The PBS chief said that the executive decree of American president Donald Trump aimed at reducing public subsidies to the broadcaster and the NPR radio network was obviously illegal.
The CEO of the Public Broadcasting Service, Paula Kerger, said that the president's order “threatens our ability to serve the American public with educational programming, as we have done in the past 50 years”.
“We are currently exploring all the options to allow PBS to continue serving our member stations and all the Americans,” said Kerger.
Trump signed the prescription late Thursday, alleging “prejudices” in broadcasting reports.
The ordinance requests the public distribution company and other federal agencies of “ceasing federal funding” for the PBS and national public radio and also requires that they work to eliminate indirect public funding sources for press organizations.
The White House, in a publication on social networks announcing the signature, said that points of sale “receive millions of taxpayers to spread radical, awake from propaganda disguised as” news “.”
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which surrounds public funding from the two services, said it was not a federal executive agency subject to Trump's orders.
The president earlier this week said that he was drawing three of the five members of the remaining CPB board of directors, threatening his ability to do a job and was immediately prosecuted by CPB to arrest him.
The vast majority of public funds for services go directly to its hundreds of local stations, which operate on a combination of government funding, donations and philanthropic subsidies.
Small market stations depend particularly on public money and the most threatened by the sections of the genre that Trump offers.
Diffusers in the reticle
Public broadcasting has been frequently threatened by Republican leaders in the past, but local ties has largely allowed them to escape reductions with legislators who did not want to be seen responsible for closing their districts.
But the current threat is considered the most serious in the history of the system.
It is also Trump's last decision and his administration to use federal powers to control or institutions of hamstrings whose actions or points of view with which they do not agree.
Since his entry into office for a second term in January, Trump has ousted the leaders, has put the staff on administrative leave and cut hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to artists, libraries, museums, theaters and others.
Trump also pushed to retain federal funds for research and education of universities and to punish law firms unless they accept to eliminate diversity and other measures that he found reprehensible.
ADVERTISEMENTTwo weeks ago, the White House said that it would ask the Congress to cancel the funding of the CPB as part of a bunch of cups of $ 9.1 billion (8 billion euros).
This set, however, that the director of the Russell Vought budget would probably be the first of many, has not yet been sent to Capitol Hill.
This decision against PBS and NPR comes when Trump's administration worked to dismantle the American agency for the world media, notably Voice of America and Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, which have been designed to model independent news gathering in the world in societies that restrict the press.
These efforts faced a repression of the federal courts, which judged in some cases that the Trump administration may have exceeded its authority for restraint of the appropriate funds at the points of sale by the congress.
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