Rachel Maddow called President Donald Trump’s scheme to take down PBS, NPR and other independent news platforms the “Viktor Orbán playbook,” saying a series of sweeping cuts would resemble what the Hungarian president did in his country to control the media.
“This is what they call the Viktor Orbán playbook for using the power of government to eliminate independent, credible, professional journalism,” Maddow said during a segment of her MSNBC show “The Rachel Maddow Show.” “Using the power of the government to hurt journalism as much as possible, weaken it as much as possible to try to drive independent, capable professional media out of business and into ruin so that it goes away, and the only thing that’s left is, for a lack of a better term, state TV.”
The MSNBC anchor pointed to Trump’s past legal battles with local newspapers, bringing it Newsday’s plans to sue Trump ally Bruce Blakeman, the executive of Nassau County, New York, over “a violation of First Amendment rights.” Per the Long Island Daily, the county is “repeatedly obstructing” the newspaper’s access to information that is says is crucial to the “local communities Newsday has been serving for decades” by removing them from the county’s “media lists for the distribution of crucial information and announcements.”
Maddow’s second example was the Trump administration’s probe into NPR and PBS. DOGE head Elon Musk drew a bead on National Public Radio, posting “Defund NPR” on X.
“They’ve opened an investigation into how NPR and PBS stations state on the air who their underwriters are. NPR and and PBS are public broadcasting, so they don’t accept ads, per say, but they do accept sponsorships,” Maddow said, listing some of the types of businesses that typically sponsor the organizations, like local shops or music bands. “When you’re watching something on PBS or listening to something on NPR, you will hear them tell who their sponsors are. It’s part of how NPR and PBS stations stay financially viable and sustainable, and honestly, locally grounded in their local communities because a lot of their underwriting is from local businesses, right?”
She continued: “That is what they are going after them for this time. They’re saying that their underwriting is somehow wrong. The way they state the names of their underwriters, that’s illegal somehow. This is a new approach. This is not the usual blunt force Republican attack of threatening to take away their federal funding. Federal funding only makes up a fraction of the budgets of NPR and PBS … They going at the way these stations are sustainably and locally making money to keep their programs on the air.”
She concluded her breakdown with the Trump Administration removing office space at Pentagon that four major news outlets, including NPR, NBC, NPR and Politico, used at the federal building. Maddow mentioned that while it doesn’t mean the publications are banned from reporting at the Pentagon, their jobs will just be a lot more difficult because they won’t have around-the-clock, direct access to the Pentagon when government decisions are made. Maddow says Trump’s actions aren’t the usual for a president.
“This is not just your typical political thing where you’ve got somebody in the White House or somebody in politics complaining about press coverage,” Maddow said. “It’s not even the typical thing with Trump calling the press ‘the enemy’ of the people or whatever Stalinist thing he’s onto now … “He can’t simply close newspapers or imprison journalists. Instead, he sets about undermining independent news organizations in subtler ways, using bureaucratic tools such as tax law, broadcast licensing and government contracting.”
The post Rachel Maddow Breaks Down Trump Plans to Drive PBS, NPR and Independent News Media ‘Into Ruin’ | Video appeared first on TheWrap.
