Trump’s War on the Media Has Found Its First Targets

Donald Trump is officially waging war on publicly funded journalism.

In a letter to PBS and NPR, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr announced that he was launching an investigation into the news organizations’ member stations, The New York Times reported Thursday.

“I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing Commercials,” Carr wrote in the letter. “In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.

“To the extent that these taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements, then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars,” Carr wrote.

Both NPR and PBS seem game for review.

“We are confident any review of our programming and underwriting practices will confirm NPR’s adherence to these rules,” said NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher in a statement Thursday. “We have worked for decades with the F.C.C. in support of noncommercial educational broadcasters who provide essential information, educational programming, and emergency alerts to local communities across the United States.”

In its own statement, PBS stood by its “noncommercial educational programming” and said it had worked “diligently to comply with the F.C.C.’s underwriting regulations.”

But attacking publicly funded media is all part of Trump’s master plan.

Project 2025, the authoritarian playbook for Trump’s second administration, called for the government to strip noncommercial education stations of their federal funding and licenses. Carr actually wrote the manifesto’s chapter on overhauling the FCC. After Trump announced Carr’s nomination, Carr pledged that the FCC under Trump “will enforce” laws that ensure media organizations act “in the public interest.”

Trump himself has repeatedly called to strip major broadcasters of their licenses whenever they fact-check him on his easily disproven lies. Publicly funded media, such as NPR, is no exception to Trump’s wrath.

In April, Trump declared in a Truth Social post that there would be “NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM!

“THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!” he wrote.

Earlier this month, MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene threatened to drag PBS before Congress so they could testify on their accurate reporting on Elon Musk’s apparent Sieg Heil.

RFK Jr. had no good explanation during his Senate confirmation hearing Thursday for his past peddling of dangerous, anti-Black misinformation about how white people and Black people process vaccines.

Senator Angela Alsobrooks, Maryland’s first Black senator, asked Kennedy about his previous comments, made in a 2021 interview. “You said the following, and I quote: ‘We should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites because their immune system is better than ours.’ Can you please explain what you meant?”

Kennedy immediately began to flail. “There’s a series of studies, most of them by Poland, that show that there are particular antigens that … Blacks have a much stronger reaction. There’s differences in reactions to different products by different race …”

‘I have 17 seconds left, so let me just ask you, so what different vaccine schedule would you say I should have received?” Alsobrooks asked, removing her glasses. “What different vaccine schedule should I have received?”

“I mean … the Poland article suggests that Blacks need fewer antigens …”

“Mr. Kennedy with all due respect, that is so dangerous,” said Alsobrooks. “Your voice would be a voice that parents would listen to, that is so dangerous. I will be voting against your nomination because your views are dangerous to our state and to our country.”

Alsobrooks is right. Experts say there is no validity to the study RFK Jr references. And furthermore, racial bias in pain diagnosis, or the assumption that Black people are inherently stronger or more tolerable to pain, has been hurting Black Americans for decades.

A preliminary report on Wednesday night’s plane and helicopter collision near Washington, D.C. contradicts Donald Trump’s favorite DEI scapegoat.

An internal report from the Federal Aviation Administration found that in reality, the tower’s staffing at Ronald Reagan National Airport (DCA) was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” according to The New York Times. There was only one air traffic controller to handle both helicopters and planes in the airport’s vicinity, a job usually assigned to two people.

Having to handle both types of air traffic can be complicated, the Times report states, because air traffic controllers can use different radio frequencies for helicopter and airplane pilots. In such cases, while the controller is communicating with pilots of both kinds of aircraft, the pilots may not be able to talk to one another.

Staffing levels at the airport’s control tower have been below adequate levels for years, like many of the U.S.’s other airports. DCA’s tower only had 19 fully certified controllers as of September 2023, according to congressional reports. This is well below the FAA and air traffic controller union’s preferred number of 30, and is due to employee turnover and budget cuts, according to the Times.

As a result, many air controllers at the airport work up to 10 hours a day and six days a week. Those levels probably have not been helped by Donald Trump’s federal hiring freeze, his gutting of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and the FAA chief’s resignation at Elon Musk’s behest. As much as Trump and the right might try to blame DEI or something else ludicrous, perhaps they should look in the mirror.

Robert F. Kennedy attempted Thursday to score a cheap political point against Senator Bernie Sanders by accusing the independent Vermont lawmaker of being bought out by the pharmaceutical industry—but he got his facts wrong.

“And by the way, Bernie, the problem of corruption is not just in the federal agencies. It’s in Congress too,” Kennedy said. “Almost all the members of this panel, including yourself, are accepting millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry and protecting their interests.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no,” Sanders said, raising his hand to quiet the applause that erupted from the gallery. “I ran for president like you. I got millions and millions of contributions. They did not come from the executives; not one nickel of PAC money from the pharmaceutical industry. They came from the workers.”

Sanders’s financial support from the health care industry stemmed from everyday workers, galvanized by his campaign promises of Medicaid for all and large-scale pharmaceutical reform.

“In 2020 you were the single largest receiver of pharmaceutical money,” Kennedy again insisted.

“Because I had more contributions from workers all over this country. Workers, not a nickel from corporate PACs,” Sanders continued, before he was cut off again by Kennedy, reiterating his point.

“Bernie, you were the single largest acceptor of pharmaceutical dollars. $1.5 million,” Kennedy said.

“Yeah, out of $200 million,” Sanders said, before reminding Kennedy that he had deflected from answering a question as to whether, under the “Make America Healthy Again” banner and as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, he would “guarantee health care to every single American.”

But Kennedy never had to answer that. Instead, Senator Markwayne Mullin interjected that Sanders had gone over his allotted time and was “battering the witness.”

Quiver Quantitative, a financial technology startup that provides data on insider trading and campaign contributions, listed no corporate PAC donors for Sanders—let alone any within the folds of the pharmaceutical industry. The company noted, however, that they do not currently track donations by industry employees.

Kennedy, meanwhile, has seemingly made a business out of his extreme public health stances. A disclosure form filed for his nomination revealed that the outspoken vaccine critic pulled in roughly $10 million over the last year related to dividends from his vaccine lawsuits, anti-vax speaking fees, and leading Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit dedicated to spreading misinformation about vaccine efficacy.

Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee boycotted a meeting Thursday to advance Russell Vought’s nomination to chair the Office of Budget and Management—but of course, Republicans still forged ahead to put his candidacy to a vote.

In a press conference ahead of the meeting, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer explained that in light of the OMB’s effort to “illegally freeze trillions of dollars” for federal funding for grants and loans, Democrats would “not move an inch to advance Mr. Vought’s nomination any further.”

“Make no mistake about it,” Schumer warned. “As long as Russell Vought is Donald Trump’s pick for OMB director, Americans can be virtually certain he will try again to illegally seize funding for their communities.”

Several other senators also spoke against Vought, tying him and his work on Project 2025 to Trump’s efforts to undermine federal funding appropriated and agreed to by Congress. The sudden freeze appeared to affect essential government services, and officials in multiple states reported having problems accessing programs such as Medicaid and Head Start.

In his chapter of Project 2025, Vought had written about how the president could have the power to slash government spending without the support of Congress, and his think tank the Center for Renewing America, or CRA, has repeatedly pushed the view that through “impoundment,” the president can pause, or even outright refuse to spend, the full amount of federally mandated funding that Congress has appropriated.

“You know what makes absolutely no sense? Confirming the mastermind of the last few days—of the last few days of chaos—to oversee our country’s budget again,” said Washington Senator Patty Murray.

Democrats urged that Vought’s confirmation should be postponed until the crisis was resolved—and that’s an issue that seems far from over. After the first memo was published Monday, a second memo came out two days later claiming that certain programs that would clearly be affected wouldn’t actually be.

Then a district judge issued a brief administrative stay on the order, then OMB rescinded the original memo, then Trump’s press secretary revealed that it wasn’t a real rescission. Finally, a federal judge agreed to grant a restraining order on the whole thing. And this was just within the past two days.

Republicans on the committee voted 11–0 Thursday to put Vought’s confirmation to a Senate vote.