Eulogy for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

Let’s not mourn the CPB; let’s start thinking of how we can build something better

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Joni Mitchell once sang, “don’t it always seem to go you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone” in her famous and well-covered environmental anthem.

Well, folks, the big yellow taxi took away our Corporation for Public Broadcasting Monday.

For more than half a century, we had the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) distributing our tax dollars to public radio and television stations across the nation, both big and small. It’s impact was most felt in small and rural communities, where public broadcasting was used to transmit emergency community information and local community news.

On Monday, the CPB board of directors voted to disband and officially close down. This is because in August 2025, Congressional Republicans managed to pass a resolution to rescind funding for CPB. They have the majority in both the Senate and the House, and the vote landed along party lines.

For those 58 glorious years, from the time an act of Congress created the CPB to the time it defunded it, public broadcasting stations around the country educated millions of people with free information, thanks in part to that funding. It was a large portion of the budget for some stations and a small portion of the budget for others.

John Dewey talked about the concept of public media back in the 1920s, when radio was beginning to be used as a medium to spread information. Back then, the idea of public media was that information was for the good of the public, and using the means of communication to get information to the public was essential. The most modern form of communication at the time, radio, should be in the hands of the public.

When CPB was formed in 1967, television was technology of the day, but radio was still dominant.

The idea for CPB was brilliant: an independent nonprofit corporation to receive the government funding that could then distribute it to the public media stations. It put a barrier between the government money and the radio and television stations so they could operate without the political whims of the day. Their programming could include Mister Roger’s Neighborhood and Sesame Street for children — thought of as quite progressive in their early days — and news programming that met journalistic standards without feeling government interference.

Little has changed since then. And a lot has changed.

From early on, there were some who decried that the government money was funding propaganda: Sesame Street showed interracial couples; Mr. Rogers preached empathy and showing feelings; the news was not conservative enough. 

Programming has remained too progressive for right wing politicians, and there were several attempts over the years to defund CPB before the vote in August 2025.

But public broadcasting is more than just programming. It has advanced technology and even accessibility.

WGBH in Boston houses the Media Access Group, which was instrumental in developing closed captions and audio descriptions for television programming and not only does the closed captioning for GBH television programming, but also for some companies you may have heard of, including Amazon Studios, Universal, CBS, Sony Pictures, Viacom, and USA.

For better or worse, the media industry is changing. Radio and television are no longer the main mediums of information distribution. Newspapers, once thought stable mainstays of local and national news, lost ground. Some news outlets are trying nonprofit tax status to survive, with many exploring the same ideas of public information that Dewey espoused.

Meanwhile, audiences are getting their news, whether it originates from television, radio, or print, from social media, emailed newsletters, and other digital means. When the CPB was formed, no one dreamed there would ever be a TikTok or an Instagram or a Bluesky.

The government funding for public radio and television was vital. Many countries see fit to fund news: the UK funds the BBC through a television licensing fee and Australia makes government news grants available, for example.

Let us not mourn the CPB. Let’s plan for the someday when we rebuild it better.

We can someday rebuild the CPB. We need that independent nonprofit corporation that receives the government money, then distributes it to media outlets to keep a firewall between the government and the outlet.

When we rebuild the CPB in its new form someday, we make the funding less vulnerable to political whims.

When we rebuild it, we provide even stronger funding — because truly, the funding was never enough in the first place.

And, when we rebuild it, let’s broaden our horizons on types of media to include print and digital print, audio including podcasts, and web video so that more free high quality information —  especially news —  is available to educate the public, as John Dewey would have imagined it.

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Stacy Kess is the chief of editorial for Equal Access Public Media. She previously worked as an editor and reporter at papers across the U.S. Find her on Bluesky at @stacykess.

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