Trump vs. the arts: Fresh strikes against PBS and the NEA

"Beating up on Sesame Street isn't necessarily the flex the GOP thinks it is," said Brian Lowry in The Wrap. But last week, President Trump drew cheers from his base when he sharpened his assault on PBS and NPR amid a wider culture war offensive. In a May 1 executive order, Trump demanded a cessation of federal funding to both media nonprofits "to the maximum extent allowed by law."

The president may in fact have no authority to end the $500 million in annual congressional funding that flows to PBS and NPR, as leaders of those organizations quickly argued. But while Trump and his allies claim that the cut would be justified because PBS and NPR's news and public affairs programming is biased, any across-the-board reduction achieved by the president "will inflict at least as much damage on those who live in states he carried in the last election as on bright-blue bastions of liberal elites." Rural stations rely far more heavily on federal funding than big-city stations, and if those stations go dark, so does the access of many households to Big Bird and other valued content.

On a related front, Trump's team just did something crueler, said the Chicago Tribune in an editorial. A day after the president's NPR/PBS decree, he released a proposed federal budget that would zero out funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities. Worse, arts organizations began receiving emails from the NEA telling them that grants they'd been promised would not be honored. Because the NEA "hasn't been a major source of arts funding for years," the damage of those sudden reversals may be somewhat limited. But no theater company should have a $25,000 hole blown open in its budget because of the president's political pettiness, as some have. If cruelty was Trump's actual intent, "it's un-American, unbecoming to his office and, frankly, pathetic." Should the president succeed in ending funding for the NEA, NEH, and the lesser-known Institute of Museum and Library Services, said Helen Stoilas in The Art Newspaper, the tax savings would amount to just over $2 per American. But even with just the job and grant cuts he's made already, "swaths of the country's cultural infrastructure have been dismantled."

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The pushback Trump is getting on the broadcasting front is "occasionally hilarious," said Michael Goodwin in the New York Post. NPR and PBS claim they deserve special treatment because they're independent news sources, yet they both bring the same anti-Trump perspective that most legacy media outlets do. In terms of political messaging, "they not only want a monopoly, they also demand that taxpayers fund it." Whether or not you like the programming, attempting to end this funding by executive order is a direct "attack on Congress," said the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in an editorial. Past lawmakers created the public broadcasting system because they believed in its cultural and educational value. And because most of its funding comes from private sources, it too costs each American only about $2 a year.