National Public Radio promised to fight a presidential executive order cutting off its federal funding, and now that's exactly what it's doing. The public broadcaster—which, along with PBS, was targeted by President Trump's executive order earlier this month accusing them of being "biased media"—filed a lawsuit on Tuesday morning against the White House. The complaint says that the administration has illegally blocked funds that were set aside by Congress for the broadcasters via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in a form of "textbook retaliation," reports the AP. Named as defendants in the complaint, per NPR: Trump himself, as well as White House budget chief Russell Vought, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Maria Rosario Jackson, former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts.
"It is not always obvious when the government has acted with a retaliatory purpose in violation of the First Amendment," NPR says in a legal brief, which was filed in the District of Columbia on its behalf and that of three Colorado public radio stations. "But this wolf comes as a wolf," the brief adds, noting that Trump's executive order went after NPR and PBS "expressly because, in the president's view, their news and other content is not 'fair, accurate, or unbiased.'" According to NPR, the "wolf" remark was pulled from a 1988 dissent by late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
The Trump executive order "is a clear violation of the Constitution and the First Amendment's protections for freedom of speech and association, and freedom of the press," says NPR CEO Katherine Maher in a statement, per KSUT. "The Supreme Court has ruled numerous times over the past 80 years that the government does not have the right to determine what counts as 'biased.'" KSUT, founded by the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, is one of the three Colorado stations joining NPR's complaint; the other two are Colorado Public Radio and Aspen Public Radio. (More NPR stories.)
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