President Donald Trump is not the first Republican in office to go after the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Kennedy-era nonprofit that manages federal funding to thousands of local TV and radio stations. But he is the first one to succeed.
On July 18, Congress approved a $9 billion rescissions request that will claw back $1.1 billion in CPB funding, eliminating all federal support from NPR and PBS — which Trump has repeatedly called politically biased — and inflicting collateral damage on hundreds of local member stations.
“Federal funding has had bipartisan support for almost 50 years because of senators understanding the importance of public TV and radio to their very rural communities,” said Tami Graham, executive director of KSUT in southwestern Colorado. “They get it. I mean, they got it. They got it until now.”
KSUT was one of the first radio stations in the nation to be founded by a tribe, the Southern Ute Indians, and has continually focused its coverage on Indigenous affairs for the Southern Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, Jicarilla Apache in northern New Mexico and a large portion of the Navajo Nation. The radio is an important resource for connecting tribal nations in the region, Graham said, while also providing hyperlocal news and emergency alerts.
Graham runs one of 52 stations in Colorado that had its federal funding revoked in the bill, with many anticipating their next fiscal year on Oct. 1 with a sudden shortfall.
KSUT will be down $330,000, about 20% of its overall budget.
Nearby station KDUR, located on Fort Lewis College campus, is also slated to lose about 20% of its operating budget due to the cut, as reported by the Durango Herald. And KSJD, a third Durango-area station, lost one-third of its budget.
At KSUT, the 20% reduction means they have to reconsider national news segments, like Morning Edition and BBC programs, as well as local programs like Native Voice 1, an hourlong call-in talk show that focuses on Indigenous issues. Tribal stations reportedly have an opportunity to retrieve the revoked funds through a carveout in the bill, but Graham is skeptical that it will amount to anything.
“It’s sort of, at best, a Band-Aid, and at worst a backroom deal to get this bill to pass,” Graham said. “Even though we’re on that list I doubt we’ll ever see funds.”
In May, KSUT along with Colorado Public Radio and Aspen Public Radio sued Trump over an executive order to cut funding for NPR and CBS, arguing that the order violates their free speech.
“It’s especially difficult (with Native Voice 1) because, I mean, talk about an underserved community,” Graham said. “People in these areas don’t get their voices elevated nearly enough as they should.”
Not out of thin air
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been a target of various Republican presidents and lawmakers since its formation in 1967.
Fearing a decline of TV and radio shows from informational, educational and cultural programs to more saccharine content driven by ad revenue, Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, solidifying funding for stations to focus on programs “of human interest and importance.”
It didn’t take long — only five years and one administration change — before the newly formed network faced its first existential crisis. In 1972, President Richard Nixon vetoed continued funding for the network and continued to attack the corporations, upset by a news program, then anchored by Robert MacNeil and Sander Vanocur, that he called “the liberal hour” in internal White House memos.
President Ronald Reagan, President George H.W. Bush and U.S. Rep. Newt Gingrich have all tried a hand at dismantling public broadcasting, too, but were either voted down or backed out after discovering it politically untenable. Even deeply conservative areas listen to the radio, it turned out.
Some think that Trump was able to push the cut through because people simply don’t rely on public media as much as they used to, making it less of a political risk to cut its funding.
But that argument doesn’t seem sound to Graham.
“This argument we’ve been hearing a lot from Republicans is like, ‘Hey, it’s the modern day, people have access to lots of ways of getting information,’” Graham said. “Well, in rural areas, especially tribal communities, we may not have reliable internet or broadband signal, we may not have cell service. If there’s an emergency happening — a wildfire, a flood — people absolutely tune in to the radio. Their local radio.”
Tim Russo, station manager at KGNU in Boulder, made a similar point. KGNU lost $155,000, or 15% of its budget, for the upcoming fiscal year.
Their CPB funds are divided into unrestricted funds, which they use for facility maintenance, staff and equipment, and restricted funds, which are spent on program access from different stations and the public radio satellite system, where emergency alerts come in.
“You remember the Fourmile fires, the Gold Hill fires, the Jamestown flooding,” Russo said. “We’ve had our fill of climate-driven catastrophes, and we’ve got so many people that live in those rural foothills that turn to KGNU, because our volunteers can jump on that hyperlocal coverage in a way that the bigger stations can’t because they have to focus on the whole state.”
It’s this expansive volunteer network — Russo said they have more than 400 active volunteers at the station, about 200 of them producing on-air content as DJs or hosts — that allows them to be more nimble and community-driven than some other stations.
But it also means there isn’t much room for cuts.
“I bring that up to say that we run an extremely frugal budget as it is,” Russo said. “It’s thanks to all the volunteer and community support that we can run on a very tight budget. But that just means it’s going to be that much more difficult for us to balance a budget. Like many stations, we don’t have deep reserves.”
A rural double whammy
High Plains Public Radio operates KCSE, 90.7 FM in Lamar, reaching large portions of Prowers, Kiowa and Bent counties, as well as KZNK, 90.1 FM out of Brewster, Kansas, that reaches much of Yuma, Kit Carson and Cheyenne counties — covering a vast swath of Colorado’s Eastern Plains.
The funding takeback could stifle the reach of stations impacted by the loss of nearly $500,000 over two years, or about 15% of the budget, starting in October, Garden City, Kansas-based HPPR said. Its stations also blanket western Kansas and part of the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles.
Another roughly $68,000 in shared technology and support services that CPB has funded — things like music licensing fees — will have to be covered in other ways. In an announcement last week on HPPR’s website, executive director Quentin Hope outlined a plan to examine and cut costs while also using reserve funds to continue operations and plan for the future. He also noted that private fundraising work would be intensified and an endowment campaign developed with an eye toward financial independence.
In the short term, the HPPR station in Brewster could be affected because of the massive cost of its 100,000-watt facility — and one option for controlling expenses would be to dial down the power, said Abby Killingsworth, development director for HPPR.
“So instead of reaching the entirety of Kit Carson County, it could be, ‘Oh, you just crossed the state line and now you lost the service,’” she said. “It’s about that rural access, because one of the things we can control is how much we spend on power, and if we are forced to reduce our expenses, then that’s a lever we may have to pull.”
Given the region’s often extreme weather, she added, engineering and utility costs run much higher than the national average, even though its stations serve a small population relative to the geographic reach.
The CPB money largely allows public radio to reach areas that can’t sustain a broadcast through underwriting or membership, making the finances “a completely different equation” from larger metropolitan areas, Killingsworth explained. Even though HPPR reports a higher percentage of donors in its coverage areas than the national average and a higher average gift per donor, the lower population means that those areas are more reliant on public funding.
“These are committed folks in this region who want this service,” Killingsworth said. “We just simply don’t have the financial base to offset the loss of this funding in ways that the metro stations may have available. So that gets to the argument of the impact really weighing the heaviest on the rural stations.”
She noted that these changes have pointed HPPR toward getting back to the basics of its mission to enrich the educational, cultural and community life of our region, but the methodology will have to be adapted.
“Our focus is looking forward,” Killingsworth said. “We can’t change what’s been done, and it’s up to us to reinvent and redefine what the future of High Plains Public Radio looks like.”
At KGNU in Boulder, Russo said he has already seen community support start to fill in the gaps that the federal cuts are leaving behind. The same goes for KUNC, based in Greeley, covering northern Colorado. It’s the smaller, rural and tribal stations that Russo worries about.
“Community radios are very resilient, and I know that KGNU is going to lean into the community,” Russo said. “I just hope the community leans back, not just to KGNU, but all the community radio partners.”
Source link
