A lifelong resident of Portland, Oregon, Congressman Earl Blumenauer is one of Oregon's innovative leaders. Raised in SE Portland, Earl attended Centennial High School. While still a college student at Lewis and Clark College, he led the campaign in Oregon to lower the voting age. He was a key player just two years later as one of the youngest legislators in Oregon's history in a landmark session for school funding, ethics reform and Oregon's groundbreaking land use laws.
As a Multnomah County Commissioner and member of the Portland City Council, Earl's innovative accomplishments in transportation with light rail, bicycles and the street car, planning and environmental programs and public participation helped Portland earn an international reputation as one of America's most livable cities.
Congress created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in 1968 to promote the growth and development of public media throughout the U.S. Over the last four and a half decades, CPB has been the steward of federal funding, which goes directly to thousands of public television and radio stations across the country, supporting over 20,000 local jobs.
Public broadcasting – whether it's TV or radio – provides free, high-quality educational content to our children, in-depth news coverage from across the globe, and is one of the last remaining providers of locally produced and focused programming.
Earl is a long-time champion of public broadcasting, founding the Public Broadcasting Caucus in the 106th Congress to ensure the continued services of local public television and radio stations. He has led efforts to fight bills aimed at defunding public broadcasting. In 2011, he won both the Champion of Public Broadcasting Award from American Public Television Stations (APTS) and the Lowell Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for extraordinary efforts in public broadcasting, leadership at the national level, and education and professional development.
Earl has successfully fought back against the Trump Administration's efforts to cut all funding for the CPB. Defunding CPB would have negative impacts in every community across America, but would be especially harmful in smaller communities where public broadcasting is often the only source of local news available.
During the 2019 appropriations process, Earl successfully led nearly 200 of his colleagues in an effort for increased funding for both the Corportation for Public Broadcasting and the Ready to Learn program. He believes that without continued federal support, public media would lose its unique character that so many enjoy and have come to depend on and trust, and that the public broadcasting format of in-depth coverage cannot survive without federal seed money.