The GOP’s assault on public media will hit rural America the hardest

Nearly six decades after Congress established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to steward the federal government’s investment in public broadcasting, Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress have killed it. Last week, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced that it will begin winding down its operations at the end of the fiscal year on September 30, 2025.

Most of its staff positions will be eliminated, although the organization specified that a small transition team will remain through January 2026, “to ensure a responsible and orderly closeout of operations.”

This follows the GOP Congress’ July approval of the White House’s request to claw back nearly $1.1 billion in federal funding for the organization.

“Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,” CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison said in an August 1 statement.

Now, for the first time in more than half a century, Americans will see what the public media landscape looks like without a private, nonprofit funding entity like the CPB to level the playing field.

As many reports have pointed out, PBS and NPR, along with their news flagships, “PBS NewsHour” and “All Things Considered,” will not disappear. But that should not be reassuring, since we don’t yet know the extent to which those productions will be affected by the loss of grant funding.

Financial support from the CPB and other federal sources accounts for 15% of PBS’ overall funding, with the majority of this amount allocated to its more than 330 member stations. NPR derives around 1% of its annual budget from those sources. The rest comes from an array of private funding sources, including corporate underwriters and, yes, viewers and listeners like us.

Sometime this fall, however, the public may start to notice that the schedules for their local stations have become a little less varied, or that NPR content from some of the 1200 stations that currently carry it is no longer available. That’s because most of the funding CPB distributes goes directly to local TV and radio stations, which those stations use to pay licensing fees and dues to carry nationally distributed programs.

To say conservatives have threatened America’s public media for most of its existence isn’t an exaggeration. Republicans didn’t start by targeting the CPB, however.

The original object of the party’s ire was the Public Broadcasting Service, established two years after Congress established the CPB in 1967. PBS officially went on the air for the first time on October 5, 1970. Immediately, it distinguished itself by bringing high-quality programming such as Julia Child’s “The French Chef” and “Sesame Street” into homes across the country.

But the real problems began in 1973, when the service broadcast gavel-to-gavel prime-time coverage of the Watergate hearings, earning the enmity of President Richard Nixon.

Nixon long expressed his disdain for what he perceived to be the network news’ liberal bias, but ABC, NBC and CBS aren’t taxpayer-funded. PBS received federal funding through the CPB, leading the GOP to question whether the government should be in the business of funding national news coverage.

The service doesn’t operate like other broadcasters, in that it isn’t a network of affiliated stations. Most of the long-running shows we closely associate with the brand are produced by separate member stations functioning as independent non-profit entities.

The Boston-based WGBH Educational Foundation, for example, produces and distributes several public TV standards, including “Frontline,” “Nova,” “American Experience” and “Masterpiece.” D.C.’s WETA-TV produces and distributes “NewsHour” and “Washington Week.” New York’s WNET-TV is the production home of “Nature,” “Great Performances,” “Live from Lincoln Center” and many other titles. In other large cities, member stations may be affiliated with universities or other local institutions.

On its face, then, CPB’s defunding represents a victory no other Republican president or Congress could pull off.

Producing stations located in deep blue cities may receive larger CPB grants by count, although that money tends to make up a smaller portion of their budget.

But as the heads of CPB, PBS and NPR have separately warned, the real loss will be in rural areas like Eureka, California’s KEET-TV. CPB funding accounts for nearly half of its operating budget. The station’s manager recently told CalMatters he cannot truthfully say that the station will survive without the $847,000 it was counting on.

And Eureka is not a community with the same number of deep pockets as, say, New York, Los Angeles or Seattle. In 2023, its population was just over 26,300.

While funding for public media is built on a combination of private and public support, the argument that philanthropists and other major donors will swoop in to cover the $1.1 billion shortfall created by the CPB’s destruction is wishful thinking.

Never mind the potential perils that relying on private capital poses to editorial independence. That theory doesn’t account for the health of stations in rural communities where public radio newsrooms funded by CPB grants provide the sole local source of weather, emergency alerts and other critical updates.

Republican strongholds aren’t immune, either. Alaska Public Media president and CEO Ed Ulman, who testified at the House Subcommittee on Delivering Government Efficiency’s hearing in March, has sounded the alarm ever since regarding the harm that would be done in remote markets like his.

For stations in Ulman’s state, CPB funding supports emergency communications and reliable, fact-based community journalism. These are essential services. Sadly, in places like Kodiak, Alaska, station KMXT-TV will be starved of resources. A representative told the Associated Press it will lose an estimated 22% of funding from its budget.

Deep red Idaho’s Boise State Public Radio, meanwhile, received 20% of its annual funding for 2024 from CPB.

“CPB funding allows public media stations to pool resources towards satellite interconnection, emergency alert systems, music licensing and development of educational programs, all of which would be too expensive for stations to do on their own,” reads a statement on its website.

And, as I’ve previously written, defunding CPB will affect children in low-income communities the most. The organization’s grants funded early education material and programming that‘s now at risk of disappearing. The AP also reported that Mississippi Public Broadcasting is eliminating a streaming channel that airs PBS children’s programming like “Caillou” and “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.”

There are many ways to respond to all this, including shrugging off the downsizing of public media as a product of market forces. The media landscape is defined by evolution, and eliminating the CPB funding model that worked well enough for 58 years will surely force changes in the ways that PBS and NPR operate. But that shift should not come at the expense of the people they serve.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Past and present heads of PBS and National Public Radio have long sustained that their main purpose is to ensure communities all around the country have access to top-quality educational programming and reliable, non-partisan news and information. PBS distributes much more of the former than the latter.

But the right-wing canard concerning left-wing bias persists regardless of the many polls conducted by nonpartisan organizations that have affirmed public radio and television’s status as top among the United States’ most trusted institutions.

Sadly, many of the people who benefit most from resources the CPB provides will miss them most acutely once they disappear.

I’ve been doing this job for long enough to remember my peers arguing that public media outlived its usefulness even two decades ago. After all, what need do viewers have of PBS children’s programming when we have it on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon?

I also remember somebody pointing to the popularity of (and this will date me) “Horatio Hornblower” on a pre-“Duck Dynasty” A&E as evidence that the world has moved on from “Masterpiece.” That example also dates from a time when TLC stood for The Learning Channel instead of being the home of “Dr. Pimple Popper.”

The counterpoint to this is that PBS programming costs American taxpayers $1.60 per year. Now it will cost us nothing beyond what you’re willing to contribute to your local member station, including subscribing to PBS Passport and NPR+, or donating to stations that are hanging on by a thread. We get what we pay for, but we should never forget that the deal we enjoyed for decades is a lot better.