TRUMP TO DUMP CPB & NEA?
Subsidized arts, TV, and radio are feeling the Grim Reaper’s cold breath on the backs of their corporate necks. They’ve heard powerful hints that their taxpayer-funded lifelines are about to be severed.
The Hill, a D.C. publication specializing in ‘insider’ coverage of the Federal Government, said on Sunday that President Trump plans to eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts. Trump plans to leave them with no federal funding for fiscal year 2018.
The CPB is the Federal entity that partially funds National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. The NEA, by its own account, “funds, promotes, and strengthens the creative capacity of our communities”. It does so by subsidizing favored artists, writers, dancers, musicians, and theater productions.
The NEA receives about $150 million per year from the Federal Government, making it the biggest arts funding source in the country. No other source is even close.
The CPB receives more than $445 million in federal funding each year. About half of it goes to the 350+ public TV stations in the U.S. The stations return some of the money, in the form of licensing fees, to PBS, which produces commercial-free content such as Frontline, PBS NewsHour, and Sesame Street. (Since August 2015, HBO has held exclusive rights to first-run episodes of Sesame Street. After a nine-month window, though, they’re available at no charge to PBS member stations.
The NEA and the CPB have long been political targets for conservatives. They argue that CPB news coverage– NPR especially– is not at all objective or impartial, and that the NEA often funds obscene and aesthetically questionable work. In 1987, critics flayed the NEA fiercely for its subsidies of Andres Serrano, whose work featured his bodily fluids and religious imagery, and Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photographs were explicitly homoerotic. These are only two examples. There are many more.
Can the CPB and the NEA thrive without their taxpayer-funded lifeline? Maybe they can survive on ad sales and voluntary contributions. From their reaction and the reaction of their media allies to the news of the looming budget cuts, though, they don’t seem confident that they will.
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