NPR and PBS Reframe the Conversation as Trump Cuts Funding
KQED Headquarters, San Francisco – A two-day festival of ideas, innovations, and conversations with some of America’s most impactful journalists and thinkers was interrupted Thursday, with a breaking news announcement that President Trump issued an executive order to cease all federal funding to NPR and PBS.
The announcement came as Journalist Kara Swisher (Pivot, On with Kara Swisher) finished a talk with PBS Anchor Geoff Bennett, and implored the audience to support “critically important” public media.
This initial executive order Thursday, was just the starting gun to an all-out attack on funding to public arts, radio and TV stations. On Friday, hundreds of arts groups across the U.S. received emails notifying them of the withdrawal and termination of their National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants.
To take a stand for the local stations and programs you love, visit protectmypublicmedia.org.
The Reframe Festival brought together some of the most influential journalists in America, who asked us to rethink, adapt, and depolarize in a world that’s getting more chaotic by the minute.
Opening night hit hard, with former U.S. Labor Secretary and UC Berkeley Professor Robert Reich and tech journalist Kara Swisher taking the stage at the Sydney Goldstein Theater.
Reich, always sharp, asked the big questions: Who is government really for? Is it mostly for the wealthy, the white, and the well-educated—or is it for all of us? He laid out the ways our democracy has been redirected, step by step, to land us where we are now. His delivery was precise, urgent, and deeply human. Watch the talk with Robert Reich and Lisa Desjardins here.
Then came Kara Swisher, serving hilarious truths with a deadpan humor that was oddly reminiscent of the late Carrie Fisher. In conversation with PBS NewsHour’s Geoff Bennett, she painted a vivid picture of Silicon Valley’s power players. Swisher spun us a tale of overgrown boys with too much money and not enough oversight masquerading as visionary geniuses. She’s been in the tech trenches since the early days, following Jeff Bezos around while he looked for Amazon’s first office and visiting the Google garage before it became, well, Google.
“I know who they were, and I know who they are—a lot better than most people,” she said.
On Elon Musk: “Elon was a really interesting character. Right now you don’t want to say it… He was different and even thoughtful about a lot of the issues we faced. He’s changed—drastically in terms of that and all to the negative.”
She didn’t stop there. “We’ve had industrialists running things for a long time. It’s not a new fresh thing…What has happened is that it has become explicit. The explicit corruption is so clear and so easy to see. Which in some ways it’s kind of a good thing. Before, it was very backroom. In Elon’s case, he has been involved in a lot of interesting stuff. Some of it is PR. Some of it is P.T. Barnum.”
From there, the conversation swung through social media’s chaos, San Francisco’s resilience, and Trump’s scorched-earth effect on democracy. But Swisher ended on a hopeful note. “We’re either living a Star Wars life—which is a dark vision—or a Star Trek life. That’s what Steve Jobs told me. And I’d really like to live a Star Trek life.” The full talk can be seen here.
And then, reality crashed back in. (In minute 45, you can see the announcement of the executive order defunding NPR and PBS) It was a gut-punch reminder of what’s at stake.
Day 2
Day two of the festival didn’t let up. We heard from Nancy Pelosi, Lanhee Chen, and Wade Crowfoot. There were messages of urgency and hope, warnings about tariffs hitting working people where it hurts, and calls to stop letting political polarity eat us alive.
When beloved Bay Area choir Kitka took the stage, Executive Artistic Director Shira Cion told the crowd they’d just lost NEA funding mid-project. The moment landed like a stone in the chest.
ReFrame was funny. It was sobering. And it cracked open a thousand ways of thinking—ways that might actually help us reach across the political divide. The arts, journalism, and public truth-telling are under siege. But if we hold the line and support what matters, we might just get to live that Star Trek life if we are very lucky.
Day 2 of the Reframe Festival can be watched here
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You can support public media by visiting Protect My Public Media.
Howdy! My name is Katy Atchison and I'm an Associate Editor for Broke-Ass Stuart.
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