Massive budget shortfalls, vicious in-fighting and a power shift in Washington. Make no mistake, public media is facing the biggest ever threat to its existence.
This time, the haters are deadly serious. And they have timing on their side.
At stake are hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding and the future of such popular programs as "Nova," "This American Life" and "Sesame Street."
And while public media has long been a favorite target for Republican lawmakers, the mounting federal deficit -- coupled with a series of PR blunders -- mean that threats to slash government aid to non-profit stations are no longer just idle boasting.
Should the government turn off the spigot, National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service will likely have enough corporate and donor support to limp along, but jobs will be lost and popular shows will have to be canceled. On a local level, some of the thousands of public television and radio stations will almost certainly have to close up shop.
“There has been a longtime hate affair between the political right and public TV and radio," Martin Kaplan, director of the USC's Norman Lear Center, told TheWrap. "As the culture wars have flared on and off, the attacks on them for failing to be on the same side of the barricade have grown more intense.”
Broadcast veterans and analysts say that the Republican party’s newfound control of congress may spell the end of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- the organization that distributes parts of the federal largesse to non-profit media.
Armed with the backing of President Obama’s deficit reduction committee, congressional leaders are gunning for the CPB and its $420 million budget. Support from the CPB accounts on average for 15 percent of funding for the more than 1,100 public radio and television stations around the country.
CPB has requested $608 million for its next funding cycle, which begins in 2013. So far, the current constellation of Republicans in the House and Senate do not seem inclined to grant that request.
“With record debt and unemployment, there’s simply no reason to force taxpayers to subsidize liberal programming they disagree with” Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) said in introducing legislation last October to cut CPB funding.
To compound the problem, when the leadership of PBS, NPR and the CPB trudge up the steps of congress to plead their case, they’ll find it’s not the same group of Republicans that cropped up the last time the party regained control. The band of moderates, who might be more willing to back public media as a necessary expenditure, has dwindled to near extinction.
“They're way to right of the Republican party of 1994 that came in with Newt Gingrich. NPR is the bête noire of the Republican right,” Raphael Sonenshein, a professor of political science at Cal State Fullerton. “These people are more conservative to the point where the only media they see as legitimate is Fox, and everything else is unreliable.”
