Filmmaker Ken Burns said it’s “shortsighted” to eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as public media has become a target of the White House in recent months.
“This seems foolhardy and seems misguided, mainly because there is a perception among a handful of people that this is somehow a blue or a left-wing thing,” Burns said of cutting funds to PBS in an interview that aired Sunday on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
President Trump signed an executive order in May instructing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the private nonprofit that serves as the steward of the funding to public media, to cease federal funding for PBS and NPR. Then in June, the House approved a request from the White House to claw back $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The package is expected to be taken up by the Senate in the coming weeks as the White House has targeted the public media entities, claiming they have “spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’”
Burns, whose upcoming film “The American Revolution” is expected to air on PBS in November and has had more than 40 documentaries on the public broadcaster, told “CBS Evening News” co-anchor John Dickerson that he’s worried about PBS’ future, noting that he’s “always been worried about it.”
The filmmaker recalled testifying before congressional committees in the 1990s about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He likened PBS to the “Declaration of Independence applied to the communications world,” saying it’s “bottom up.”
The funding cuts are “shortsighted,” Burns said, because “it mainly serves rural areas in which the PBS signal may be the only signal they get.”
Burns stressed that PBS has children’s programming, continuing education, information on homeland security, crop reports and weather emergencies, saying, “that, we’re going to take away?”
“I just think that maybe we’re throwing the baby out with the bath water,” Burns said.
The filmmaker also noted that his films wouldn’t be possible without PBS, saying he wouldn’t be afforded the time it takes to produce his films elsewhere.
“I couldn’t do any of the films I’ve done without them being on PBS,” Burns said, noting that streaming services or cable “wouldn’t give me 10 years.”
Of his work, Burns said many of the projects have “taken time to incubate, and that has been under the system that has one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other proudly out, kind of like the National Parks or the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape.”
“These are really good American institutions that represent everybody from the bottom up, which is what it’s always about,” Burns said. “That’s the essence of what Thomas Jefferson was talking about.”
Kaia Hubbard is a politics reporter for CBS News Digital, based in Washington, D.C.
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