For decades, Republicans threatened to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) only to stay those cuts in exchange for more conservative-friendly programming.
It was a surprisingly libertarian twist this month, then, when the Republican-controlled Congress passed the White House's recission bill that eliminated funding for the CPB—an institution that subsidizes National Public Radio (NPR), the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and their local affiliates, among other operations.
As noncommercial broadcasting adjusts to a world without federal subsidies, the Trump administration is trying to force a sale of the social media company TikTok's U.S. operations from its China-based owner ByteDance to a new consortium of American investors.
