostly offers straight news. Of course there are always individual stories to complain about, there or in any other outlet. But again, with the closure of so many newspapers, NPR does provide local coverage that no one else does.

DAVID: Oh, it is true of NPR. If you can find me an NPR story from at any point in 2024 that comes with a conservative slant or God-forbid a Trumpy slant, I’ll reconsider my view.

MELINDA: Straight news as opposed to commentary isn’t supposed to slant at all, though one thing that got NPR in big trouble with MAGA listeners — I won’t say conservative, because there was nothing conservative about it — was stating the truth that the 2020 election was not stolen. That was a problem for all mainstream media.

Marjorie Taylor Greene says news deserts are no problem, because rural America has the internet now. But that’s far from universally true. And because NPR stations are part of the emergency broadcast system, they play an important role when the water and the wind move in. I don’t think rural Americans can rely on Infowars to tell them that, or anything else, for that matter.

Is there another Harvest Public Media, intensely covering and as they put it, the food system, in 12 states in the Midwest? Kansas Public Radio does stories that would otherwise not be done if not for them.

Locally, the KCUR interview show “Up to Date,” anchored by our former Star colleague Steve Kraske, adds enormously to the conversation in Kansas City. And internationally, maybe you also abhor the BBC Newshour, but I love hearing stories there that aren’t covered well or sometimes at all in this country. Their host Tim Franks would grill his own mother, which I mostly say in admiration. “Stop!” I have a time or two yelled at Tim in my car, when I thought he was sprinting in the wrong direction. But if I’m driving, I always listen and learn something.

DAVID: Where to start. There’s plenty of ag media that doesn’t get a federal subsidy for its granola point of view. AGNET Media, Farm Progress, AG Daily, Farm Journal — they go on and on and on and I don’t have to pay for it. My stepfather who owns a corn and soybean farm can pick which ones he wants to pay for, and if he doesn’t like what he gets, he can turn to different journalists.

I agree with you that there’s a problem with local media dying out and leaving nothing but chat boards and social media behind, but I don’t see running subsidies through a federal government run by Trump as the solution.

MELINDA: We are getting so much for so little. And we are both neglecting PBS, which will suffer more from these cuts than NPR will because it receives more of its funding from the government. Do you really support defunding the original American platform for “Downton Abbey”?

I thought their “Wolf Hall” got both Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell wrong, on a matter of some importance to me, actually. But that didn’t tempt me to stop watching that genius actor Mark Rylance, much less want to see the whole network decapitated like Claire Foy’s Anne Boleyn. America will regret these cuts.

DAVID: There never has been a time when the argument for PBS is weaker. We’re living in a golden age of TV through the streamers that bring everything to us for pretty cheap at unprecedented scale and unlike PBS, they have enough money to cover all the niches from crime to documentary to sci-fi to high culture. Losing the next “Downton Abbey” is a risk I am willing to take to get the feds out of the media business.

This story was originally published July 17, 2025 at 8:08 AM with the headline "Defunding public media: Is losing the next ‘Downton Abbey’ worth it? | Opinion."