If one were to ask KSUT Executive Director Tami Graham about the future of public radio in May, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order demanding that all federal funding for public media cease, her answer may have sounded bleak.
That was not the case on Friday, however, as Graham was headed home to Southwest Colorado from Washington, D.C. On Thursday, she, along with representatives from Colorado Public Radio, Aspen Public Radio and National Public Radio, represented by Colorado lawyer Steve Zansberg, testified in a lawsuit against the Trump Administration, arguing that the president’s order violated the First Amendment rights of those media outlets.
As of Friday, the court had yet to issue a ruling. But as she waited for a flight from Denver to Durango, Graham said she was optimistic that the ruling would be in their favor.
“I feel that we’re going to be victorious in this lawsuit, based on the comments and the questions that I heard directly from the judge,” she said.
Trump’s executive order, titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” directed that all federal funding, allocated by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to NPR, cease because the news outlets’ coverage was “biased.” Additionally, public radio and TV stations were ordered to stop using Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant funding to purchase content from NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service.
Congress later passed legislation canceling out $1.1 billion in funding for public media sources. KSUT lost $333,587 in funding, Graham said.
However, as KSUT and its fellow plaintiffs argued, the executive order violated the will of Congress and “the First Amendment’s bedrock guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of association.” Though Congress’ ruling remains, the lawsuit is relevant because Trump’s executive order essentially intimidated news sources into not publishing certain things – a free speech violation, she said.
“I mean, it’s intimidation,” Graham said. “Attempting to tell us how we can spend our federal grant dollars is viewpoint discrimination.”
According to the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court considers laws regulating certain speech to be unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination “when it regulates speech based on its specific motivating ideology or the speaker’s opinion or perspective.”
“(The order) has a chilling effect on our First Amendment rights of freedom of the press to make our own editorial choices,” Graham said.
She said cutting federal funding for public radio stations makes it more difficult to distribute local and national news in rural areas across the country – places referred to as “news deserts.”
“The reason KSUT was founded in the first place by the Southern Ute Tribe in 1976 was because they wanted to have a means of direct communication where people, especially elders, could be in their homes in remote places and know what was going on with their tribe, and that mission holds today,” she said. “There’s not nearly enough local outlets producing content, which is so important to the foundation of democracy, holding power to account.”
Good journalism, like what KSUT and NPR strive to produce, involves gathering multiple sources and undergoing rigorous fact-checking, Graham said.
That sometimes conflicts with how those in power want the public to perceive their actions, and why media outlets are sometimes labeled as biased, she said. Politicians have become increasingly unwilling to talk to outlets they claim are biased, denying perspectives and source of information to the public.
“(Our reporting) has to be upheld to certain standards, like getting multiple sources with different viewpoints,” Graham said. “That’s what the American people need and want: varying perspectives. But you have to have people willing to talk to the media in the first place.”
She said she has two sources of hope after a year of highs and lows: the first being the case the plaintiffs presented in the lawsuit, and the second being community support for KSUT.
“We eclipsed all of our fundraising records in fiscal year 2025 because of the way our community and region stepped up knowing that we were losing our federal funding,” she said. “We’re not completely out of the woods. Who knows what’s going to happen in the future with federal funding. But for fiscal year 2026, I feel like we're going to be OK.”
Graham said community support made her proud to be fighting the administration in court – both for the community service but also to uphold First Amendment guarantees.
“The First Amendment is worth fighting for,” she said. “This was really important for us to step up and make a stand, because it’s a slippery slope. I feel really proud to be in this position.”
sedmondson@durangoherald.com
