What Happens to Public Media Now?

When Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, he remarked that broadcasting is built on a collection of “miracles”—undersea cables, satellite transmissions—and that its ultimate aim is “to enrich man’s spirit.” He said that the airwaves “belong to all the people” and should be dedicated to the enlightenment of viewers and listeners. To that end, the C.P.B. would direct federal funding to non-commercial educational, cultural, and public-affairs programming across the U.S. “How will man use his miracles?” President Johnson said. “The answer just begins with public broadcasting.”

The modern movement against the C.P.B. has tended to use less lofty language. In 1994, Newt Gingrich argued that public-media stations had become biased, and that, through the C.P.B., Americans were “paying taxes involuntarily to subsidize something which told them how they should think.” His proposed solution was to “privatize them all.” In February of this year, Representative Claudia Tenney, a Republican from New York, claimed that National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, which receive funding from the C.P.B., had “chosen advocacy over accuracy, using public dollars to promote a political agenda rather than report the facts.” In April, Donald Trump described NPR and PBS as “radical left ‘monsters’ that so badly hurt our country,” and called for them to be defunded. Finally, on July 24th, the Republican-backed Rescissions Act of 2025 was signed into law, clawing back more than a billion dollars in C.P.B. funding that had already been allocated to public broadcasters for the next two fiscal years. (The bill also cut nearly eight billion dollars in foreign-aid funding.)

In advance of the cuts, David Gordon, the executive director of KEET-TV, a local television station in Northern California, went through his budget line by line and sketched out a worst-case scenario: a total loss of federal funding. KEET broadcasts to largely rural communities that are speckled among national forests and state parks. There are no other local public TV stations in the region, so the C.P.B. has historically considered KEET a “sole station provider” and funded about fifty per cent of its two-million-dollar annual budget. Gordon planned to clear out everything that the station could spare, including custodial services, electricity use, and insurance coverage. But that didn’t add up to anywhere close to fifty per cent of its budget.

The worst-case scenario came to pass, and Gordon made the difficult decision to cut all of KEET’s local news programming. The station pays about three hundred thousand dollars a year, or fifteen per cent of its budget, to syndicate national programming from PBS; the content comes prepackaged and ready to air. Local programming is far more expensive on an hour-by-hour basis—it requires reporters, producers, editors, and equipment—and membership surveys have suggested that it’s not generally what people tune in for. After the bill became law, Gordon made plans to lay off two of his ten employees: a staff member who led outreach to the community, and James Faulk, the host and producer of a weekly local-news roundup called Headline Humboldt.

Gordon, who has become pragmatic about his station’s predicament, told me that, no matter how much he values local news, he needed to keep his station on the air while he tried to raise money. “What we are most concerned about is the immediate future, and being able to have the organization in existence,” he said. Faulk was remarkably understanding that his show was being cancelled. During the final episode of Headline Humboldt, on August 1st, he asked for listeners to contribute to KEET. “While I personally will no longer work here, I’m hoping that this community will rally around the station,” he said. “Keep it alive and thriving, and make its survival a way to strike back at the forces of tyranny and ignorance that would so cavalierly see it doomed.”

That same day, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced that it will shut down, eliminating the grant-giving organization and adding a sense of finality to the funding cuts. They take effect on October 1st; most C.P.B. employees will lose their jobs by the end of September. For dozens of stations that depend heavily on federal dollars, a slow-motion crisis is now unfolding; many are already downsizing and cutting programming, and some report that if new sources of funding do not materialize they could go dark for good. Jack Jones, the acting station manager of KGVA, a tribal radio station on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, in northern Montana, told me that roughly eighty-five per cent of his station’s funding comes from the C.P.B., and much of the rest comes from the reservation’s college, which is also facing a funding crisis. Senator Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, has said that he secured more than nine million dollars from the Department of the Interior for tribal radio stations, noting that they “play a vital role . . . delivering critical emergency alerts and public safety information.” But Jones doesn’t know whether KGVA will receive any money, or what kind of stipulations could come with such funds. “Everything’s up in the air right now,” Jones told me. “I’m fighting for as long as I can.”

Last year, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting allocated more than four hundred million dollars to more than five hundred public-media organizations around the country. NPR and PBS were the two most recognizable recipients, but a relatively small share of their funding is federal. NPR receives about one per cent of its annual budget from the C.P.B.; PBS receives about fifteen per cent. (A much larger share comes from sources such as corporate sponsorship and direct audience support.) The other recipients include local affiliates of NPR and PBS—member stations—and also hundreds of local broadcasters with little or no connection to either organization. In 2023, thirty-one per cent of the C.P.B.’s grants went to rural networks.

One such network is Allegheny Mountain Radio, a trio of radio stations in West Virginia and Virginia which are the only broadcasters in the area. They air within the National Radio Quiet Zone, a thirteen-thousand-square-mile region where the airwaves are restricted because of a nearby radio telescope. (AMR operates on a low enough frequency that its broadcasts do not interfere.) AMR receives more than sixty per cent of its annual budget, around three hundred thousand dollars, from the C.P.B. It pays a fee to NPR for a five-minute newscast, which is played at the top of each hour, as well as other limited programming. But most of the network’s funds cover everyday production costs, including salaries for a small newsroom and production for hyperlocal stories: updates on waste-management contracts, interviews with local musicians, searches for lost animals. The morning weather report comes from four people around the Alleghenies; a regular listener also sends dispatches from a mountain in Taiwan.

Danny Cardwell coördinates one of AMR’s stations, in Bath County, Virginia, along with the network’s social-media accounts. He is one of relatively few Black people in the area, and his family had initially assumed that AMR was a conservative media outlet; about three-quarters of the area voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 Presidential election. The station has typically remained neutral in national political disputes, however, and what little controversy it has generated has come from coverage of local matters. After a report on a meeting of Bath County supervisors, in 2017, someone dumped manure in front of the local station’s porch, twice. Earlier this year, when the network warned in social-media posts and public-service announcements that funding cuts could force it to shut down, listeners were largely sympathetic. Cardwell was worried enough about losing his job that he started making more frequent payments on his wife’s car.

Then, on July 20th, NPR aired a national story about AMR which said that the network had been “caught in the funding-cut crossfire.” After Cardwell shared the story on one of the station’s Facebook pages, the comments section grew heated. People called AMR “right at the edge of state run media,” demanded that it cut its limited ties with NPR, and asked why “wealthy Democrats such as Bill Gates” weren’t stepping in to provide the necessary funding. “Shut. It. Down. If not good enough to run without tax payer funding,” one person wrote. The criticism continued as national outlets—Politico, NBC—picked up the story. It was clear from the comments that both supporters and detractors were conflating local stations funded by the C.P.B., such as AMR, with NPR and PBS. “It is the national dialogue sort of usurping real facts on the ground,” Cardwell told me. “I try, to the best of my ability, not to have animus built up toward local people about some of the things that maybe they’re hearing on national networks. Because the reality is, when the power goes out, those people are going to be calling our stations.”

In general, public-media outlets in poorer and more rural areas of the country, which rely more heavily on C.P.B. funding, will be hit hardest by the rescissions bill. Networks that are headquartered in major cities, and that can turn to large or affluent membership bases during fund-raising drives, will have an easier time making up shortfalls. This reality is in tension with the way that Republicans have discussed their funding cuts. In the spring, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene argued at a congressional hearing that the C.P.B. should be defunded because NPR and PBS had become “echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy white urban liberals and progressives who generally look down on and judge rural America.”

“The ironic part of the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is that the hyperlocal content is going to go away, and the cheap NPR content is going to take its place,” Austin Roof, the station manager of KSDP, which broadcasts to the Aleutian Islands, a part of Alaska where slow fishing seasons have caused economic strain, told me. I heard a similar story from Emily Cohen, the station manager of KHOL, a Jackson, Wyoming, community radio station that is not directly affiliated with NPR. C.P.B. grants helped KHOL build a local newsroom and expand its staff from two employees, with a budget of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to nine employees, with a budget of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. (Roughly a quarter of that comes from the C.P.B.) Without those funds, she told me, KHOL, like KEET, might have to consider falling back on national programming. “All these radio stations were independent,” Cohen said. “We’re just local outlets with our own newsrooms. And if you take away the funding that’s supporting local coverage, it could potentially make polarization worse.”

While reporting this story, I spoke to nine people who managed small public-media networks. Many expressed hope that lawmakers might feel buyer’s remorse about damage to stations that their constituents rely on; some will probably secure state funding or philanthropic grants. But staving off the existential threat is only a first step. “Just being alive to say, ‘Woo-hoo, we exist,’ does not give us a reason to still be alive,” Scott Smith, the general manager at Allegheny Mountain Radio, told me.

All of my sources said that their stations received an uptick in the number of donations, either leading up to the C.P.B. funding cuts, or immediately after. Cohen, whose station sits within a twenty-five-mile radius of three ski resorts in one of the wealthiest communities in the country, told me that supporters contributed about ten thousand dollars in one day to KHOL. She has recently been fund-raising non-stop, attending events that known local donors might attend. “I feel like a stalker,” she told me. Allegheny Mountain Radio has received more than a hundred and seventy individual donations, adding up to tens of thousands of dollars. Gerald Rodriguez, the station manager for KRZA, in Alamosa, Colorado, which gets half of its three-hundred-thousand-dollar budget from the C.P.B., told me that his station received more than forty donations. Still, these contributions are a sliver of the lost funding, and they may be temporary. “While it’s amazing and it will help us continue, I’m looking at it as buying us time,” Phillip Manning, the general manager of KTNA, in Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Valley, told me.

Jones, at Montana’s KGVA, plans to apply for as many grants as possible, but he has been hesitant to accept individual donations. “I don’t want to receive people’s money and then be, like, ‘Oh, we need to shut down,’ ” he said. Most of his station’s programming is educational; it airs Native American drum groups, words of the day in the Aaniiih and Nakota languages, interviews with tribal elders, and play-by-plays of high-school basketball games. An estimated hundred thousand dollars are being cut from the station’s budget. Jones’s plan is to eliminate all programming that requires someone in the studio, a measure that will leave roughly thirty thousand dollars for expenses like licensing fees and station upkeep. “Salaries are our biggest costs, so we’d start letting people go,” Jones told me. The station employs a single part-time worker—a summer d.j. When I pointed out that Jones himself was the only other person who could be let go, he paused, then said, “Yeah.” ♦