As a $1.1 billion federal budget cut looms over the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that funds both NPR and PBS, local public radio stations and television affiliates are at risk of going under, an outcome that will ultimately devastate civic life in small towns, experts told TheWrap.
The move is part of the Trump administration’s $9 billion rescission package, which the Senate and House approved Thursday, putting into play the cuts that have been dangling over the CPB for months.
While the corporation’s largest properties NPR and PBS will survive with a tighter budget, more than a thousand NPR affiliates and 330 PBS member stations will feel the weight of the cuts the hardest.
“This is going to represent job loss,” president and executive director of Public Media Content Collective Abby Goldstein told TheWrap. “If you’re a small rural station and you don’t have a lot of donors in your area, your opportunity to raise money is much smaller, so you depend more heavily on other revenue. That federal appropriation represents a lifeline to a lot of those smaller organizations.”
The impact is devastating and wider than just the loss of “Sesame Street.” As rural, low-income communities see less representation in their local media coverage and even less so on a national level, it will further widen the gap between socio-economic classes. The lack of local media outlets could also lead to delayed emergency alert responses and less scrutiny of community governing, causing greater damage and opening the door for political corruption.
“What could happen is there’s nobody watching the local government, the city council or the county government,” said Nick Roman, a public radio veteran who spoke to TheWrap. “There’s nobody keeping track of a significant amount of taxpayer money in communities that is controlled by elected government.”
“We have to keep shining the light,” Goldstein said. “That’s the whole role of journalism in this country. It is a pillar of our democracy. Without that pillar of democracy, corruption runs rampant.”
The effort to “defund” the CPB came in May when Trump signed an executive order threatening budget cuts to the public media broadcasters. As a result, NPR and PBS sued the Trump White House, saying the order is a case of “viewpoint discrimination.” Trump snapped back, calling NPR and PBS government-funded “left-wing propaganda.”
Trump wasn’t alone, with lawmakers like Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota calling the CPB an example of “wasteful spending” as Congressional Republicans took on the president’s task.
Not all Republicans backed the president, though. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was one of 10 Republican senators who signed a rare public letter to Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, demanding that he reverse a decision to withhold roughly $7 billion in congressionally approved state funding meant to bolster educational programs. But only two of those senators, Murkowski and Maine Sen. Susan Collins, voted against the federal budget cuts Thursday.
Now, the NPR and PBS stations are forced to deal with the ramifications.
“These cuts will significantly impact all of our stations, but will be especially devastating to smaller stations and those serving large rural areas. Many of our stations which provide access to free unique local programming and emergency alerts will now be forced to make hard decisions in the weeks and months ahead,” PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger said. “There is nothing more American than PBS. Despite today’s setback, we are determined to keep fighting to preserve the essential services we provide to the American public.”
NPR president and CEO Katherine Maher denounced the House vote late Thursday, calling it an “unwarranted dismantling of beloved local civic institutions, and an act of Congress that disregards the public will.”
While PBS only anticipates a roughly 16% loss and NPR around 2%, smaller affiliate stations – especially in low-income parts of the country – will be more hurt by the cuts. These local stations depend on federal CPB funding for 25% to even 50% of their overall budgets as viewers are less likely to have spare cash to send.
For Cheryl Devall, general manager of Lafayette-based NPR affiliate KRVS Public Media, the loss of federal funding means a greater reliance on listeners. With only five full-time staffers and volunteers to fill the gaps, the station is already a lean operation.
“The loss of close to $200,000 a year in federal grants will mean that listener and philanthropic money will play an increasingly important role in maintaining daily operations at KRVS,” she said in a statement to TheWrap.
Devall added that the station has already had to cut back on the national programs they air. The station has stopped airing “This American Life” and “Snap Judgment,” saving the station about $10,000 a year.
One less watchdog
The Lafayette station is not the only one that will face tough decisions in the coming years. SoCal public radio veteran of 44 years Roman told TheWrap that while his Los Angeles-based station KPCC will likely survive, smaller stations across the state will “be badly hurt” and that a number of them will likely go off the air.
His time as a host at LAist and other publicly funded stations in the SoCal region allowed him to cover stories that national publications could not follow. Roman’s worry for the future of public broadcasting is the lack of oversight.
But ultimately, Roman’s primary concern is the loss of community and representation across the board. When local stations go to the wayside, so do stories of small-town successes and failures.
“We’re not thinking about what’s happening in your town anymore. You’re thinking about what’s happening in Washington,” he said. “If you’re only focused on what’s happening in Washington, D.C., you’re not looking at your local town anymore, and that’s bad for all of us.”
“Life and death”
Smaller communities with a lack of national media attention face a real danger of becoming news deserts, leaving constituents disenfranchised and disillusioned by media at large.
Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania, told TheWrap that some of the stations hit the hardest by the budget cuts “will indeed go completely under.” But his primary concern for these communities could be a lack of emergency alert systems.
“It is potentially a life and death matter when you’ve got an emergency where your local public media outlet is your lone source of reliable local news and information, and that’s what will be potentially wiped out by these funding cuts,” he said. “So these communities, which ironically tend to be Republican voters, they will become news deserts.”
These news deserts are a significant problem when dealing with very local emergencies. The nation saw one just this month in Texas, when 134 people died in devastating floods. What happens when the next violent weather event hits a small community?
“It’s really crucial in a time when climate patterns are so unpredictable and volatile,” Erica Scharrer, a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told TheWrap. “If we’re in a news desert, and the closest proximity we have to relevant news is a city that’s 50 to 60 miles away, how will news spread if there’s some kind of tragedy or need for emergency response?”
Think of the children
For generations, PBS has been a hub for children’s entertainment. With shows like “Sesame Street,” “Reading Rainbow” and “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” PBS Kids has raised decades of children.
Trump has called NPR and PBS government-funded “left-wing propaganda,” and Republicans called for cuts to public broadcasting because of this perceived liberal slant of programming. The publicly funded broadcaster has long been an affordable option for families as opposed to increasingly expensive streaming services like Disney+ or YouTube premium.
Daniel Anderson, UMass Amherst professor emeritus in the department of psychological and brain sciences, warned that budget cuts to PBS could severely hurt the broadcaster.
“The cuts would damage PBS Kids, perhaps terminally. PBS is the only television network that is dedicated to making positive TV content for children,” Anderson said in a statement to TheWrap. “The effectiveness of their programming is always backed up by research. Other networks and streaming services may sometimes provide excellent kids’ content, but that is hit or miss, not part of their core mission.”
While YouTube has become a new hub for user-generated children’s entertainment, with creators like Ms. Rachel, childhood development expert Erica Scharrer posited that it lacks the research that PBS has implemented for decades.
“What most, if not all, of the content on YouTube that’s not redistributed from something like PBS lacks is research behind what is actually good for kids and how can kids learn,” she said. “PBS employs educational consultants who are experts in child psychology development … They do formative research before shows even hit the airwaves and evaluative research after shows are circulating to make sure that they’re not just liked by kids, but also helpful for kids, beneficial to kids, and that’s what a lot of YouTube is lacking.”
Without proper funding for this entertainment, there will be a widened gap in the American education system, especially in the formative pre-K years. Additionally, viewers may now have to pay up for a service that had always been a “public good.”
“That’s kind of the opposite of how public media is intended to be,” Scharrer added.
Heading backwards
As federal funding cuts attempt to stifle local news media, Pickard lamented that the slashed budgets are part of a greater trend.
“In global comparison, the U.S. was already off the chart for how little we were allocating towards our public media,” the University of Pennsylvania professor of media policy and political economy said. “We’re going in the opposite direction from what every other democracy on the planet has done … So it’s a dangerous experiment.”
While Trump may celebrate this win in the near term, the country may face the ramifications for reduced local public media for years to come.