Suddenly, the possibility of losing public
broadcasting forever feels very real.
The announcement last Friday by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that it will soon cease to exist came from a conclusion reached by CPB leadership
that the CPB has no future, effective immediately.
Without this source of funding, can public TV and radio be far behind?
The majority of CPB’s workforce will be gone by
September 30. After that, a skeleton staff will manage aspects of the shutdown until the doors are closed for good in January.
CPB’s decision to close up shop came quickly -- just shy of
one month since President Trump signed his Big Beautiful Bill on July 4 and it became law.
The law pulled all U.S. government funding for CPB down to the last red cent. As a result, the entity
established by Congress in 1967 to distribute funds allocated for the support of public broadcasting lost everything virtually overnight.
advertisement
advertisement
For decades, some conservatives grumbled over what
they perceived as political biases on PBS and NPR. They railed against funds for public broadcasting paid for with taxpayer dollars.
But in all that time, the system had enough bipartisan
support to withstand the pressure from conservative members of Congress, until now.
The CPB survived 11 presidential administrations (including Trump’s first term) -- six Republicans and
five Democrats. But it took until the present administration to finally kill it.
For fiscal 2025 ending September 30, federal appropriations for the CPB totaled $545 million, according to an
accounting of the CPB operating budget posted on CPB.org. https://cpb.org/aboutcpb/financials/budget/
The biggest chunk of the total, $267.83 million (49.1%) represents direct grants to local
public television stations. PBS has approximately 350 local station affiliates, according to various on-line sources.
Some, if not many, of them operate on a shoestring, so for them, losing
this vital source of funding might mean the difference between life and death.
The rest of the funding includes $96.78 million (17.8%) in TV programming grants, $83.33 million (15.3%) in
direct grants to local public radio stations (many of which also run on a shoestring), and $28.63 million (5.3%) for national radio program production and acquisitions.
Of the rest, $26.76
million (4.9%) goes to CPB administration and $32.10 million (5.9%) goes to costs related to “system support” (as the CPB web page refers to it).
A drop in the bucket, peanuts and
chicken feed are the kinds of terms some people bandy about when they hear about government programs with estimated costs in the nine figures.
It’s a drop in the bucket for a government
with trillions of dollars, they say, so it’s small potatoes (a fourth such term).
Yes, in an annual budget estimated at $7 trillion this year, $545 million is a tiny fraction. But
chicken feed?
To me, $545 million is not chicken feed. And too many government officials go around acting like it is.
The problem with the defunding of CPB is that cutting government
spending is not the primary reason for doing so. The reasons are political and ideological.
The Republicans who voted to include the defunding in the Trump bill did so because they have long
nursed a grudge against PBS and NPR over biases real or imagined -- not because they want the government to save $545 million.
The question is: What is public broadcasting supposed to do
now?
In the major cities, the first order of business for the better-known PBS stations would be hitting up their big-pocketed donors to pony up even more, and devoting even more evenings to
the beg-a-thons everybody hates. But even if these efforts were successful, would they be enough?
Farther out in the medium and small markets, public TV and radio stations might hit up their
own traditional supporters for more money -- local businesses, educational institutions, charitable viewers and the state.
It is not necessarily a given that public broadcasting will now die
because the government has ceased funding the CPB.
Perhaps public broadcasters will surprise us all by adapting to their new situation and finding new ways to support themselves.
Who
knows? The loss of this federal funding just might represent a wake-up call and an opportunity for public broadcasting to break a few eggs and make a new omelet.