In conclusion
After Congress withdrew funding for public broadcasting, California’s small NPR and PBS stations are on the verge of collapse. Large stations are also preparing for reduction.
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Republicans in Congress voted to deny federal financing to dozens of California public broadcasting stations, denying them a lifeline in rural areas and restricting access to local news programming in a time of hyperpartisan national media. The stations will lose millions of dollars in revenue.
In addition to reassuring viewers that they intend to continue operating their signals, California broadcasters caution that cost-cutting measures are unavoidable.
Across the Golden State, radio and television stations of all sizes believe that unless they can recover their losses through fundraising, they will probably have to reduce programming and lay off employees in order to survive. According to its leaders, the changes will disproportionately affect locally produced shows, which are among their most popular and costly to produce, and which educate millions of viewers and listeners.
Republicans have long sought to reduce public broadcasting funding, claiming that private benefactors, not taxpayers, should pay for these programs. President Donald Trump’s request to withdraw $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which awards grants to National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting Service, their affiliates, and other independent public media producers, was approved by Congress last week, demonstrating the success of their efforts. The financial cuts were approved by all nine of California’s Republican representatives in Congress.
Approximately 35 stations in Humboldt County, ranging from San Diego to Hoopa, have now lost vital funding.
All public broadcasters believe that the revocation undercuts the egalitarian goal of public media, which is to establish a statewide network that gives local communities access to high-quality information, stories, and music, even though many of them still have faith that they will manage to survive.
According to Joe Moore, president and general manager of KVPR Valley Public Radio in Fresno, it has been our greatest strength. The CPB took $175,000, or roughly 7% of his station’s budget, away from it.
Public radio provides local news from villages in Alaska, North Dakota, and on tribal reservations, but the New York Times does not have the same level of investment in these areas.
The stations most at risk of shutdown are smaller ones whose budgets depended primarily on federal funding. Due to CPB’s defunding, Eureka’s community-owned PBS affiliate KEET-TV will lose $847,000, or over half of its operating budget. Since the station lacks an institutional backer, like a nearby college or school system, all of its funding will have to come from the community in order to continue.
Although he thinks the station will continue to operate even at reduced capacity, David Gordon, the general manager and executive director of KEET, says he won’t make the same audacious declaration that, “We’re not going anywhere,” as some stations have.
Gordon stated that until the fallout from this defunding decision is over, he cannot promise that KEET will remain. He made it clear that he was not speaking for his station, but rather for himself.
I sincerely hope it is, and I believe there is a high chance it will endure in some capacity. Will it, though? I’m not sure I can say that.
KZYX, a nearby NPR member station in Mendocino, had to fire its news director after the CPB cut 25% of its operating budget, or $174,000. Accordingly, there will be less in-depth items in the news, including interviews with county supervisors or city council members, said Andre de Channes, general manager and director of operations at KZYX.
He stated, “There isn’t time to source out those kinds of things.” As a result, the news begins to resemble a headline.
Approximately 130,000 listeners, including those in Mendocino County and a portion of Lake County, are served by the station. Since listeners who reside in remote rural regions without internet or cell coverage depend on KZYX for emergency information, de Channes was immediately concerned about fire safety when he first learned about the CPB reduction.
Public media providers and their allies used such potentially life-saving emergency notifications as a rallying cry, pleading with Congress to maintain funding for their stations, particularly those in rural, remote areas that also tend to be Republican. During extreme weather occurrences, Frank Lanzone, the longstanding general manager of San Luis Obispo’s NPR-affiliated KCBX, said his station has occasionally been the only on-air source of emergency information.
According to Lanzone, who has over 50 years of experience in public radio, there have been multiple instances during severe storms when we are the only station broadcasting in our region due to either power outages or people’s generators running out of propane.
About 45,000 listeners from Santa Barbara to Monterey are served by KCBX, which will lose $240,000 in CPB financing, or roughly 13% of its operational budget.
According to Lanzone, it will harm the stations and the listeners who are most in need. The ones in the midst of nowhere are the most vulnerable.
Local programs are most at risk
Leaders of radio and television stations stressed that local programming programs that are developed and produced internally rather than acquired from a third party will be the first to go. In addition to the membership fees that stations pay to be affiliated with PBS, which grants them access to a vast library of material that they can broadcast for free, producing locally focused public television programs requires additional time, money, and effort.
That probably means that popular local programs like Learn With Me, an award-winning bilingual English-Spanish children’s show, and Inland Edition, an Emmy-winning weekly half-hour public affairs show, which are both produced in-house by affiliate KVCR, will no longer be available to PBS viewers in the Inland Empire.
According to KVCR executive director and former Democratic state senator Connie Leyva, the local issues that people care about the most are likely to disappear. The station would lose roughly 6% of its yearly budget, or $550,000, in CPB financing.
She underlined that the station also wished to retain its journalism team, which includes one part-time reporter and two full-time reporters who have lately covered federal immigration sweeps occurring throughout the area.
“The Inland Empire is just hearing about what’s happening in Los Angeles if we’re not here,” Leyva stated. We are interested in the events that are taking on in our backyard, in the nearby schools, and at the Home Depots.
Large stations and independents suffer too
Larger radio stations, like San Francisco’s KQED, are better able to survive the budget blow than their smaller counterparts, but they will still lose significant portions of the money that currently supports popular shows and journalism positions. The loss of public funding would necessitate even greater cooperation, according to Tony Marcano, who oversees the California Newsroom, a statewide partnership network of 14 public radio stations and CalMatters.
According to Marcano, while smaller stations are probably going to be more impacted, this does not imply that big stations are exempt. There will be discomfort.
Earlier this month, KQED, the biggest public radio station in California and one of the most popular in the nation, let go of 45 staff members and lost another 10 due to early retirement offers. The 15% cut, which marks KQED’s third round of layoffs in as few as five years, was made immediately before Congress passed the budget cuts. Despite emphasizing that the changes were made because of long-standing financial difficulties, KQED will now lose about $8 million, or roughly 8% of its revenue.
The largest NPR station in the Los Angeles area, LAist, has cut 61 jobs since 2023 and lay off eight employees early this year. It will lose almost 4% of its budget, or $1.7 million in federal funds.
Newsroom employees and programming are not the only ones affected. In addition to providing funding for transmission infrastructure upgrades, the federal government assisted local stations in negotiating artist royalties.
Negotiations for a $1.1 million grant from the CPB to upgrade its transmission equipment, which hasn’t been updated since the 1980s, were nearing completion for Radio Biling e, a Central Valley-based organization that is among the biggest Spanish-language radio stations and broadcasts in the United States and Mexico. But the funding rollback means it will have to find the money elsewhere, said Hugo Morales, the group s co-executive director and founder.
According to Morales, you’re discussing transmitters that are forty years old. At some point, it s going to give out, and we re going to have to find somewhere else to raise the money for that.
Morales also made the difficult decision earlier this year to cancel the construction of three additional stations across Arizona and New Mexico that would have primarily served rural communities and farm workers who don t have access to broadband. The organization and its stations will lose $300,000 in annual CPB grants, roughly 7.5% of its yearly budget.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Radio Biling e shared vital information about testing centers, vaccine availability and how to sign up for social services in Spanish and Indigenous languages such as Mixteco and Triqui.
The loss of CPB funding will also jeopardize independent documentary filmmakers supported by the San Francisco-based ITVS, which Congress created in 1990 as an independent service with a mandate to increase diversity and innovation in public media. It received roughly 86% of its budget, $19 million, from federal grants.
ITVS leaders say the group has partnered with hundreds of independent filmmakers to co-produce more than 900 feature documentaries distributed to PBS stations nationwide.
Public media is a space for all Americans, said Carrie Lozano, the organization s president and CEO. These films are not partisan. They are, generally speaking, films that touch everybody s lives. They are there in service of the public.
In anticipation of the cuts, the organization laid off 13 employees in June, or roughly 20% of its staff. Lozano expects roughly 10 films to lose out on funding this year a big cut from the 20 to 40 feature and short documentaries that ITVS typically funds every year. While the organization is determined to stay afloat, Lozano worries the loss of federal investment will prevent important stories from being told and create a domino effect on the rest of the ecosystem.
There s no question that this is a huge blow to the field, Lozano said, and to everything that surrounds it.
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