President Trump has four choice words for the state-funded media and pseudo-arts program: Not on my watch.
Plans are in the works to eliminate both the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). And Trump wants to privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which helps fund National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
The CPB currently draws nearly half a billion dollars ($445.5 million) a year from taxpayers.
Trump’s plan, first reported by The Hill, is part of a blueprint to slash federal spending by $10.5 trillion over the next decade. “Many of the specific cuts were included in the 2017 budget adopted by the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC), a caucus that represents a majority of House Republicans,” The Hill reported.
“A free society should not have government-supported media outlets, especially ones that so often convey political news and opinion,” the RSC report said. “There is no shortage of media outlets and news services available to consumers,” the report said.
“The federal government should not be in the business of funding the arts,” the RSC said of eliminating the taxpayer-subsidized programs.’
The RSC report follows budget proposals from the conservative Heritage Foundation. “Without federal funding for the CPB, services such as the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), which receive funding from the CPB, could make up the lost money by increasing revenues from corporate sponsors, foundations, and members,” the Heritage report concluded.
The idea of doing away with the NEA stretches back to the Reagan administration, although President Reagan eventually dismissed the idea. And Mitt Romney took a boatload of criticism in the 2012 presidential campaign when he proposed killing the CPB (President Obama even ran an ad that said the Republican nominee wanted to murder Big Bird).
The NEA has been awash in controversy, most notably when the “arts” endowment funded an exhibit by photographer Andres Serrano. “The work at the center of the controversy was Piss Christ, a photo of a plastic crucifix submerged in a vial of an amber fluid described by the artist as his own urine,” according to the Wikipedia entry.
More recently, the NEA was involved in a controversy when “an official at the White House Office of Public Engagement encouraged a group of artists on a conference call with the National Endowment for the Arts to produce works that supported the Obama administration’s agenda, a transcript of the call reveals,” Fox News reported in 2009.
PBS and NPR also both skew liberal, with the radio arm — which has 700 affiliates across the country — even admitting so in 2003.
Although a 1985 rule mandates all PBS shows must be “noncommercial, nonpartisan and nonsectarian,” their tax-subsidized programming includes “celebrating lesbian-feminist choirs, ‘transgender’ riots, and a liberal teenager fighting against abstinence education. As part of its wave of secular fundamentalism, PBS celebrates even late-term abortionists with a fanaticism. The PBS show NOW was devoted to smearing the pro-life movement as terrorists,” the Wiki entry on “liberal bias” says.
It’s anyone’s guess as to whether Trump will follow through on his threats — he does have a pretty full plate right now, and funding for public news and arts programs likely falls well down the list. But our guess is that he’ll circle back around to the proposal, especially when budget time comes around because, let’s admit it, $500 million is an awful lot to spend for a Piss Christ.