Public TV in a Private-Everything America
“Hey! What a wonderful kind of day”
When I was a kid in 90s Arkansas, our TV situation was… bleak.
We didn’t have cable. We had an old set with bunny-ear antennas that you had to stand in exactly the right place to make work, like some kind of human lightning rod. Most channels were just static or fuzzy reruns of things I didn’t care about.
But there was one signal that always seemed to come through: PBS.
PBS was my first passport. It was my study abroad, my museum visits, my after-school arts program, and my media literacy course, all beamed into a tiny living room in a below the poverty line Arkansas household. Between PBS and the public library, I got access to a world I absolutely did not live in, and that is exactly why the Trump administration has spent so much time and energy trying to choke it out.
“Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high”
I grew up on PBS Kids and British comedies with production values that screamed “we had a budget for exactly three sets.” I watched talking animals teach empathy and friendship, quirky hosts explain science experiments, and very serious British ladies demanded that their name was pronounced “bouquet” even if it was spelled “bucket” - side note, Keeping Up Appearances is an underrated critique of British class issues.
Those shows did two things at once:
They made the world bigger.
I saw cities I’d never visited, families that looked nothing like mine, accents I’d never heard in person, and problems that existed far beyond my town line.
They made learning feel normal.
You turned on the TV and people were reading, arguing, building, experimenting. Knowledge wasn’t this hoarded, elite thing; it was a vibe. A habit.
And here’s something important: my parents encouraged all of this. We talked about what we watched. We asked questions together. There was no “PBS raised me because my parents didn’t care.”
We were all learning from PBS.
“It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood”
Fast-forward.
The Trump administration came into office in 2017 and almost immediately started trying to kill federal funding for public broadcasting. His first budget blueprint proposed eliminating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) entirely, including the $445 million that had already been appropriated for 2018.
Those proposals kept coming. In 2018, the White House once again called for eliminating public broadcasting and arts funding. And in 2025, Trump’s administration asked Congress to rescind about $1.1 billion in funding for CPB as part of a broader rescission package, money that would have funded public media through 2026. Congress ultimately went along with defunding CPB, and the corporation is now being wound down after nearly six decades of supporting PBS, NPR, and more than 1,500 local stations.
If you listen to the official justification, it’s all about money and “efficiency” and “bias”:
Public broadcasting is “no longer necessary.”
The internet exists now, so people can “just stream things.”
Why should “hardworking taxpayers” fund media that’s supposedly unfair to conservatives?
On paper, this is framed as a budget decision. In practice, it’s an ideological one.
Because here’s the thing: federal funding is not some massive gravy train. Across all public media, federal dollars make up around 16% of station revenue on average, with PBS stations relying on about 18%. But averages hide who gets hit the hardest. For small and rural stations, CPB grants can be 25%–50% of the entire budget. In 2023, rural stations received 45% of CPB’s appropriation, and for many of them, losing that money is an existential threat.
In other words, the cuts don’t really punish “elite urban PBS liberals.” They punish the exact communities politicians love to claim they’re defending: small towns, rural areas, poor families, places like the Arkansas I grew up in.
So no, I don’t buy that this is really about saving money.
PBS and local public stations are being targeted because they make it harder to control the story.
“On my way to where the air is sweet”
If you grow up poor and rural without cable, your media diet can be incredibly narrow. Maybe you get a handful of networks shaped by advertising, ratings, and whatever plays well with national sponsors. Maybe local talk radio leans heavily one direction. Maybe your church or community has very strong opinions about what’s “appropriate.”
Public broadcasting disrupts that.
PBS drops a crack right into that bubble and says, “Hey, here’s a documentary about another country; here’s a show about science that doesn’t frame climate change as a debate; here’s a storyline where a girl likes math, where a family doesn’t look like yours, where an authority figure admits they were wrong.”
Public media has consistently been one of the most trusted news sources in the U.S., rated more favorably than for-profit media by a wide margin in recent polling. That trust isn’t an accident; it’s the result of an ecosystem that was designed to prioritize education, culture, and the public interest over shareholder value.
When you are an administration or a movement that relies heavily on grievance, resentment, and tightly controlled narratives about who “real Americans” are, that is a problem.
PBS is dangerous to that project not because it’s partisan, but because it quietly normalizes curiosity and empathy. It tells kids that the world is bigger than their town, their church, their family’s politics. It tells adults that information can be nuanced and complex without being a conspiracy.
Authoritarians do not thrive in environments where people, especially children, are regularly told:
Ask questions.
Consider other perspectives.
Learn from people who don’t look, pray, or vote like you.
So of course they hate public broadcasting.
“Every day when you’re walking down the street”
When I think about the Trump administration going after PBS, I don’t picture D.C. hearings or line items in a budget spreadsheet.
I picture myself, a kid on the floor with a notebook, copying down words I didn’t know yet so I could look them up later at the library.
I picture British comedies accidentally teaching me class politics, satire, and the idea that you can laugh at the powerful. I picture nature documentaries that made me care about places I’d never see and species I’d never hear about anywhere else.
All of that came from an underfunded local station in a state most national politicians only remember exists during election season.
So when somebody shrugs and says, “Well, PBS will be fine, they only get a small percentage from the government,” what I hear is:
“We don’t care if poor and rural kids lose their bridge to the rest of the world.”
When someone says, “They can just raise money from donors,” I hear:
“As long as culture and information remain pay-to-access, we’re good.”
Public broadcasting is one of the last places where a kid without cable, without money, without the “right” zip code, can still stumble into a wider universe just by turning on a TV.
“Take a look, it’s in a book”
This isn’t nostalgia; it’s a warning
I’m not writing this because I’m sentimental about theme songs and pledge drives (though I could absolutely sing you a few, my oldest nephew HATES it when my sister and I sing the whole Arthur theme song from memory and I once got my entire Cold War history class singing PBS theme songs when we studied the founding of the program in class). I’m writing it because the attempt to defund PBS isn’t just about television—it’s about who is allowed to access culture, information, and imagination without having to buy their way in.
For me, PBS was the reason I could sit in a university classroom years later and not feel completely lost. It was the reason British slang didn’t sound alien when I moved across the Atlantic, why news from other countries felt familiar, why accents and faces and stories different from mine didn’t scare me.
My parents did everything they could with what they had. Public broadcasting gave our whole family something more: a shared education, a common set of references, a quiet reminder that we were part of a bigger world than the one we could physically see.
That’s exactly what scares people like Trump.
Because a kid who grows up believing the world is bigger, more complicated, and more interconnected than the people in power want to admit?
That kid is a lot harder to control.
“Won’t you be my neighbor?”
If you grew up with PBS in a small town, if you learned to read with a muppet, if you fell asleep to British feminist vicars and woke up to Saturday morning science experiments, this fight is about you, and about the next poor kid living in Arkansas, Alaska, Appalachia, who can’t afford a streaming service or a cable plan.
They’re not just cutting “funding.”
They’re cutting off oxygen.
And some of us only learned to breathe because of public broadcasting in the first place.