Jan. 12 (UPI) — The dissolution of the Corporations for Public Broadcasting ends a nearly 60-year commitment by Congress to fund local stations across the country, putting the communities that need public broadcasting the most at the greatest risk.
The CPB has been a key funding stream for broadcasters that serve the most rural and underserved communities in the United States and while public radio and television networks, from national outlets like NPR and PBS to small, local stations will continue on, for now, rural areas will feel the impact of the board’s vote to dissolve itself.
NPR draws a relatively small amount of its funding from the federal government: about 1 or 2% annually. A larger portion of the PBS budget comes from the federal government but smaller locally-operated stations are the main recipients of federal funding.
Tami Graham, executive director of Tribal radio station KSUT in Colorado, told UPI that the CPB contributed about 20% of her station’s funding. She knew it was only a matter of time before the CPB would dissolve but the announcement earlier this week brought about a “stark reality.”
“It puts a tremendous amount of local and rural serving public stations at risk including ours,” Graham said. “We’re having to backfill and find ways to continue our same level of service to our communities without that support from the American public.”
Local entities and listeners have increased their contributions to the network through donations and adding to their monthly memberships. She is “feeling pretty good” about this year but worries that generosity will waiver over time.
KSUT covers the Four Corners region in the Southwest, reaching listeners in Northwest New Mexico, Southwest Colorado, Southeast Utah and Northeast Arizona. Its broadcast area serves as a primary source of news and information for four tribes: the Southern Ute Tribe, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Jicarilla Apache Nation and the Navajo Nation.
Many of its listeners, particularly in the tribal nations, live in rural areas where cell and internet service may not be reliable, Graham said. KSUT’s broadcast region is not wholly unique in this as many tribes live in remote areas.
One of the primary functions of public broadcast airwaves is to deliver emergency alerts.
“Th moment is matters the most is those times,” Graham said. “Tribal members are living in the most remote regions of the country. That’s really the core importance of keeping our signal and our ability to respond quickly during often-changing wildfires or what may be.”
Along with the loss of a funding source, KSUT has also lost funding dedicated to upgrading its emergency alert system. It was to receive about $500 million through the FEMA Next Gen Warning System program to upgrade nine tower sites. It lost that funding in the federal public broadcasting cuts.
“It was a double whammy this year for us,” Graham said. “Not only did we lose federal funding but we lost a major grant to improve our service to our very rural communities.”
Victor Pickard, C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania, told UPI that despite longtime criticism from Republicans in Congress, public broadcasting still had enough Republican support to stave off attempts to defund it.
The rescissions package that passed last summer, cutting $1.1 billion in funding, passed in the Senate by three votes.
The move to defund public media highlights a fraught relationship between media that serves the public interest and political influences, Pickard said.
“It’s revealed that it is quite vulnerable,” Pickard said. “It really took an all out push by the Trump administration to force just barely enough Republican members of Congress to support defunding public media. During otherwise normal times I don’t think that would have happened. At least historically there was always a critical mass of Republican members of Congress that would at the end of the day support public media.”
Public broadcasting has always drawn bipartisan support both on Capitol Hill and among the public, Pickard adds. With that, he believes a federal commitment to public broadcasting can be revived in the future, though it is less likely to happen during the presidency of Donald Trump.
“If I wanted to be optimistic about all of this I would say it gives us the opportunity to reimagine what public broadcasting could and should be,” Pickard said. “It’s difficult to imagine any kind of renewed federal approach to public media under the Trump administration.”
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