CPB will dissolve following unanimous board vote
Dru Sefton / Current
CPB is expected to file formal documents to dissolve the nonprofit this month after last year’s rescission of federal funding, court records show.
The nonprofit, authorized by Congress with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, let go of most of its staff at the end of September and entered a “wind-down” phase after Congress rescinded its forward-funded $535 million in annual appropriations for fiscal years 2026 and 2027.
Still, CEO Patricia Harrison said at an August board meeting that a wind-down was “not a dissolution,” leaving open the possibility CPB could continue in a scaled-back form.
But CPB announced Monday that its board had decided that without resources, maintaining the corporation as a “nonfunctional entity” would not serve the public interest or advance public media’s goals.
Court documents also filed Monday in CPB’s case against President Donald Trump and other administration officials reveal that CPB’s board unanimously voted Dec. 10 to formally dissolve the corporation. The documents state CPB intends to file a notice of its voluntary dissolution “on or about” Jan. 15 and its Articles of Dissolution “on or about” Jan. 30.
“What has happened to public media is devastating,” Chair Ruby Calvert said in the release. “After nearly six decades of innovative, educational public television and radio service, Congress eliminated all funding for CPB, leaving the Board with no way to continue the organization or support the public media system that depends on it.”
Calvert added she remains convinced that public media will survive and that a new Congress will “address public media’s role in our country because it is critical to our children’s education, our history, culture and democracy to do so.”
Harrison said in the release that CPB was protecting the integrity of the public media system by dissolving “rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks.”
The news release added that a “dormant and defunded CPB could have become vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse, threatening the independence of public media and the trust audiences place in it, and potentially subjecting staff and board members to legal exposure from bad-faith actors.”
CPB plans to complete distribution of its remaining funds according to Congress’ intent, the release said.
The nonprofit’s archives will be preserved in a partnership with the University of Maryland and will be accessible to the public, the release said. CPB will also support the American Archive of Public Broadcasting as it digitizes and preserves historic content.
CPB had announced in October that it had finished negotiations to pay music licensing agreements for public media organizations through the end of 2027. PBS and NPR are expected to manage the agreements going forward.
“Public media remains essential to a healthy democracy,” Harrison said. “Our hope is that future leaders and generations will recognize its value, defend its independence, and continue the work of ensuring that trustworthy, educational, and community-centered media remains accessible to all Americans.”
“After nearly six decades of innovative, educational public television and radio service, Congress eliminated all funding for CPB…”
No, that is not an accurate description. After perhaps four decades of doing all of those things, and then another couple of decades of descent into overt identitarianism among other things, only then did this happen.
There was a long time where almost all I ever watched, and almost all I ever listened to, was one version of public broadcasting or another. Morning with Morning Edition, afternoons with All Things Considered, and excellent local (Los Angeles) shows on KCRW and KPCC, evenings with the MacNeil- Lehrer News Hour and its later iterations, Nova and BBC imports, and spectacular music programming on KCRW into the wee hours. Weekends with A Prairie Home Companion, Says You, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and an early incarnation of This American Life.
I don’t mean this to sound like an autobiography, but to point out that there was once a not small population of people like me, but when these outlets that we once loved slowly, then more rapidly, devolved from a bastion of rationality and culture to becoming grossly ideological, almost antithetical to its former self… That was enough.
For me, the end of Public Broadcasting as we knew it is something that happened a long time ago. This is just the denouement.