Weeks after Donald Trump declared that he was cutting federal funding for public broadcasters, PBS followed in NPR’s footsteps and sued the president to block his executive order, calling it unconstitutional and “blatant viewpoint discrimination.”
In the complaint that was filed in the U.S. District Court of Washington Friday, the network – which was joined by member station Northern Minnesota Public Television – accused the administration of violating the broadcaster’s First Amendment rights. The lawsuit also claimed that the executive order broke the laws that “forbid the President from serving as the arbiter of the content of PBS’s programming, including by attempting to defund PBS.”
