variety.com: As it prepares to shut down after nearly 60 years of service, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will be honored with one of the Television Academy‘s top prizes, the 2025 Governors Award. The news is bittersweet, as it comes following President Trump’s move kill federal funding for public media.
2 comments:
While I am glad that the CPB is receiving this award, I am deeply saddened and angered by their forced closure due to funding cuts from the current Trump administration. This has made me reflect a lot on the impacts of the media on my own childhood. The main channel I watched as a kid was PBS, and with the CPB being a primary funding source of PBS, I feel disheartened by how the company will be affected. This attack on public media is more than just a political strategy. As mentioned in the article, local public broadcasting is often the only method of getting relatable safety information in rural communities. This major cut to the funding of the CPB coupled with proposed cuts to FEMA target our most vulnerable and remote communities. Public broadcasting has been so demonized by the current administration without any foresight into the dangers that eliminating funding will cause. Time and time again, cruelty seems to be the point of these funding cuts.
While I think the award is deserved, I think it feels like more of a consolation prize amidst the foreclosure of the CPB and of public media in the United States. As someone who grew up watching PBS and who has many fond memories of CPB media, this hurts to some extent. The article does an okay job of explaining some of the multitude of positive impacts the CPB and its productions have had over the years, but I really don’t think they can be understated. Taking media away from the masses is never a good thing and I think it bodes poorly for our future if that course is not corrected. The destruction of the CPB is an irreversible blow to our ability as a nation to entertain, educate, and inform ourselves and each other. The CPB’s projects such as Mr. Rogers or Sesame Street have done some incredible work in research on the best ways to educate young people and on what is important to developing minds. Programs like NOVA provided deep dives into fascinating topics presented with zero bias and no corporate inclination or agenda. The destruction of this kind of media in the modern world is only a negative, and the money the government is “saving” with this move is only pennies. This makes me wonder what the ulterior motives are behind this move, as the intellectualism and empathy embodied by many of the CPB’s programs are natural enemies of the anti-intellectual and anti-empathy movement of modern day right-wing politics. I hope that future administrations can revert this decision and put us back on track, in this regard and in many others.
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