Welcome to the Aaron Harber show This is part one of a special two part series with the president and CEO of the Public Broadcasting System, Paula Kerger.

Paula, thanks for joining me.

Oh, it's great to be with you, Aaron.

It's an honor having you on the show.

You know, for for my audience, which is a PBS audience.

I thought I'd just start off asking you, because I think a lot of people will see the these two shows who have who really know nothing about PBS itself except for what they watch.

What is PBS?

Actually, it's a great question, and it's a great one to start off with, because I think a lot of people assume we're a network like CBS or NBC or ABC, but we're not.

We actually are, in many ways a profoundly different kind of organization, in that we are the organization that all of our stations are members of.

So we're an absolute local system.

PBS and our member stations all across the country are all independent.

They're all locally owned, operated and governed.

And they, in fact, formed PBS as a way to help them bring together programing that everyone could share to manage the infrastructure that it takes to bring those programs into everyone's home, whether that's through broadcast or through digital, and also to invest in things that we do in places like the classroom, where we deliver a lot of content through broadband.

So I think, again, when I took this job, now I can't believe it.

More than 20 years ago, people said, well, you're going to have all these stations reporting to you.

And I said, no, you got it backwards.

I report to all of them.

And that's who we are.

Okay.

So how did you become so good at herding cats?

I have a lot of patience, but I also believe fundamentally in the way that we're organized.

So I just described what is, in essence of federated system.

I often say, if you want a lesson in humility, run a federated organization.

You have a lot of responsibility, not often ultimate authority.

And the thing that is so important to me, I came from a member station, and I saw firsthand how important it is that we are part of a community which served in my case, it was a big community.

It was New York City.

But as I've traveled around the country over the last 20 years and visited most, not quite all, but almost all of our stations, I see something very similar, which is these are jewels within communities.

Communities are so proud of what we're doing.

And I think the fact that I understand from my experience what it feels like to be in a station that I believe that's our secret sauce.

It makes us different than almost any other media company.

I think it just gives me a little bit of credibility that perhaps we're all in this together.

And as we face all of the challenges we've had over the last 20 years, we do it together.

And that's been a big piece of keeping everyone all moving in the same direction.

So talk about the diversity in that membership.

I mean, you you operate the largest noncommercial media organization in the United States.

Yes.

You have over 330 member stations.

And I think and I want to emphasize you reference this, but but each station is owned locally.

Yes.

Each station is a nonprofit.

Yes.

Committed to its community.

Give me an idea of the range of of what you deal with.

Well, I mean, look, there are a lot of similarities.

You know, our stations sometimes think of themselves as all being so fundamentally different from one another.

Most of what they do is very similar.

So if you're in a in a big market like New York City, you may have certain priorities and things that you do.

But, you know, most of the stations carry a number of the same programs.

If you go from one city to another and you flip on Sunday night, you're probably going to see a masterpiece.

If you flip on the television during the day, you're probably going to see children's programing.

If you come right before prime time, you're probably going to see the NewsHour.

But how those programs are connected and locally is what is a little different.

And then stations have different priorities.

So if I can give you a history lesson, we were formed really by the vision of the first female FCC commissioner, woman by the name of Frieda Hennock.

And she was looking at this emerging technology of television and she thought, wow, this has the potential to be so powerful.

But here in this country, it was it was really created by a commercial interest.

This is different, by the way, in the rest of the world.

BBC came before commercial television in the UK is one example.

And so she lobbied to have spectrum put aside for public purposes, educational purposes.

And so first license Houston and around the country stations started to crop up but they were very local, very focused on local communities.

This is how I'm going to answer your question of how they're each different.

And some stations came to be because they were the licenses were acquired by states as a way to bring educational programing all across the state, particularly in rural parts of the country, where you wouldn't have an Advanced Placement English teacher, perhaps in every school, but you could do it if you made it available through television.

And so, you know, this was emerging out then flash forward to Lyndon Johnson.

He was well aware of the BBC.

His family was in the media business.

He came from a very small town, and he saw how much possibility it offered if we could bring content into every part of the country.

He signed the Public Broadcasting Act, which was the beginning of the formation of PBS, was also what began to put federal money in to public broadcasting, because up until then it was all local.

You get to apply for a license and get it, but you were on your own.

And so that really began to transform it.

So because the origin of the stations was different, each looked a little different.

My old station in New York did a lot of programing around a lot of the arts that happened in New York, because that's a big part of that community.

Some of our stations really remained and retained their education roots and do a lot of educational programing, working closely with the school systems and particularly with younger kids.

And some stations are just very interested in local journalism, and they built their work out that way.

And so it's the thing that's extraordinary.

Most of our programing comes to us through local stations, including this show itself, which comes to us through our station in Denver.

And so the fact that, again, this is what makes us different than everyone else, all of our programing isn't coming from New York or LA or Washington.

It's coming from across the country.

So I want to talk about funding at length.

But before we do that, I mean a number of other questions I want to ask you, but you referenced President Johnson, you know, taking a look around the BBC reference similar situation in Germany, for example.

Talk a little bit about what other countries do when it comes to funding their version of public TV.

Yes.

It's interesting.

We're part of an association of public broadcasters from around the world.

In fact, we were part many years ago of creating this organization.

And in the early days when I first would attend some of the meetings, they, you know, they couldn't quite understand us.

In fact, someone from the BBC said, we often like to think of you as our poor American cousin, because they couldn't understand how we could actually ask people for money because almost all of them are funded by government.

Some of them are funded by tax, in the case of the BBC, taxes on television sets.

Some of them are funded by license fees and so forth.

And and the scope of their work is also different.

So again, if you think about how public media started up, a lot of them have sports as a big piece of what they do.

So it's a pretty different business model now.

Interesting, as we have been in this country scrutinizing the appropriateness of federal funding for media organizations and public media that actually is happening around the world a bit as well.

And so some have actually come back to us and said, can you explain that philanthropic model again?

Because we would like to look at it.

But the interesting thing is, if you look at the investment that different countries have made in public broadcasting, we were always kind of at the bottom.

We, you know, the federal investment in public broadcasting until last year was about $1.60 per person a year, and it was created in that model.

Again, this was LBJ's idea, again, because he was thinking of rural communities.

And he thought, well, you know, public broadcasting will exist in places like New York or Washington or San Francisco or Dallas and Chicago, bigger cities.

But it's really important that these these organizations also flourish in small communities.

And so it would be hard for a station in Cookeville, Tennessee, which is in Appalachia to really get off the ground unless there's some support to help them with the infrastructure.

And so that's where the federal investment came in.

And it was those stations that actually got more of the federal appropriation than the bigger stations.

The idea that if you could raise money, you would raise money.

But if you needed the support in order to have the station viable, you would get that support from the government.

And certainly those smaller rural stations, those dollars represented a greater percentage of their overall resources.

Cookeville was like 50% of their budget,you know, so it was pretty significant.

Yeah.

Compared to WNET... Yeah.

Which was probably about 6% of its budget.

If you go to some parts of the country, Alaska is probably the most profound example where you have such a large geographic area.

Big parts of the state of Alaska have no other television.

It's not just, you know, public television covering some of the state.

It is the only one there.

And so public television and public radio really are sources of information, because also broadband is not is not really a possibility for those areas either.

So I think for many of us who just say, well, you know, just turn on your computer.

Well, not so easy if you're living in a really isolated part of the country.

Right.

Not always a given.

What do you think PBS is best known for as far as the American people are concerned?

Well, I mean, I think it's obviously our children's programing.

I mean, people when I, you know, when they see my PBS logo, almost invariably and I do wear it a lot, I don't have it on right now, even though I almost have PBS blue on.

But they'll comment on Sesame Street.

I grew up on Sesame Street, or Mister Rogers had such a big impact in my life.

Or they'll talk about more contemporary programs if they're a little bit older.

Daniel Tiger if they're 18 or 19 year olds.

So I think certainly children's programing, because that also, I think hits people at such a profound part of their life.

But I think people also think of the NewsHour.

They think of I mentioned masterpiece before, they think of the great dramas, they think of the natural history programs.

And that's the thing about being a system like us that provides service for the whole country, you know, it's depending upon who you are and how old you are.

You know, you may, you know, people a lot of people remember that cooking shows came from public broadcasting, you know.

Yeah.

Julia Child Julia Child started at GBH.

Well, I'm a big Arthur fan, but other than that.

What about looking ahead?

Arthur.

I have a caricature that was done with me by the creator of Arthur, and it's one of the things that I'm that I cherish the most.

In fact, it's the image that I use as my, as my for for zoom & teams is my holding Arthur and me as an aardvark.

So just imagine that for a second.

It's pretty spectacular.

You're jealous.

I'm very envious.

I'm very envious.

What about in terms of programing?

Looking ahead in the next few years, what are some of the projects that you're excited about?

Yeah.

So I mean, obviously we have series that have been ongoing that I really love.

My favorite.

And part of it is because of the time that it it came on the air.

It just was such a welcome respite as All Creatures Great and Small.

It started during Covid and we're looking forward to another season.

We have some great dramas ahead.

We're working with Ken Burns on sort of his next programs.

He's doing a program on LBJ, he's doing one on reconstruction, and those look really terrific.

I love natural history programs and.. When is Ken going to slow down?

I don't see any sign of that.

And and thank goodness for that.

We have a new series from Skip Gates on music and which really looks terrific.

And it's he's done it.

He's organizing it in a great way.

It's he's doing it by your personal playlist.

And what would end up in your playlist and what's the significance of it?

And think about that for a minute.

You know, again, I said a few minutes ago about the power of, you know, children's programing and how it resonates, but music is the same.

You know, when music is the most important part of our lives, it's usually when we're teenagers and and younger and, you know, you hear a song that you loved when you were 16 or 17 years old and it just makes your heart swell.

And so being able to think about what moves people, it also is what brings people together.

So I'm really interested in how PBS celebrated America's 250th birthday.

And by the way, I want to mention that I was really glad to see that because one of the things I noticed is there really seemed to be a divide in terms of a political divide, in terms in the broadcast world of the emphasis on the 250th, where the more conservative media outlets really were, I mean, waving the flag 24/7 and others I thought were taking a more tepid approach.

And I was I was disappointed in that distinction.

And we can talk about the political divide later.

So I was really proud of PBS to see what you did.

Well, I you know, I remember the bicentennial and I remember, you know, the bicentennial minutes.

And I remembered a lot of companies talked about the, the bicentennial as part of their marketing and so forth.

But it you know, I was a kid at the time, but in looking back, it felt, you know, very basic.

And so about ten years ago, we began a conversation with Ken Burns, who had decided he wanted to do a documentary on the American Revolution.

It's it's hard, you know, he did the Civil War in Vietnam and World War two.

This is a much harder story to tell because there is no there are no photographs.

There are no there's no video, obviously.

And the way that his stories are done, which I think is so powerful as he looks for the unknown stories, he's he's really attempting to not only focus on the wars in the generals and everything that we know or think we should remember from, you know, school.

But he also wants to help us understand what it felt like to be living during that period, what it felt like if you were a woman or a kid or whatever, if you fought in the war, if you stayed home, all of those perspectives.

And to find those stories, you really have to dig deep into archives and lots of other resources to sort of unearth what makes his work different than what anyone else does.

So which is why it took ten years to do it.

And as we got closer.

But by the way, that's what what's you know, I think notable that people don't realize is they'll see something on the air.

We generally have no idea what went into it and how long it took and the effort made.

Which is why he's on PBS, because there is no commercial organization that would allow him to spend ten years researching the American Revolution to bring that series forward.

Why does that matter?

It matters for an experience that you and I would have sitting in our living room watching the series.

But all of his work is used in the classroom.

It becomes a record that I think is tremendously important.

I have kids that come up to me all the time about this new series they've seen on the Civil War.

That was more than 30 years ago, and so there is a resonance to what he does that also is is usually powerful.

And we decided we would broadcast it in 2025.

We wanted to get in front of what we thought was going to be a much bigger celebration of, of 2026, and we thought that it could be an anchoring point.

And what has happened is it brought a lot of people together, people that are more conservative, people that are more liberal.

Everyone was watching American Revolution, and part of it, I think that really resonated, is that it helped us really think about how improbable this country is.

This was an enormous experiment.

This was the beginning of democracy here and in an inspired democracies that then developed around the world.

And for every reason it should not have worked.

And in fact, a lot of people, you know, have reported the same experience as you're watching it.

You're kind of rooting, you know, you know how it turned out, but you still in the back of your mind, think this may not work.

And I think so much of what we're going through now is just this real wrestling with who are we?

What did those that created this country envision?

How was the constitution constructed and why?

What were the the framers worried about as they were putting it together?

Because they clearly realized this was going to have to be evolving over time.

And so I think that the series has represented so much more.

And so we played it quite a bit, broadcast and digital.

We made it available so people could see it whenever they want.

We had it in the classrooms.

We developed all this content for classroom use, and we did a lot of other programing throughout the year.

A lot of our stations did programing about America 250 that they could put in their own communities as well.

And I'm just really proud that, you know, this was a moment that I think, for me, certainly reminded so many people of why what we do is different and important.

So and you mentioned that each station deciding what it wanted to do, what it might do on its own.

How does PBS establish standards, content standards?

When you you have over 330 members, each with their own ideas about what they want to do, and each with different limitations in terms of resources.

Well, I mean, here's the beauty of what we do.

That's up to the stations.

I mean, we have, you know, obviously, standards for the entire system that we share you know, so that, you know, stations, you know, understand what it means to be a public broadcaster, but in terms of the latitude of what they're developing out.

But here's the great thing about the American Revolution, we were able to get support from a foundation, and they gave us the resources.

Ken traveled all over the country in 25 and in 26, and he visited communities.

He did events at stations.

He brought together people for conversation.

We'd show little pieces of the film, and then we would talk about what is the significance, and he could share more about what he had learned.

And his co-producers, David Schmidt and Sarah Botstein, did the same thing so that it really became not just, again, this broadcast event, which is what a commercial venture would do, that's their business.

But it became more about creating a public square.

That's the business that we're in.

And that was really a great opportunity for our stations.

And for me, it's a perfect example of who we are.

We created this together as an investment by our entire system, and then every station took it and figured out what to do around it and how to make it really resonate within their communities and what that meant.

And that's what we try to do each and every day.

Well, one of the things I want to talk about when you mentioned the communities is, you know, certainly PBS has become has has come under attack in recent years.

You know, from a political perspective.

Yet each station is community based.

What what what have you seen different stations do?

Well, first of all, different stations do to emphasize that, hey, we're we're here in Nashville or we're here in whatever.

And not only that emphasis, but communicating to to their population, to their viewers how independent they truly are.

And have we done that enough or have we not done that well and as a result, created a void that makes PBS much more vulnerable to attack?

You know, it's interesting.

So I'll come back one more time to American Revolution.

So we did an event on Capitol Hill, and a lot of the same people that voted to defund us showed up at the event and were so enthusiastic about the series.

So there's a little bit of a disconnect, right?

And I, you know, again, I travel to many stations and I know that their legislators are in the stations all the time.

A lot of them will go there for debates.

A lot of them will go there.

Some of them go to community events, particularly those that are done for families and children and so forth.

So I think that, you know, perhaps, you know, more focus on helping people understand what's at risk.

After the vote to defund, which was in July of 2025, there were a number of members of Congress that seemed surprised that actually, that actually meant taking the money away from their station.

I don't think they fully understood.

And I have been part of many conversations, and our stations spend a lot of time up on the hill.

So for me, this is still a little bit of a puzzlement, but maybe I understand because they have a lot of other things to focus on, not just us.

And so maybe people just forgot that the money wasn't really staying in Washington.

It wasn't really going to PBS.

It went to their communities.

And so I think, if anything, what we need to make sure that we do is communicate that it's your local station.

This is where the resource is, this is why it was created.

And just really reinforce that, because I think then when people fully understood, it was like, oh, you know, and I think we will have a chance to get some of that funding back.

I think particularly in rural communities where I've seen firsthand what an outsized influence we have.

People are very concerned that people be informed and have access to information, and kids have access to shows that will open their minds to the possibilities of the world, as well as help them prepare to enter school for the first time.

And so I think telling our story better is going to be an important piece of of what we need to do moving forward.

So one of the aspects that fascinate me, and you mentioned Alaska is a great example, is that a lot of these stations are in rural communities.

Many of them are in Republican dominated communities.

That seems to be a real disconnect.

Yeah.

So how do you leverage going forward looking in the years ahead?

How do you leverage the fact that the some of the communities that are most impacted in a positive way or most affected with, with funding from, from PBS, are in communities that have Congress persons and senators who supported defunding PBS.

Yeah.

I mean, what's a what's a long term approach?

Yeah.

So I think there's a there's a few things that I think are important.

So look, I really sympathize that these are hard decisions that legislators have to make.

You know, there is a finite amount of money and that there are lots of needs and really trying to figure out how to balance that out.

That's why I think it's important for us to, you know, make our case and help them understand the consequence of where this money goes and how it's used.

I do think moving forward.

There are a few things.

I mean, a lot of people don't realize that we manage an infrastructure that's the backup for the emergency alert for the country.

I mean, we use our broadcast infrastructure for that.

If you've ever been in a community that's had a natural disaster, you know that cell phone service melts and it's broadcast where you can get information to the public, but also to first responders.

And we have worked very closely with the government to build out that infrastructure and somehow that gotten forgotten.

So I think if we're going to enter our way back, I would start with infrastructure, because that's what the government does and does well.

Road systems, bridges, you know, you know, we're part of rural electrification.

Build out a broadband.

These are all things government worries about.

And broadcast is still an important piece of that.

So I think you start there.

I also think that again, you know, we have lost a few stations since the money went away.

And I do think that again, you know, perhaps there was this thought that, well, they really don't need the money.

Well, parts of the country really do.

And so being able to come back and demonstrate that.

The other thing is, and you mentioned this a few minutes ago, is the is you know, what prompted the decision to try to go after our funding?

And, you know, from time to time people say, well, you're just liberal media.

I always ask people, well, what can you give me an example?

What have you seen that actually, you know, conveys that, you know, and people can't always answer that question.

And so I think being able to really engage more as the answer.

Well, I want to talk a lot more about that and the whole funding picture, what it means and where we can go, but how to address some of those challenges.

We're going to do that in part two.

So thank you Paula.

Thank you.

Aaron.

That was Paula Kerger, the president and CEO of PBS.

Make sure you watch part two.

This was part one of our special two part series with Paula.

Thanks for watching.

We'll see you next time.