By now, most Americans are aware that PBS and NPR have been “defunded.”
Judging from letters to the PBS Public Editor, viewers believe it’s “public media” that’s had the rug pulled out from under it; Some say “Sesame Street” or “[fill in with your favorite show]” were defunded. Or, as some put it more harshly, “wokeness” was defunded.
Whether these personal messages to PBS were delivered with sadness or glee doesn’t matter. What interests me is what people think they will be losing (or getting rid of?).
They are about to find out.
The jolts many people might not see coming will actually hit on October 1, the direct result of the shuttering the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
At President Donald Trump’s behest, both the U.S. House and Senate voted for the erasure of two years’ worth of federal funding for public media, or $1.1 billion. The second shoe to drop was confirmation that the CPB would disappear. Not every legislator voted whole-heartedly for the bill that would collapse the public media funding structure, but I will get to that later.
News of the rescission generated bold-faced headlines about NPR, PBS and their member stations, but not so much about the CPB. Then, a little later, CPB announced it would wind down its operations at the end of September because, in a separate action, the Senate released its 2026 appropriations bill with no money dedicated to the public corporation that sustained an array of public media enterprises and activities. For the first time in more than five decades, we will not have a Corporation for Public Broadcasting. At all.
It was then, and only then, that the real public discussion began. People started asking what the loss of CPB would look like in the real world.
The unsung corporation (not an agency)
When the billion dollars allotted to public media was yanked back, some people may have assumed the end of the CPB was inevitable, if they thought about it at all. Perhaps that’s because the CPB’s primary and most visible job was to be the conduit for the $1.60 per year each U.S. taxpayer was contributing to PBS, NPR and their member stations around the country. Of the $535 million the CPB had been receiving each year, less than 5% went to pay for its own rent and employees, primarily in Washington. Around 70% of the money was distributed to some 1,500 locally owned public TV and radio stations around the country.
About $10 million per year had gone to negotiating and consolidating music and program rights. The program enabled stations to access a wider variety of content on terms that were more affordable than if they negotiated the rights on their own. If PBS, NPR or someone else picks up this vital function, you may never notice anything went awry. Or, you still might notice, because the CPB was good at what it was doing.
Even people who believe they know a thing or two about public media funding, like me, are now a bit puzzled, waiting to see how things will shake out.
The independent non-profit Corporation for Public Broadcasting emerged around the time that then-Federal Communications Commission chairman Newt Minow famously opined that what commercial television executives of the 1960s had created for American viewers was a “vast wasteland.” That seems to be the moment America woke up to the need to invest in the future of its children, especially kids without access to quality education.
Now, it seems like we’ve changed our collective minds and decided to close our eyes.
At the heart of it all, CPB has been a “great equalizer by supporting the things that make public radio a network,” as NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride pointed out. It has been supporting a vast and intricate web of independent stations—330 for PBS and 1,500 overall, including radio–that make their own budgetary, editorial and management decisions.
Unlike commercial networks, none of the local public television stations are owned by PBS. They raise their own funds and create their own on-air lineups, all under the PBS brand that has added a patina of trust and assurance that the programs are better – OK, at least far different than – the standard commercial fare. The relationship means they get access to PBS programming—often, programs created by other PBS member stations. In return, the stations pay dues and distribution fees to PBS, and they must agree to stringent production and journalistic standards.
When something functions as an ecosystem, the loss of the underpinning structure is a shock that has resounding effects. Lose one station and you lose whatever it managed to accomplish using both the federal funds it received directly from the CPB and the funds it raised on its own, much of it from viewers like you. You might live in a big city bristling with supporters, both financial and creative. But viewers like you include people in rural communities served by 245 license stations serving smaller populations, yet with a need for public media that’s just as great as anywhere.
The CPB’s role has been that vital scaffolding. If its functions must now be scattered among what is left of the public broadcasting community nationwide, outcomes will change and the first impacts will be local.
‘This is not a test’
Have you ever been advised to “seek shelter immediately” by your radio or TV as a storm approached? You might have heard that warning because the CPB has been helping local stations – especially in rural or remote areas – improve their capacity to receive and relay alerts to vulnerable residents, through equipment and other upgrades. Even as Washington was dithering about the future of public broadcasting in July, listeners and viewers in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands got the following warning over the airwaves: “A tsunami warning has been issued for this area. Move to high ground immediately. Tune to your local radio station for details.” Read about this in The New York Times, which this week did a very good job of describing what could happen to the village of Unalaska, in the Aleutian Islands, and to less populated areas around the country, in the aftermath of this major blow to public broadcasting.
But don’t let me delay you in your bid to finish this article. When you’re done here, just Google “natural disaster” and “public media” to learn how the public alert system fared during recent hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters.
This life-saving alert system will remain when funds run dry in October, but the relaying of alerts will no longer be guaranteed for everyone. Some public radio and television stations will close because of the funding cut, so some places will have no federally supported central warning system. Residents will have to rely on mobile phones. Those don’t always work during disasters, although public station signals generally do. (But when public media stations do go dark because of a natural disaster, CPB steps in–or would step in–with emergency funding to get broadcasters up and running again.)
Now, however, even in areas lucky enough to keep their local stations, the reliability of the alerts may be uneven in the aftermath of the defunding. That’s because the CPB has been using federal public safety grants, channeled to CPB through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to build and manage the Next Generation Warning System grant program, with a focus on rural and disaster-prone areas, in partnership with FEMA.
CPB’s president and CEO Patricia Harrison, said, “This is one more example of rescission consequences impacting local public media stations and the communities they serve—in this case, weakening the capacity of local public media stations to support the safety and preparedness of their communities.” In a public statement, she said FEMA “should assume responsibility for disbursing the funds as Congress intended.”
That tells me there currently is no plan to do so. FEMA is having its own, well-publicized struggles. That’s a different story.
So, if your representative in Congress is Republican, you may have asked yourself why they voted to zero out funding for public media. Through the years, public media has enjoyed bipartisan support. Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski's story is an instructive one, as mentioned in the same Times article, and it is also shared by Mike Rounds, a Republican Senator from South Dakota, who represents another geographically vast but sparsely populated state. Times reporter Megan Mineiro, along with photojournalist Haiyun Jiang, wrote that Murkowski, a Republican who is known to go against the grain of her party, told the paper that Republicans’ fear of Trump’s wrath is stronger than their concern for their own constituents. Murkowski said she tried to salvage the public broadcasting funding, but failed without the support of her colleagues. That is part of the story you should read. It's a good starting point if you want to learn more about the dynamics that led to the collapse of federal funding for public media.
At the mere cost of $1.60 per year per American taxpayer, or less than one-hundredth of 1% of the federal budget, public broadcasting hardly seems to fit the out-of-control spending narrative the White House pushed in its bid to stamp out media that it doesn’t like.
I close with a quote from Nevada Representative Mark Amodei, a Republican, who voted with his colleagues to kill public media funding. Telling the Times he now plans to introduce a measure that might restore some of the money, he said he and other House Republicans looked at the electoral map, noting the locations that stand to lose their stations, and became concerned. “Jesus crackers – these people voted for the president,” he said.
If you’re becoming concerned, maybe it’s time to let your congressional representative know. Odds are, they were only doing what they thought you wanted them to do.