State Department Firings & Public Broadcasting Funding

Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Public Broadcasting

I recently emailed a reporter who interviewed me earlier this spring that they should: "Dust off your notes on public broadcasting funding - that issue is coming around again."

The "Recission Package" now in the Senate for a vote, will kill funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting including grants that CPB makes to NPR, PBS, and the local affiliates of both.

Eliminating public broadcasting funding by adopting a Recission Package is actually legal and so presents a much greater threat to public broadcasting than Trump's first effort to kill public TV and radio by unilateral impoundment.

If CPB funding is eliminated, PBS and NPR themselves will live on but many local affiliates may not. In consequence, Ken Burns' November series on the American Revolution could become the 'Last Hurrah' for the truly national public television we have known for more the past 56 years.

Alternatively, although the hour is late, perhaps Burns can become the public broadcasting advocate who gets through to the right and successfully protects public television funding as Fred Rogers did in 1969 (link below)

https://youtube.com/shorts/kAZ15wWvNc8?feature=shared

State Department Firings

As part of its reporting on the firing of 1,200+ State Department Foreign Service Officers and Civil Service employees, PBS posted the photo below.. It urged the remaining employees to resist fascism and reminded them of their oath obligation to do so.

I took that oath at my commissioning. And, although that was more than 40 years ago, I remember it well - especially the most important part:

"support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign or domestic..."

Oaths confer obligations on people that last long after the job(s) for which they were originally taken are over.

These postings are one of the ways that I try to live up to the obligations of that oath I took as a not yet 25-year old

.