(light charming music) (upbeat intense music) - Welcome to The Newsfeed.

I'm Paris Jackson.

Public media is under the microscope.

PBS is suing the Trump administration alongside NPR over efforts to block funding that would impact public broadcasting.

On June 3, the president formally requested that Congress rescind more than a billion dollars of approved federal funding for public television and radio.

The Trump administration argues PBS and NPR are politically biased.

This month, Cascade PBS, Seattle's Member Station posted a meeting of the national PBS Board of Directors.

I sat down with PBS CEO, Paula Kerger, while she was here, to learn what's at stake for viewers like you.

Can you briefly explain PBS' funding structure and how it's related to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting?

- Each of our stations is independent.

It's locally owned, locally operated, locally governed, and stations are members of PBS.

And so, the federal appropriation actually goes directly to stations.

It represents about 15% of the cost of stations around the country of their budgets.

But that's an aggregate number.

So, you know, so here in Seattle, it's, it's probably a little less than that, but for some of our small stations in rural parts of the country, it can be as much as 40% of their budget.

And that's why this whole debate in Washington about the future of funding for public broadcasting actually really matters.

It's not as much about what happens to PBS.

It's about what happens to your local stations and communities around the country.

If you lose 45% of your funding, you're probably not gonna be able to continue.

And so that's why we wanna make sure that legislators understand what's at stake here.

- And we talk about potential cuts.

For the average viewer, what would that look like in terms of the shows that they love and the programming that they watch?

- Yeah, so right now we're, we're thinking very hard about what cuts we would have to make.

Just last month, the Department of Education ended our Ready To Learn funding.

This is a grant program that has been in existence for 30 years that has helped us support the production of new programs as well as the research.

It's been really very important to the work that we do.

That was immediately canceled.

It ended across the country, a lot of, of summer camps 'cause we do a lot of outreach in communities.

It's, it's really led to us to cancel the development of new projects so people won't see an immediate change.

But I think over time, if we can't figure out a way to bring that funding back in some form, it will have a big impact on kids.

When you look at the rest of the programming that we produce on PBS, we're now in conversations about having to make very hard decisions about programs that people love and whether we can continue to produce them or whether we have to radically cut them back.

And I hope that we don't get into that position.

I also think for a lot of our stations who do a lot of local programming, that could be under pressure, I do think that everyone is gonna have to really think about what we can afford to do.

And that may be the sacrifice of, of things that have been important to our viewers.

- The Trump administration argues PBS and NPR are politically biased organizations.

How do you respond to that?

- Well, you know, I think when people talk about bias, they are speaking mostly about our news.

Our news represents about 10% of the work that we do.

But I would say that, you know, we work really hard to bring together diversity of viewpoints.

That's part of our mission.

Our, our whole focus is to make sure, particularly people whose voices aren't often heard, that they have an opportunity to be heard on public television.

And if you look back over the years, and even now, we have people across the political spectrum that have a voice on public broadcasting.

- I'm Paris Jackson.

Thank you for watching The Newsfeed, your destination for nonprofit Northwest News.

Go to CascadePBS.org.

for more great local coverage.

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