PBS receives roughly 15 percent of its $373 million operating budget from the federal government. In addition to its member stations and on-demand streaming shows, some of the money goes to Independent Lens, the weekly series through which PBS airs documentary films. They often have to do with racism.
The 2022 Independent Lens flick Racist Trees, for example, chronicles a black neighborhood in the overwhelmingly liberal “LGBTQ haven” of Palm Springs, Calif. The neighborhood’s residents feel that a “wall of trees” that lines a nearby golf course was “intentionally planted to exclude and segregate” the neighborhood, and want the trees removed.
“They say that these trees are not racially motivated, that they were not racially planted there,” one interviewee says in the film. “They can prove that by one simple act. Remove the trees.”
Other Independent Lens documentaries similarly center on claims of racism, misogyny, and homophobia. There’s Our League, the story of a transgender woman who “comes out to her old-school Ohio bowling league.” There’s also Ferguson Rises, a documentary in which PBS shadows the father of Michael Brown. And in Breaking the News, PBS documents the “women and LGBTQ+ journalists” who launched nonprofit newsroom The 19th to “buck a broken news media system.” One interviewee in the film argues that it’s easier for a white woman “to vote in space than it is for a black woman to vote in Philadelphia.”
It’s documentaries like those that have motivated the Trump administration to call to scrap taxpayer funds for PBS. The White House plans to ask Congress to rescind $1.1 billion in federal funding for the entity that funds NPR and PBS, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. PBS has hired Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with deep ties to the Trump administration, to push back.
Those funds help keep most Independent Lens films, including Racist Trees, free to watch online. Some episodes, however, require a subscription to PBS Passport, which provides unlimited access to offerings like Breaking the News. The subscription costs $60 a year and is tax-deductible.
In addition to taxpayer funding, Independent Lens receives funding from the left-wing Ford Foundation and MacArthur Foundation, according to its website.
