Minnesota public TV station leads fight against Trump executive order to defund public media

PBS stations across the country are on the brink of losing a big chunk of their funding, but a small station in northern Minnesota is fighting back.

Lakeland PBS in Bemidji has joined the national PBS organization in challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order calling for an end to government support for both PBS and NPR. The lawsuit was filed on Friday.

Through an executive order last month, Trump told the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and federal agencies to stop funding PBS and NPR. Through the corporation alone, PBS is receiving $325 million this year, most of which goes directly to individual stations.

The White House deputy press secretary, Harrison Fields, said the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is creating media to support a particular political party on the taxpayers’ dime.

“Therefore, the President is exercising his lawful authority to limit funding to NPR and PBS,” Fields said. “The President was elected with a mandate to ensure efficient use of taxpayer dollars, and he will continue to use his lawful authority to achieve that objective.”

The PBS lawsuit came days after NPR and three public radio stations in Colorado also filed a lawsuit to block Trump’s executive order.

PBS, which makes much of the programming used by its member stations, said it gets 22 percent of its revenue directly from the federal government. Sixty-one percent of PBS’ budget is funded through individual station dues, and the stations raise the bulk of that money through the government.

Jane Kirtley, a professor of media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, said the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as a private organization, not a government agency.

“That was done very specifically to try to ensure that both PBS and its member stations would be free from governmental interference,” she said. “In fact, it says that explicitly in the Public Broadcasting Act.”

She said over the years, Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court have affirmed the intention to keep public media independent from government control, including FCC vs. League of Women Voters, a 1984 case.

Kirtley said the public broadcasters can ask a court to rule on whether President Trump can act alone.

“If somebody, whether it’s the president or anybody else, doesn’t think Congress should be appropriating money to PBS, they should go to Congress and complain about it,” Kirtley said. “They shouldn’t be doing it unilaterally with an executive order.”

In joining PBS’s lawsuit against the executive order, Lakeland PBS said it will be “severely impacted” if it loses federal funding. Of the station’s $2.7 million budget, about $1 million or “37 percent comes from federal grants awarded by CPB.”

Lakeland PBS is also facing other financial challenges. According to the lawsuit, sponsorship revenue has declined by 5 percent over the past decade. The nonprofit also noted that “despite strenuous efforts, Lakeland PBS has found it increasingly difficult to obtain local foundation grants for operations.”

Lakeland PBS broadcasts its programming on two stations: KAWE in Bemidji and KAWB in Brainerd, serving about 490,000 people, none of them living in cities of more than 20,000 people. One of the station’s flagship programs is Lakeland News, which the station said is essential to local residents.

“Without Lakeland PBS, many residents in its coverage area would have no access to television covering local issues,” the lawsuit said.

News coverage by PBS and NPR is one of President Trump’s biggest complaints about public broadcasting.

“PBS disputes those charged assertions in the strongest possible terms,” lawyer Z.W. Julius Chen wrote in the PBS lawsuit. “But regardless of any policy disagreements over the role of public television, our Constitution and laws forbid the President from serving as the arbiter of the content of PBS’s programming, including by attempting to defund PBS.”

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington.

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