In May 1993, Kansas Sen. Bob Dole addressed the annual public radio conference at an early morning session, introduced as “one of the toughest critics of public broadcasting.”

Saying he shouldn’t be thought of as an enemy, Dole then gave the crowd a dose of the sardonic wit for which he was well known: “I’ve already had breakfast. And by the way, Big Bird never tasted better.”

When he ran for president three years later, Dole’s campaign issued a position paper including his stance on public broadcasting: Dole “opposed the establishment of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as well as the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities and supports their elimination.”

Although he didn’t succeed in his presidential bid, Dole’s position was perfectly in line with the Republican Party.

“Every Republican President since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) of taxpayer funding.”

That quote comes from the “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” also known as Project 2025. It calls for the elimination of this “tyrannical situation” in which “PBS and NPR do not even bother to run programming that would attract conservatives.”

Project 2025 calls for “the 47th President” to use their bully pulpit to persuade Congress — especially members of their own party — to support the total elimination of funding for public broadcasting: “CPB receives advance appropriations that provide them with funding two years ahead of time, which insulates the agency from Congress’s power of the purse and oversight. This special budgetary treatment is unjustified and should be ended.”

To be clear, CPB is not a government agency. It’s a private, nonprofit corporation created by an act of Congress in 1967 during the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The advance funding approach is intended to insulate public broadcasters from partisan politics.

It’s not surprising that President Donald Trump would follow through on Project 2025’s plan to eliminate funding from the budget, but as with many other actions he has taken recently, he chose to issue an executive order to accomplish the goal expeditiously. His order gives the CPB board until the end of June to revise its community service grants in a way that would “prohibit direct or indirect funding of NPR and PBS,” contending that “neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”

Signed May 1, the order “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media” also calls for the immediate cancellation of funding, ignoring the advanced funding formula intended to shield public media from political pressures.

The leaders of PBS (the Public Broadcasting Service) and NPR (National Public Radio) were quick to respond.

Katharine Meyer, NPR president and CEO, issued a statement the next morning: “The President’s order is an affront to the First Amendment rights of NPR and locally owned and operated stations throughout America to produce and air programming that meets the needs of their communities.”

Her counterpart at PBS, Paula Kerger, released a more terse statement referring to it as a “blatantly unlawful Executive Order, issued in the middle of the night.” She noted that PBS is exploring all options to continue with its mission.

While challenges to this executive order, which may well be overruled by the courts, are playing out, managers of local public broadcasting stations must consider how to deal with the potential loss of revenue. Stations receive grants directly from CPB and pass much of the money along to PBS and NPR to cover the cost of the national programming as well as to cover the cost of local productions and broadcast transmissions.

In a letter addressed to listeners of Kansas Public Radio, based at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, director Feloniz Lovato-Winston notes that federal funding amounts to 10% of the station’s budget.

“Critical funding for Kansas Public Radio is just steps away from being eliminated,” she writes, “and could result in a loss of approximately $244,000 per year.”

At KTWU, the PBS station licensed to Washburn University in Topeka, that figure is significantly higher at approximately $865,000, which is about 30% of the station’s budget, according to general manager Val VanDerSluis.

Stations in western Kansas, located in a less densely populated region, face even more challenging circumstances. From her office in Bunker Hill, Betsy Schwien, general manager of Smoky Hills PBS, which serves western Kansas, reports that federal funding accounts for about 48-49% of its annual budget.

At High Plains Public Radio, with offices in Garden City and Amarillo, Texas, the current annual operating grant of $222,000 from CPB amounts to about 15% of its annual budget.

“Without this funding,” says executive director Quentin Hope, “HPPR would be hard pressed to continue its current levels of service, including operating transmitters reaching the most rural areas of the High Plains.”

Such broadcasts to rural areas in Kansas can be traced to the early 1920s, when professors from Kansas State Agricultural College (now Kansas State University) drove over to Milford to present lectures on KFKB, a radio station operated by “the Goat Gland Doctor” — J.R. Brinkley. In 1924, K-State launched its own station, KSAC, broadcasting educational programming to listeners across Kansas and beyond.

When the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 was taking shape, the general manager of KSAC, Jack Burke, served as chairman of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. He played a key role in a lobbying effort to include radio in the legislation in addition to TV.

Ralph Titus, an announcer for KSAC (later identified as KKSU), joined the committee that determined how NPR would function. When the first edition of “All Things Considered” premiered on NPR in 1971, Titus was on air locally to welcome it. A timeline of KSAC’s history credits the station with providing more stories than any other in the nation during NPR’s first decade.

I should note that I used to be employed by public broadcasting in Kansas, serving as a producer and host of the “Sunflower Journeys” series as well as producing documentaries (like “Goat Gland Doctor,” narrated by Titus) and community affairs programs. I still produce documentaries that appear on public television occasionally, but I left my position at KTWU 10 years ago this month to return to my roots as an independent producer.

The effort to defund public broadcasting seems particularly alarming and sinister to me, as does the elimination of funding for institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, not to mention other draconian cuts that have been made in the name of “government efficiency.”

It raises serious questions about the objectives of those initiating these actions. Is this really only a matter of conservatives following through with their vision of America and making good on their promises to restore “family values” and the like?

Trump has denigrated and demonized journalists since he began campaigning, calling us “enemies of the people” and speaking of “witch hunts” and “fake news.” His executive order related to public broadcasting must be viewed in the broader context of his attacks on other media outlets, all of which suggests he’s following an “authoritarian playbook” to circumvent the Constitution and the safeguards built in to our system of democracy.

Will our congressional representatives take any actions to protect us? It doesn’t look very likely.

However, I did come across a series called “The Open Mind” featuring an extended interview with Sen. Jerry Moran that was distributed to PBS stations across the nation last year. Following a conversation over lunch at a small cafe in Hays, the host travels with Moran to Plainville, the small town where he grew up.

The conversation continues as they walk through the stacks of the Plainville Memorial Library, where Moran recalls the time when he worked at the library as a teenager, helping organize its collection according to the Dewey Decimal System. He obviously has an appreciation for libraries, which makes one curious about how he felt when Trump issued the executive order directed at the federal agency that provides grants to libraries and museums: the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

I also wonder what he thinks about how the director of the Library of Congress, Carla Hayden — the first woman and person of color to lead the world’s largest library — was summarily dismissed for no apparent reason, leaving the impression that it most likely relates to the administration’s fervor in eliminating any ostensible DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) hires.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt basically said as much: “There were quite concerning things she had done at the Library of Congress in pursuit of DEI.”

One of the recent additions to the vast archives of the Library of Congress during Hayden’s tenure did indeed have a considerable amount of content related to diversity and inclusion as well as equity. I can attest to that fact because I produced some of it.

In partnership with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, the LOC has become a repository for selected locally produced programming. I received notification from Rochelle Miller, the archives project manager, last spring that our local series about Kansas history and culture has been included: “Early seasons of ‘Sunflower Journeys’ are now preserved and stored by the Library of Congress for future generations.”

I contacted Moran’s office in Washington, D.C., to ask about his response to the recent order involving public broadcasting. Although an aide indicated that I might expect to receive a response for this piece, I had yet to receive one Tuesday.

The same is true for an inquiry I made of my U.S. representative, Derek Schmidt, who continues to revel in what he sees as great accomplishments of Trump, whose “first 100 days have been success after success — and he’s just getting started.”

That assessment is listed on a special page of the White House website, along with those of most other Republicans in Congress, including Sen. Roger Marshall, who echoes Schmidt’s assessment: “The President’s first 100 days is a return to American greatness.”

Do you suppose they also agree with and support Trump’s characterization of those employed by PBS and NPR as he posted on his Truth Social platform?

“RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS’ THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY!”

The only monster I’ve encountered in my years with public broadcasting is one who’s obsessed with cookies!

Dave Kendall served as producer and host of the “Sunflower Journeys” series on public television for its first 27 seasons and continues to produce documentary videos through his own company, Prairie Hollow Productions. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate.