Public radio and television stations across the country are weighing cuts and possible alternative sources of funding a week after Congress narrowly passed President Donald Trump’s bill gutting the entire $1.1 billion in federal funding set aside for NPR, PBS and member stations over the next two years.
The rescissions law, which also claws back $7.9 billion Congress had allocated for foreign aid, takes effect on Oct. 1, meaning stations have to immediately address existing employment and programming costs.
Margaret McConnell, executive director of public radio station WDIY in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, said the outlet was already struggling to recover from pandemic-era financial losses when the bill, hotly contested by Democrats and opposed by a handful of Republican lawmakers, became law.
WDIY is set to lose the 15 percent of its budget that comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or exactly $111,000. “For a station of our size, that’s money we don’t have,” McConnell said.
Member stations that are outside major metropolitan areas and depend most on federal dollars face the toughest, most immediate choices. But the new law poses broader questions about the positives and perils of depending on government funding, and whether other means can fill the breach.
All told, McConnell thinks she needs to raise $200,000 - a daunting sum that has prompted her to reconsider whether it will be possible to even remain an NPR affiliate in the long term. The station currently pays $104,000 a year to run NPR programming, including news shows “Morning Edition,” “Weekend Edition,” “All Things Considered” and NPR headlines. She pays NPR an additional $17,000 to run Terry Gross’s interview show “Fresh Air”; fellow member station WNYC in New York gets paid about $3,000 to air “On the Media.”
Beyond the direct funding loss, McConnell faces additional costs from services that CPB previously provided. The corporation negotiates music licensing rights on behalf of member stations - a crucial function for WDIY, where 75 percent of programming is music played by volunteer hosts. Those licenses are paid through the end of the year, but replacing them could be an exorbitant new cost for stations like hers.
“Our volunteer hosts are the ones that come in and they sit down at the station and they play whatever they want to play,” McConnell said. Without licensing agreements, that programming model - a hallmark of community radio - could disappear entirely.
Any and all of those line items are on the chopping block if the station, which employs five full-time staff including McConnell, cannot find new donors and underwriters.
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KUAF, which serves 750,000 people across Northwest Arkansas, Southern Missouri and Eastern Oklahoma, is no less hard up. The University of Arkansas-owned station, best known for its local flagship newsmagazine “Ozarks at Large,” receives $193,000 each year from CPB. But General Manager Clint Schaff sees federal defunding as an opportunity for transformation, and says the station could benefit from doubling down on its local commitments.
“I don’t think it’s enough to simply make some cuts and drive some new revenue to get to where we were,” Schaff said. “We actually need to put KUAF in a financially sustainable place … to become even more indispensable in the lives of our listeners.”
For better or worse, the outlet has very little to cut. “We don’t have pens in our office,” Schaff said. “We’re going to cut the water cooler.”
In recent days, some stations have found their communities ready to step up immediately. At Tampa’s WMNF, General Manager Randi Zimmerman organized a one-day “Save Our Signal” fundraiser that brought in $280,000 - more than enough to replace their $130,000 CPB loss and another $100,000 recently pulled from state funding in Florida.
WMNF started as “a bunch of guys with a coffee can” collecting “nickels, dimes, quarters and big dollar donations” from neighbors, Zimmerman said. Saturday’s drive followed the same model, with about 1,300 people ponying up toward the total.
Still, she knows emergency fundraising isn’t a long-term solution. “This may or may not be sustainable,” Zimmerman said, noting that “only a small percentage of listeners pay for public media, right? Like four to six percent.” She is holding off on new hiring until the path forward is clearer.
The broader question facing public media is whether private philanthropy can replace public funding - and whether it should.
Evan Smith, a senior adviser with the investment company Emerson Collective and a founder of the Texas Tribune, says public funding at large regional stations can probably be replaced with private philanthropy.
“It’s a hole, no question … but the hole can be filled in,” Smith said. “In the grand scheme of things it will be tough but they can probably make it up.” Smith said federal funding typically accounts for between 6 percent and 10 percent at public TV or radio stations in larger regional markets.
By contrast, small TV and radio stations in rural areas with fewer local funders will struggle and some will close, he said. And even the largest foundations have a limit to what they can or will spend, as public media must compete with other philanthropic priorities. “Do [foundations] want to help? The answer is yes,” Smith said. “Is it necessarily a slam-dunk for them to do it? The answer is no.”
There are conversations happening around the country about what can be done, he added, but “the reality is I think everyone is kind of knocked back on their heels a little bit by the funding decision.”
Still, he sees a silver lining in “untethering” these stations from whichever party happens to be in charge at the time. “I have always been of the mind that it would be better if we were independent financially,” Smith said.
Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, president and chief executive of journalism-focused Knight Foundation, said potential donors are mostly in evaluation mode, trying to figure out the impact of the latest funding cuts and where donations can lend support. She cautioned, however, that public funding may be irreplaceable in rural areas where there isn’t much of a business community to rely on for sponsorships.
“Philanthropy isn’t a business model,” Pérez Wadsworth said. “But I have no doubt that philanthropy will also seek to lend some support in the immediate term to supply some stability.”
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, a longtime public media advocate, warns that the cuts will most impact “those smaller, rural stations that people rely on for emergency alerts, homeland security information, continuing education, and children’s programming.”
“Sometimes public media is the only local news there is, reporting on school board and town council meetings,” Burns said in a statement provided by a PBS spokesperson.
Ed Ulman, president and CEO of Alaska Public Media, echoed that concern from one of the most remote markets in the country. “These cuts are impacting member stations across the country, including in Alaska,” Ulman said. “In this moment I am focused like a laser on making the case to Alaskans on our current needs so we can continue to provide the essential services and programming communities across the state have come to know and love. We are hopeful that viewers will step up and help us fill our immediate needs as we collectively look ahead to what comes next.”
Back in Bethlehem, McConnell is preparing for a range of scenarios. She’s considering whether to cut “Fresh Air,” replace NPR programming with content from other sources, or potentially end the station’s NPR affiliation entirely while maintaining its focus on local programming.
“I would say that it is still a priority for us to find a way to still provide independent trusted news to our region,” McConnell said, “and I think that may be sourced through the major markets like Philadelphia, New York, Boston, who have large news teams, and are producing news stories about what’s happening in the world.”
The irony isn’t lost on her that WDIY - a call sign the station’s “Do It Yourself” founders explicitly sought - may indeed need to do just that, crafting a new model of public radio that’s more locally rooted and less dependent on federal support.
But she sees a problem. “I do not think it is a DIY era; I think it is a partnership era,” she said, adding that the defunding is “an opportunity for reinvention and rebuilding.”
Still, McConnell admitted, the way forward seems daunting: “It feels like the ship sank and here’s your life raft and we hope it stays afloat while you’re navigating the ocean.”