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PBS and one of its member stations in northern Minnesota sued President Trump and several cabinet officials on Friday over Trump’s executive order targeting the public broadcasting system.
PBS alleges that the president’s May 1 order violated the First Amendment of the Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act.
The lawsuit asks the US District Court in Washington, DC, to affirm the order’s unconstitutionality and bar the Trump administration from enforcing the president’s demands that PBS be defunded.
“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 said Friday. CNN has asked the White House for comment.
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The network’s radio and podcasting counterpart, NPR, filed a similar First Amendment lawsuit earlier this week.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the private entity that disperses taxpayer funds to public radio and TV stations, has also sued Trump over his attempt to fire three board members.
For the time being, the CPB is ignoring Trump’s demand. But if federal funding to public media is indeed halted, some smaller stations could be forced off the air.
Both the PBS and NPR lawsuits focus on Trump’s own claims about the public broadcasters. He has repeatedly lambasted public media for perceived political bias, charging that NPR and PBS are unfair to conservatives.
“PBS disputes those charged assertions in the strongest possible terms,” Friday’s lawsuit filing states. “But regardless of any policy disagreements over the role of public television, our Constitution and laws forbid the President from serving as the arbiter of the content of PBS’s programming, including by attempting to defund PBS.”
In legal parlance, the alleged First Amendment violation is known as “viewpoint discrimination.”
Trump’s order “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,” the lawsuit continues. “That is blatant viewpoint discrimination and an infringement of PBS and PBS Member Stations’ private editorial discretion.”
The lawsuit also notes that the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act “expressly insulated” PBS and its member stations from political interference.
With the May 1 executive order, Trump “is attempting to circumvent Congress,” which allocates funds for public media every year, the lawsuit adds.
When NPR’s lawsuit was filed, the White House charged that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “is creating media to support a particular political party on the taxpayers’ dime. Therefore, the President is exercising his lawful authority to limit funding to NPR and PBS.”
Attorneys for NPR said the White House statement amounted to further evidence of viewpoint discrimination.
PBS took pains in its Friday filing to reject conservative claims about liberal bias on its airwaves. It said the White House’s talking points about “radical, woke propaganda” were misleading and “misrepresentative of the variety of PBS programming.”
The involvement of Lakeland PBS, a member station in northern Minnesota, is meant to buttress the lawsuit’s arguments. The station is the only local TV news provider in the part of the state where it operates.
“Without Lakeland PBS, many residents in its coverage area would have no access to television covering local issues,” the lawsuit states.
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