Public broadcasting cuts threaten local stations

A May 1 executive order by President Donald Trump could have impacts on the local media landscape.

Titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” the order directs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to cease direct federal funding for NPR and PBS.

Additionally, the board is directed to cease indirect funding to NPR and PBS by ensuring local stations do not use federal funds for NPR and PBS programming.

Locally, Ozarks Public Broadcasting includes Ozarks Public Television and KSMU Radio. Rachel Knight, general manager of OPB, said roughly 320,000 people watch the public television station each week, including some 50,000 children ages 2-12. On the radio dial, KSMU has an audience of 36,000 people per week.

Trump’s executive order is based on a perception of bias in public broadcasting. In the directive’s text, the president calls it “consistent with my administration’s policy to ensure that federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage.” The order requires the CPB to cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and to decline to provide future funding.

Following the order, the U.S. Department of Education canceled its CPB-administered Ready to Learn grant program, resulting in a loss of $23 million that would have gone to children’s educational programming, according to New York Times reporting. That grant has funded shows like “Sesame Street,” “Reading Rainbow” and “Clifford the Big Red Dog.”

The Times quoted Department of Education spokesperson Madi Biedermann as saying that the Ready to Learn grants funded racial justice educational programming.

“The Trump Department of Education will prioritize funding that supports meaningful learning and improving student outcomes, not divisive ideologies and woke propaganda,” Biedermann was reported as stating.

Funding mix
Knight said federal funding makes up about 10% of KSMU’s budget, while some 35% of OPT’s budget comes from the federal government.

That direct funding from the federal government is only part of the funding picture, however, Knight said. She noted while more than 70% of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding goes directly to stations, the remainder of its funding is invested into the system as a whole, covering expenses like satellite access, music licensing and other costs.

Funding by listeners and viewers is a key component of the OPB, Knight said.

“Our community is where we get the lion’s share of our support,” she said. “Public media has always been envisioned as a public-private partnership. It doesn’t work if you take one of those things out of the equation.”

Established through the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 by President Lyndon Johnson, public media is an interconnected ecosystem, Knight said.

“For sure, if public funding goes away, stations will fall,” she said. “Some stations across the country will go off the air entirely. That would have a tremendous ripple effect across the rest of the system.”

A 35% hole in OPT’s budget would be tremendously difficult to overcome, Knight said.

“On the local level, no stations, not even the largest ones, can do what the system does collectively – and certainly not small stations like us,” she said. “There’s no replacing the centralized production of these high-quality children’s programs.”

Knight said half of American children do not have access to pre-kindergarten services. Springfield’s most recent Community Focus Report identified access to child care as a persistent red flag in the community, with a shortage of 2,000 spots for infant and toddler care, plus 800 spots for children eligible for Head Start.

“A tremendous number of families are relying on PBS for their children’s early educational foundation,” she said. “It remains widely popular in a bipartisan way; 88% of parents say that they trust PBS Kids as a safe space for their children, and 76% of Americans agree that PBS is an excellent value.”

Those figures cited by Knight come from a decade-old survey by nonpartisan research firm ORC International. The political landscape has changed in the intervening years.

A 2019 survey from Pew Research Center found that of respondents who identified NPR as their main source of political news, 87% identified as Democrats. Nielsen-MRI data from 2016 showed 46% of PBS viewers identifying as conservative, 31% as moderate and 23% as liberal. Ad Fontes, which rates media bias, rates both PBS and NPR in its “middle” category of bias and calls their analysis and fact reporting reliable.

Knight said it’s unfortunate that public media has become politicized. She cited a PBS-commissioned YouGov poll from this year that found 82% of voters, including 72% of Trump voters, said they value PBS for its children’s programming and educational tools. The poll found 65% of Trump voters think the public broadcaster is either underfunded or adequately funded.

Knight said the annual budget of OPT and KSMU combined is about $4.5 million. Together they employ about 40 people, counting part-time workers and students, with 28 full-time employees.

Cathy Primm, who said she has been a public broadcasting donor and volunteer for 47 years, said she answered phones during the most recent fund drive for KSMU, which came in $10,000 over its goal.

Primm said she and her husband appreciate public broadcasting for its balanced news and its coverage of the arts.

A 2022 study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication found that the U.S. spends about $1.50 per year, per citizen, on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. By comparison, the British government spends $100 per year, per citizen, on the BBC.

Appearing on MSNBC on May 8, Paula Kerger, CEO of PBS, said federal funding accounts for 15% of the PBS budget and 1% of NPR’s.

Kerger said the 15% number is an aggregate and varies among the 330 PBS affiliates nationwide.

“There are stations in this country that the federal appropriation represents up to 50% of their budget,” she said.

In addition to the funding cut, which Kerger said would cripple PBS’s ability to serve its stations, she said public broadcasting is facing Federal Communications Commission questions about whether it appropriately runs sponsorship messages.

Ozarks Public Broadcasting is licensed and housed by Missouri State University, receives federal funding from various sources, including research grants. This raises a question about whether the relationship between MSU and OPB is threatened by the executive order.

Knight said that due to the brevity of the order, its full impact is not clear.

“That said, I have no reason to believe that university support for OPT and KSMU is jeopardized by this executive order,” she said.