Here’s where public broadcasting cuts hit the hardest

Here’s where public broadcasting cuts hit the hardest

When a 7.3-magnitude earthquake rumbled beneath the Bering Sea on Wednesday 50 miles south of Sand Point, Alaska, authorities sent their first tsunami warnings directly to the nearest public radio station, KUCB in the Aleutian Islands town of Unalaska. Along with other local NPR and PBS stations, it immediately broadcast alerts for residents and tourists to get to higher ground. By the time the Alaska Emergency Management Agency contacted Sand Point and other island communities, the word was already out, said the agency’s director, Bryan Fisher.

The earthquake struck as senators in Washington were debating whether to eliminate all of the $1.1 billion in federal funding for public broadcasting set to be doled out over the next two years to PBS, NPR, and local radio and television stations across the country.

“If the funding goes away and KUCB can’t stay on the air, we lose that vital warning channel to the public, mariners, and tourists in our coastal communities,” Fisher said.

The Senate narrowly passed the bill, which rescinds previously appropriated funds. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was one of only two Republicans to vote against it, citing “the incredible public service these stations provide,” including “emergency alerts that save human lives.” Early Friday, the House of Representatives passed the bill and sent it to President Donald Trump for a signature.

The bill’s quick passage showed most Republicans falling in behind Trump’s view that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a left-wing “monstrosity.” But the resistance from Murkowski and other lawmakers from rural states exposed an uncomfortable truth about federal funding for public media stations: Rural stations — often in red states — depend heavily on federal funding to survive, unlike stations in larger markets that can better tap donations from listeners with money to spare.

KYUK in Bethel, Alaska, for instance, depends on federal funding for 70 percent of its budget.

“We very much are the only place to get local news and information,” said Emily Schwing, a longtime investigative reporter in Alaska now working there. “If there’s an emergency alert, it comes from us.” Like other stations in Alaska, KYUK broadcasts in Indigenous languages too, providing what Schwing calls “the only official Central Yup’ik translator in the region.”

Public broadcasting is less vital in other rural regions with better cell and wireless service; consumers there have moved, like Americans in general, away from scheduled TV and radio and toward the internet, podcasts and streaming. And many rural Americans see much public radio programming in the same politicized light Trump does.

Jason Boeshore, a commercial agriculture manager who runs a large grain elevator, lives in what he calls Montana’s “forlorn eastern fringes,” an area of vast wheat farms where temperatures drop to minus-50 in the winter. A rare Democrat in his heavily Republican region, he has just one station saved on his truck’s radio: Prairie Public, the closest public radio affiliate, broadcast out of Williston, North Dakota. He feels confident that many of his conservative neighbors are “closet NPR consumers,” he said. “People don’t like to admit they use the service, but I know that they do.”

Mike McGinley, a Republican county commissioner in Beaverhead County, Montana, might contest that. His truck’s dial is turned not to public radio, but to KDBM 1490 AM, “Dillon’s Real Country.”

“It’s got local news, weather and a lot of ag reports and that kind of stuff,” he said. “A little bit of state news every once in a while. And then the national news on the hour.”

His constituents, he would guess, mostly do the same. Asked whether he thinks many turn to local public radio for information, McGinley said: “I hate to say for sure, but I would say absolutely not. I don’t think in my career I’ve ever listened to it.”

Lloyd Larsen, a Republican member of Wyoming legislature from Fremont County in the center of the state, said broadband brought YouTube and the rest of the internet to his county. But he added that since “it’s challenging to find anything that’s specific to your area,” Wyoming public television — which can be streamed online — fills those gaps.

Larsen is a fan of “Wyoming Chronicle,” a weekly program of interviews with notable locals produced by Wyoming PBS. He’s also been impressed with the station’s interviews with state lawmakers, he said, and its weather warnings are critical.

Republican state legislators Lloyd Larsen, left, and Matt Greene look over paperwork at the Wyoming Capitol in Cheyenne in 2013.

Larsen has served on appropriations committees in the Republican-dominated legislature, which has consistently allocated funding for Wyoming public television.

“We try to do our part in supporting Wyoming public television because we think it has real value,” he said.

It has, he added, “done some great documentaries on mental health and on issues that are very, very important to Wyoming, and how they’ll be able to do that moving forward is going to be challenging.”

The content derided by some Republican members of Congress as overly liberal, he said, does not dominate on the broadcasts in Wyoming, the nation’s reddest state.

“All those public broadcasting networks function a little bit independently,” Larsen said. “If you came and looked at the programs that they provide for Wyoming, you would find it’s just radically different, I believe, than what you would find in Chicago.”

While public TV and radio stations in much of rural America don’t depend on federal funding as heavily as their Alaska counterparts, the cuts would hit many of them hard. In Colorado’s Four Corners region, KSUT gets 20 percent of its funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

KUNM in Albuquerque covers just 10 percent of its $2.3 million budget with federal funding, but Jeff Pope, its general manager, says losing that still represents a significant blow. Stations have until Oct. 1 — the beginning of the federal fiscal year — to either replace the funding or make drastic cuts to programming and staff.

“What business makes an adjustment in 10 weeks?” he said.

Tami Graham faces a similar challenge at KSUT, which serves multiple communities and Indigenous tribes across a vast area. Located on the lands of the Southern Ute Tribe in Ignacio, Colorado, the station operates two distinct signals — one for tribal programming and another for broader public radio — reaching about 250,000 potential listeners across remote terrain where many lack reliable internet or cell service.

Covering an area that extends into parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah is costly: It takes “eight different tower sites to serve the region with a good signal,” Graham said. “A lot of people don’t realize that the FM signal is line of sight. So if you can’t see that tower site, it’s not going to reach you.”

Marsha Porter-Norton, a county commissioner in Colorado’s La Plata County, said KSUT provides perspectives on Native American communities that traditional media often misses. “I sometimes turn on KSUT and I hear drums,” she said. She noted that while other outlets typically portray Native Americans through historical imagery, crime reporting or reconciliation efforts, KSUT offers “a different lens.”

The broadcasters’ role in emergencies often goes beyond simply relaying official warnings. In Alaska, Fisher said, stations sometimes resemble one-person shops with a “general manager/engineer/on-air talent.”

“We’re able to call into the radio station and get on air and share information about evacuation, sheltering, if FEMA is coming,” he said. “You just can’t replace that with an automated system.”

The reliability of radio becomes even more critical when there are connectivity problems. As western North Carolina dealt with the impacts of Hurricane Helene last year, Blue Ridge Public Radio broadcast live for weeks when power, internet and cell service failed across the region.

Debris in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Swannanoa, North Carolina, on Oct. 1.

“We basically turned the mics on live,” said Pope, who ran the North Carolina station before moving to New Mexico. “We were live on the air 12 hours a day covering emergency meetings, interviewing people, and providing resources back to the community.”

The fundraising challenges facing rural stations are steep.

Kate Riley, president of America’s Public Television Stations, said the funding disparity makes rural stations particularly vulnerable.

“These smaller, more rural-serving stations are more reliant on federal funding because there are not as many people for them to raise money from viewers and listeners,” she said. “There’s just not as big of a population base.”

Schwing noted that the Alaska regions served by KYUK include some of the poorest areas in the United States.

“We don’t have a listener base that has extra money to offer us, and we’re very aware of that,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a listener base.”

As the Senate vote approached, the White House struck a last-minute deal with Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota to provide alternative funding for 28 tribal radio stations in nine states. The arrangement would move money from an Interior Department account to replace some lost federal support.

Loris Taylor, president of Native Public Media, wrote a letter to Rounds on Tuesday urging him to vote against the rescissions package despite the tribal station deal.

“While we recognize and appreciate the efforts of Congress and the White House to sustain tribal media, this proposal raises serious concerns regarding its feasibility, accessibility and sustainability,” she wrote.

Graham, whose station serves multiple tribal communities, expressed similar skepticism. The deal covers only about half of the nation’s tribally affiliated stations and provides what appears to be one-time funding rather than ongoing support.

The spending cuts do little to improve the government’s fiscal health, said Devin O’Connor, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. They offset about 0.03 percent of the reconciliation bill Republicans passed this month.

That rankles Colorado’s Porter-Norton.

“If this was coming from a national crisis with our budget, that’s one thing,” she said. “But I think it is unconscionable that these cuts to something that we all value so much are happening because of ideology.”