What Happens to Public Media Now?

When Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, he remarked that broadcasting is built on a collection of “miracles”—undersea cables, satellite transmissions—and that its ultimate aim is “to enrich man’s spirit.” He said that the airwaves “belong to all the people” and should be dedicated to the enlightenment of viewers and listeners. To that end, the C.P.B. would direct federal funding to non-commercial educational, cultural, and public-affairs programming across the U.S. “How will man use his miracles?” President Johnson said. “The answer just begins with public broadcasting.”

The modern movement against the C.P.B. has tended to use less lofty language. In 1994, Newt Gingrich argued that public-media stations had become biased, and that, through the C.P.B., Americans were “paying taxes involuntarily to subsidize something which told them how they should think.” His proposed solution was to “privatize them all.” In February of this year, Representative Claudia Tenney, a Republican from New York, claimed that National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, which receive funding from the C.P.B., had “chosen advocacy over accuracy, using public dollars to promote a political agenda rather than report the facts.” In April, Donald Trump described NPR and PBS as “radical left ‘monsters’ that so badly hurt our country,” and called for them to be defunded. Finally, on July 24th, the Republican-backed Rescissions Act of 2025 was signed into law, clawing back more than a billion dollars in C.P.B. funding that had already been allocated to public broadcasters for the next two fiscal years. (The bill also cut nearly eight billion dollars in foreign-aid funding.)

In advance of the cuts, David Gordon, the executive director of KEET-TV, a local television station in Northern California, went through his budget line by line and sketched out a worst-case scenario: a total loss of federal funding. KEET broadcasts to largely rural communities that are speckled among national forests and state parks. There are no other local public TV stations in the region, so the C.P.B. has historically considered KEET a “sole station provider” and funded about fifty per cent of its two-million-dollar annual budget. Gordon planned to clear out everything that the station could spare, including custodial services, electricity use, and insurance coverage. But that didn’t add up to anywhere close to fifty per cent of its budget.

The worst-case scenario came to pass, and Gordon made the difficult decision to cut all of KEET’s local news programming. The station pays about three hundred thousand dollars a year, or fifteen per cent of its budget, to syndicate national programming from PBS; the content comes prepackaged and ready to air. Local programming is far more expensive on an hour-by-hour basis—it requires reporters, producers, editors, and equipment—and membership surveys have suggested that it’s not generally what people tune in for. After the bill became law, Gordon made plans to lay off two of his ten employees: a staff member who led outreach to the community, and James Faulk, the host and producer of a weekly local-news roundup called Headline Humboldt.

Gordon, who has become pragmatic about his station’s predicament, told me that, no matter how much he values local news, he needed to keep his station on the air while he tried to raise money. “What we are most concerned about is the immediate future, and being able to have the organization in existence,” he said. Faulk was remarkably understanding that his show was being cancelled. During the final episode of Headline Humboldt, on August 1st, he asked for listeners to contribute to KEET. “While I personally will no longer work here, I’m hoping that this community will rally around the station,” he said. “Keep it alive and thriving, and make its survival a way to strike back at the forces of tyranny and ignorance that would so cavalierly see it doomed.”

That same day, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced that it will shut down, eliminating the grant-giving organization and adding a sense of finality to the funding cuts. They take effect on October 1st; most C.P.B. employees will lose their jobs by the end of September. For dozens of stations that depend heavily on federal dollars, a slow-motion crisis is now unfolding; many are already downsizing and cutting programming, and some report that if new sources of funding do not materialize they could go dark for good. Jack Jones, the acting station manager of KGVA, a tribal radio station on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, in northern Montana, told me that roughly eighty-five per cent of his station’s funding comes from the C.P.B., and much of the rest comes from the reservation’s college, which is also facing a funding crisis. Senator Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, has said that he secured more than nine million dollars from the Department of the Interior for tribal radio stations, noting that they “play a vital role . . . delivering critical emergency alerts and public safety information.” But Jones doesn’t know whether KGVA will receive any money, or what kind of stipulations could come with such funds. “Everything’s up in the air right now,” Jones told me. “I’m fighting for as long as I can.”

Last year, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting allocated more than four hundred million dollars to more than five hundred public-media organizations around the country. NPR and PBS were the two most recognizable recipients, but a relatively small share of their funding is federal. NPR receives about one per cent of its annual budget from the C.P.B.; PBS receives about fifteen per cent. (A much larger share comes from sources such as corporate sponsorship and direct audience support.) The other recipients include local affiliates of NPR and PBS—member stations—and also hundreds of local broadcasters with little or no connection to either organization. In 2023, thirty-one per cent of the C.P.B.’s grants went to rural networks.

One such network is Allegheny Mountain Radio, a trio of radio stations in West Virginia and Virginia which are the only broadcasters in the area. They air within the National Radio Quiet Zone, a thirteen-thousand-square-mile region where the airwaves are restricted because of a nearby radio telescope. (AMR operates on a low enough frequency that its broadcasts do not interfere.) AMR receives more than sixty per cent of its annual budget, around three hundred thousand dollars, from the C.P.B. It pays a fee to NPR for a five-minute newscast, which is played at the top of each hour, as well as other limited programming. But most of the network’s funds cover everyday production costs, including salaries for a small newsroom and production for hyperlocal stories: updates on waste-management contracts, interviews with local musicians, searches for lost animals. The morning weather report comes from four people around the Alleghenies; a regular listener also sends dispatches from a mountain in Taiwan.

Danny Cardwell coördinates one of AMR’s stations, in Bath County, Virginia, along with the network’s social-media accounts. He is one of relatively few Black people in the area, and his family had initially assumed that AMR was a conservative media outlet; about three-quarters of the area voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 Presidential election. The station has typically remained neutral in national political disputes, however, and what little controversy it has generated has come from coverage of local matters. After a report on a meeting of Bath County supervisors, in 2017, someone dumped manure in front of the local station’s porch, twice. Earlier this year, when the network warned in social-media posts and public-service announcements that funding cuts could force it to shut down, listeners were largely sympathetic. Cardwell was worried enough about losing his job that he started making more frequent payments on his wife’s car.