In 1992, former Kansas Senator Bob Dole tried to kill public broadcasting. Trump is pushing Congress to finish the job.
Bundled in the series of cuts Republicans are pushing through congress is a recissions bill to claw back $1.1 billion dollars in funding meant to keep public broadcasting services like PBS and NPR solvent through 2027. It passed the House and is currently awaiting consideration from the Senate.
If passed, the proposal will have an outsized impact on rural areas, where locally owned public broadcasting stations are still some of the only reliable sources of information, especially since conglomerates like Sinclair swept up a vast swath of local television and religious conservative talk shows now increasingly dominate the radio waves. Local and regional broadcasters, including Kansas Public Radio, which operates out of the University of Kansas, may be forced to close their doors.
When introducing the legislation, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said it would codify,
cuts to … woke public broadcasting … which is a business the federal government shouldn’t even be in.
Speaking to NPR, former representatives Charles Bass and Gordon Smith, who served in the late 90’s, stated that, although the GOP had always been skeptical of public broadcasting, it was never this divisive.
What they evidently don’t recall is that in 1992, a few years prior to their terms, animosity toward public media had already reached a boiling point. Leading the charge against approving the same $1.1 billion was none other than the late Kansas Senator Bob Dole.
Dole served many roles over the course of his career: minority leader of the Republican Caucus, 47th Chair of the Republican National Committee, and Presidential nominee in 1996. Today most of us know him as the name on the side of the Dole Human Development Center at the University of Kansas or as the founding donor of the bipartisan Dole Institute of Politics.
Speaking on the floor of the Senate in June of ‘92, he criticized public broadcasting for being too partisan and introduced an amendment which would have functionally required public broadcasters to produce conservative counterprogramming in an effort to “geographically balance” their content.
As I have detailed, there is a far more serious side to this issue- millions and millions of taxpayer dollars on the line; big private profits from a socalled nonprofit network; big bureaucracies and big salaries; questionable programming; and the steady stream of documentary cheerleading for leftwing interests. That concerns me.
I am not some rightwing nut. I am not trying to make a deal. Keep them all on there. Keep all those crazy leftwing programs. But we ought to put a bunch of the crazy rightwing programs on to make it even, or at least have balance so people could take a choice. They probably would not believe, either.
He defended his position by introducing into the congressional record several articles advocating to eliminate public subsidies for broadcasting in order to address the budget deficit – the very same argument being peddled by the Trump Administration to push their big, beguiling tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.
Dole proceeded to argue that it was scandalous for the PBS show Frontline to insinuate Ronald Reagan - who defunded public broadcasting in the 80’s - committed treason in the Iran-Contra affair.
Again, this is another show that is partly funded with your tax dollars. And if you are on the left, extreme left, moderates probably could not qualify. If you are on the far left and you watch this stuff, you would say: "Isn't that great? They are condemning America, telling us what is wrong with America, what is good about Castro, what is good about Cuba, what is good about the Sandinistas."
Then he revealed the gambit.
No wonder folks in Kansas think public television reflects big-city bias. With public television and radio, you have to pay even if you're not watching or listening. It's your tax dollars feeding the meter. That doesn't mean we should use taxpayer funds for a conservative network that would be as wrong as wasting public money for liberal cheerleaders.
Finally, he introduced a press release from the American Family Association that if true “rest[s] my case against the current so-called Public Broadcasting System.” The article urged congress to pull funding from public media given the airing of a film on PBS which,
Suggests that the men are clearly to be admired and lauded for their courage in outing themselves and taking pride in their homosexual lifestyle.
As it turns out, the person who designed this media frenzy was none other than Dole’s very own speechwriter David Horowitz in collaboration with Heritage Foundation scholar Laurence Jarvik. The Heritage Foundation would go on to author President Trump’s guidebook, Project 2025, which recomends the president bypass congress altogether to get his way and argues with regards to public broadcasting:
The 47th President can just tell the Congress — through the budget he proposes and through personal contact — that he will not sign an appropriations spending bill that contains a penny for the CPB [Corporation for Public Broadcasting]. The President may have to use the bully pulpit, as NPR and PBS have teams of lobbyists who have convinced enough Members of Congress to save their bacon every time their taxpayer subsidies have been at risk since the Nixon era.
The leadup to Dole’s speech was carefully crafted to create as much disruption as possible. In the fall prior, when appropriations would typically be debated, House Lawmakers from Texas introduced a bill to abolish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The bill failed, but Dole continued to stall a vote in the Senate on the three-year reauthorization package until June when it was approved by a margin of 84-11. Dole’s amendment at that time failed in a 22-75 vote.
Hoping for a veto from president H. W. Bush, The American Family Association made one last lobbying push with an ad in the Washington Times that asked,
Do you want 1.1 billion of your tax dollars supporting nude lesbian sex and a push for homosexuality?
Quelle horreur! We couldn’t find the exact advertisement used, but we’ve included a similar one that was run in the New York Times petitioning companies that sponsored shows which offended their sensibilities.
The only difference between the push in the Senate to defund public broadcasting this week and the push by Robert Dole in 1992 is that the rest of the republican party has finally come around to Dole’s position. Dole always stressed that he, like the Challenger Shuttle, never wanted to “kill Big Bird” and was only looking for fairness and balance, but his record and accomplices precede him. Hopefully his vision to cut public funding for media and the arts will endure the same fate this week as his presidential run.
Bracing for impact, broadcasters have already begun to cut back on programming that covers trans identities. It appears that the era of truly independent publicly funded broadcasting might be coming to an end. To parrot the American Family Association, if you think that’s a SHAME, Protect My Public Media recommends you write and call your representatives and urge them to stop this ATTACK on the media.
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