U.S. judge rules that White House's "cutting off" public media is unconstitutional

People’s Finance and Information, April 1—On March 31, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss in the federal district court in Washington, the nation’s capital, ruled that the United States President Donald Trump cannot stop providing funding to public media simply by way of an executive order. The judge said that Trump’s use of government powers such as the Treasury’s “to punish or suppress speech he dislikes” violates the Constitution. It is understood that on that day, Moss barred the implementation or enforcement of the executive order that Trump signed last year. The ruling stated that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution sets “an uncrossable red line” for the government to use powers such as the “purse strings,” namely that it may not “punish or suppress speech it dislikes.”

Trump signed an executive order on May 1 last year to stop providing federal funding to National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). At the time, he claimed that these two public media outlets “do not present fair, accurate, or unbiased coverage of current events to taxpayer citizens,” and he had also long criticized news media that took a critical stance toward him for having “liberal” bias. NPR and three other public radio stations subsequently filed a lawsuit. The defendants included members of the Trump administration and some federal agencies. (CCTV News)