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Cutting Off NPR and PBS

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There is no reason, Republicans say, for the government to fund NPR and PBS.

Last week, G.O.P. members of Congress, led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, flayed the leaders of both organizations for what they said was partisan programming. “You all can hate us on your own dime,” Greene said. The next day, a Republican introduced a bill to end all government support.

What would happen to public broadcasting if Republicans succeeded? In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain.

The specter of government abandonment has haunted public radio for so long that executives drafted a secret plan for the worst.

In February 2011, NPR assembled a 36-page document that detailed exactly what would happen if the Treasury stopped cutting checks to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-backed company that supports NPR and PBS. The document, which has not previously been reported, is bleak. It describes a precarious radio system that will bear the blow poorly, with consequences for listeners across the nation.

“Most NPR member stations operate at, or barely above, break-even,” it begins. A cutoff would cause up to $240 million to vanish and up to 18 percent of roughly 1,000 member stations to close. The Midwest, the South and the West would be affected the most. Nationwide, up to 30 percent of listeners would lose access to NPR programming.

NPR provides national coverage, but the independent member stations across the country get most of the money devoted to public radio. That makes them more vulnerable than the national headquarters, which says it gets only 1 percent of its budget from Congress. (It gets a bit more from local stations that pay for its programming).

What are these local stations doing? Take WEKU, a constellation of 10 FM stations with headquarters in Richmond, Ky., that broadcast to nearly 1.5 million residents. For people who don’t have access to broadband internet, WEKU is one of the few reliable sources of information when emergencies happen.

Floods swept through the state earlier this year. “Our transmitters stayed on the air, and we were broadcasting information to residents in Pikeville on where they could get fresh water, how they could deal with FEMA,” said Mike Savage, the station’s director and general manager. NPR’s audience has fallen by about 28 percent since 2020. But many of the residents who still tune in really need the information.

After the floods, someone from Hazard, Ky., emailed Savage to say that public radio was her only source of vital information. “We were her lifeline because they had no power, they had no cell service, they had nothing except for listening to our public radio station and getting information every day,” Savage said.

NPR can weather the funding cut, its document predicts, thanks in part to aggrieved listeners: Executives predict a sudden boom in donations if Congress defunds it, as listeners rush to defend their favorite programs. But they will likely give more in big-city markets.

Public television in the United States would likely be in worse shape because PBS receives much more of its budget — about 15 percent of $373 million — from the federal government.

There’s something quirky about PBS: Many of the shows operate their own businesses. So marquee programs like “PBS NewsHour” and “Nature” would need to find money elsewhere, such as from donations or syndication.

But again, the member stations, which rely more on public funding than the national organization does, would bear the brunt. Those stations use the money to cover local affairs, often in a news desert. Alaska Public Media, for instance, is a PBS and NPR member station with several local affiliates in rural areas. Those team up with newspapers, including The Daily News-Miner in Fairbanks and The Juneau Empire, to cover state and local governments.

That’s crucial, in part, because reliable sources of information are disappearing from smaller towns across America, said Paula Kerger, the chief executive of PBS. “There isn’t an economic model that would compel commercial broadcasters to have outlets strewn across the state where the population is so sparse,” she said.

It’s not an issue that moves large voting majorities. About a quarter of American adults believe that public media should be defunded, and 43 disagree, according to the Pew Research Center.

In the past, members of Congress have been persuadable. In 1969, as Congress contemplated reducing funding for public media, members invited Fred Rogers, the creator of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” to testify. Lawmakers sat rapt as he quoted a song he’d written about keeping anger under control.

One legislator said that Mister Rogers had given him “goose bumps” and acknowledged that the testimony had saved the day. “Looks like you just earned the $20 million.”

A half-century later, the party that controls Congress is tuning those arguments out. When Mister Rogers’s testimony came up at the hearing last week, one witness said that Congress shouldn’t have listened to him.

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