NPR has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration following President Trump’s executive order ending federal funding to NPR and PBS.
“The Executive Order is a clear violation of the Constitution and the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of speech and association, and freedom of the press,” CEO Katherine Maher said in a statement. “It is an affront to the rights of NPR and NPR’s 246 Member stations, which are locally owned, nonprofit, noncommercial media organizations serving all 50 states and territories. Today, we challenge its constitutionality in the nation’s independent courts.”
“Public media was established to inform the American public and uphold American democratic values,” Maher continued. “The President’s Executive Order is directly counter to Congress’s long standing intent, as expressed in the Public Broadcasting Act, to foster vibrant institutions that achieve that mission, serving all Americans independent of political influence.”
“This unlawful Executive Order directs federal agencies, as well as the independent nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), to withhold all federal funding from NPR and PBS,” she added. “It also directs CPB to ‘cease indirect funding to NPR and PBS’ by mandating that local public radio and television stations not use federal funds to acquire NPR or PBS programming.”
Maher claimed that the executive order is “retaliatory, viewpoint-based discrimination in violation of the First Amendment.”
According to the lawsuit, Trump’s order “aims to punish NPR for the content of news and other programming the President dislikes and chill the free exercise of First Amendment rights by NPR and individual public radio stations across the country.”
“The Order is textbook retaliation and viewpoint-based discrimination in violation of the First Amendment, and it interferes with NPR’s and the Local Member Stations’ freedom of expressive association and editorial discretion,” the filing says.
President Trump’s May 1 executive order asserts that government funding of news media is “corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”
