Sara Fischer: The Risk of Cutting Public Media Funding

Why it matters: Public broadcasters don’t just provide news, but also critical information alerts that can mean life or death for local communities.

Zoom out: Once a broadcaster is shuttered, it’s unlikely its spectrum license ever returns to a community news station, PBS CEO Paula Kerger explained in a recent interview with The Washington Post.

• “I can imagine they would be auctioned off for whatever purpose and you won’t have a local television station again in a community.”
• Of the 206 news desert counties identified by Northwestern University’s 2024 State of Local News Project as having no source of local news, 67 are served by local public radio signals, per NPR.
• Most of those stations are based in rural communities that are most heavily reliant on federal government funding to survive.

Driving the news: In the wake of historic weather events and natural disasters, public broadcasters have often been the ones to deploy life-saving federal alerts.

• Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Ala.) — who voted against the package that cut public media funding — posted an example of how public broadcasters in her state served as a critical lifeline after a magnitude 7.3 earthquake.
• “Local residents and summer visitors alike were able to evacuate thanks to federal tsunami advisories relayed through local public broadcasting stations. That’s the real world,” she wrote.

Zoom in: Local radio stations are also responsible for deploying a slew of public safety warnings, including Amber Alerts and Silver Alerts.

• “The interconnected public broadcasting system is the only system capable of broadcasting these alerts to every corner of our nation – and at the county and state levels we rely upon it frequently throughout the year,” dozens of local public safety and emergency management officials wrote in a recent letter to Congress.
• “Even if a resident hears an emergency alert on a commercial broadcaster, that alert is often being re-broadcast from a signal (or entry point) that is maintained by a public broadcaster,” they added.

Between the lines: While the cuts are meant to target NPR and PBS, the national organizations won’t feel much of the impact.

• NPR and PBS nationally are mostly funded by nongovernment sources, such as corporate sponsorships or viewer/listener donations.
• Only around 1% and 15% of NPR’s and PBS’ national revenue comes through CPB, respectively.
• Local member stations depend on CPB funding, and they’re the ones that will be most heavily impacted.

The big picture: Research has shown that compared with other Western democracies, like Denmark, Finland and the United Kingdom, the U.S. has a less informed citizenry, because its public media is less robust.

• Local broadcasters are often the only source of reporting on civic practices within smaller communities, such as school board meetings and municipal elections.