Columbia Journalism Review: f the fire comes to the neighborhood and it doesn’t burn your house down, that doesn’t mean that the neighborhood wasn’t totally devastated,” Stewart Vanderwilt, the CEO of Colorado Public Radio (CPR), told me. Nationally, the landscape of public radio has been charred since last July, when Congress stripped more than a billion dollars from public broadcasting, at the behest of Donald Trump, who released an executive order characterizing NPR and PBS as “biased.” NPR prepared to file suit against the Trump administration in federal court, arguing that the stoppage of funds, via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, inhibited freedom of speech, in the form of viewpoint discrimination. CPR and two other Colorado stations, Aspen Public Radio and KSUT, opted in as coplaintiffs—which they were uniquely positioned to do, since they represent a breadth of listener demographics and operate independently of any risk-averse university board of regents. The case went into arguments in December; by January, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it would dissolve—casting the stakes of the case into sharp relief. This week, when highlighting supposed accomplishments of his first year in office, Trump mentioned defunding NPR and PBS: “I guess I heard they’re closed up,” he said. It has been a “long slog,” Katie Townsend, a lawyer at Gibson Dunn, which is representing NPR, told me.

Steve Zansberg, the lawyer for the three Colorado stations, recalled that the government’s justification for taking down public media included, among other things, a piece that NPR had run on “queer animals,” which “suggested the make-believe clownfish in Finding Nemo would’ve been better off as a female, that ‘banana slugs are hermaphrodites,’ and that ‘some deer are nonbinary.’” The story, delivered on an episode of NPR’s Short Wave (“science for everyone”), had noted that Finding Nemo would have been more accurate had it portrayed Nemo’s father transforming into a female, since clownfish often change sex. “I don’t know what it must have been like to be a fly on the wall in the room of DOJ lawyers and White House lawyers to pick these,” he told me. “Joni Mitchell famously said laughing and crying are the same release. You know, I choose to laugh at all of this because it is so farcical.” 

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