A sign for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is seen on its building headquarters on Feb. 18, 2025 in Arlington, Virginia.
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PBS on Friday sued President Donald Trump to block his effort to cut off federal funding for the public broadcaster.
The U.S. Constitution and the half-century-old law governing public television “forbid” Trump from attempting to defund PBS or “serving as the arbiter” of its programming, PBS wrote in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
The lawsuit from PBS and one of its member stations in Minnesota came three days after NPR filed a similar suit against Trump and his administration.
“After careful deliberation, PBS reached the conclusion that it was necessary to take legal action to safeguard public television’s editorial independence, and to protect the autonomy of PBS member stations,” a PBS spokesperson told CNBC in a statement.
The nonprofit public media outlets both want the courts to invalidate Trump’s May 1 executive order commanding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB, and all executive agencies to “cease Federal funding for NPR and PBS.”
Trump’s order declared that the government funding the news media is “not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.” It also accused both PBS and NPR of failing to present “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”
Lawyers for PBS said they dispute Trump’s assertions “in the strongest possible terms.” But regardless, the president is legally barred from meddling with the broadcaster’s funding or its content, they wrote.
They cited a federal telecommunications law’s dictate that no “department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States” may “exercise any direction, supervision, or control over public telecommunications, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees.”
That also applies with respect to “the content or distribution of public telecommunications programs and services,” the law states.
Trump’s order also violates the Constitution’s protections of speech and press freedom, PBS argued. It “makes no attempt to hide the fact that it is cutting off the flow of funds to PBS because of the content of PBS programming and out of a desire to alter the content of speech.”
“That is blatant viewpoint discrimination and an infringement of PBS and PBS Member Stations’ private editorial discretion,” lawyers for the broadcaster wrote. They added that the order “smacks of retaliation for, among other things, perceived political slights in news coverage.”
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