President Donald J. Trump has taken aim at NPR and PBS, seeking to cut off Congress-approved funding for the radio and television networks with an executive order issued last week and removing funding for the groups in his executive budget plan.
Arguing that it’s inappropriate for taxpayer money to flow to news organizations, and contending that both NPR and PBS are biased organizations that aren’t committed to fairness and fact in their work, Trump said in his executive order that his office maintains the power to cut off the flow of federal dollars, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to the networks either directly or indirectly.
In the North Country, executives for regional PBS affiliate WPBS and the regional NPR member station NCPR said the order, and the push to end federal support for both organizations, could pose dramatic challenges to the work they do locally.
Both WPBS and NCPR are independent nonprofits who affiliate with the national PBS and NPR networks. WPBS is a standalone nonprofit organization with headquarters in Watertown, a network of repeaters and a presence in Canada as well. NCPR is an independent department of St. Lawrence University that maintains a network of stations and repeaters in the North Country.
Both stations rely on thousands of dollars from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a company established by Congress, each year. That money is used for their own internal production and to support their relationships and content purchases from the national networks. WPBS received $993,265 for their main CPB funding package this year. WSLU, the main station callsign for NCPR’s network, got $287,276 for their main CBP funding this year. Both stations also got a few hundred thousand dollars for upgrades to their emergency alert systems.
Being a member of a national network like NPR and PBS comes with direct costs – money the stations owe to the national networks to get access to their content. Both stations use some of that CPB funding to pay those costs to the networks.
“We are a member station of NPR, and for us to be a member station and carry NPR programming, we have to pay a variety of different fees to NPR,” said NCPR general manager Mitch Teich. “The biggest one is our core fee, which basically creates the affiliation with NPR, and allows us to carry the big flagship programs like Morning Edition and All Things Considered.”
The NPR affiliation also gives NCPR access to music licenses for the radio network, helping to support their music broadcasts. Teich said that CBP and NPR negotiate streaming rights for commercial music, similar to what national commercial radio networks like IHeartRadio do. If that is somehow undone by the Trump order, Teich said that would pose a real danger to NCPR’s music lineup, which is a relatively unique offering the station provides.
“Music is a huge part of what we do here, and I think that distinguishes us from a lot of public radio stations in the areas we cover,” he said. “Anything that threatens our ability to do that is a real concern.”
At WPBS, the situation is similar but not identical. As a TV station affiliated with PBS, WPBS has to pay an annual affiliate fee, which gives the station access to the PBS catalog of content and web services including the PBS streaming service.
The CBP funding also goes to paying for local operations at both stations; WPBS uses it to maintain their four-person local production team, to pay for content creation and community events, educational investments and other projects. NCPR also uses the money to pay for their team of reporters across the North Country, equipment maintenance and “a-la-carte” programming purchases from NPR and other radio production companies.
“The money goes in a lot of direction,” WPBS general manager Mark Prasuhn said.
If the Trump EO is upheld, and the stations are permanently blocked from using CBP funding to pay for PBS or NPR content or fees, both managers said they would seek to adjust their budgets and use unrestricted funds to cover the gap left by the CBP funding restriction.
“In a best case scenario, we would essentially just be rearranging our budget,” Teich said.
Prasuhn noted that WPBS and other nonprofits are used to working with restricted funding — grants and donations are sometimes directed to specific projects. But the CBP funding, for both NCPR and WPBS, is much larger than most individual donations or smaller grants.
If the CBP money stops flowing altogether, Teich said it would be much harder to manage the fallout.
“We do rely on the CPB money, it amounted to about 12% of our current fiscal year budget,” he said.
That could endanger programming and jobs — a possibility Teich said he isn’t looking at right now, with the ongoing uncertainty over what will happen with the Trump order or his efforts to cut funding in his budget.
At WPBS, Prasuhn said the impact would be devastating – and an abrupt cutoff would be particularly damaging.
“The way this was set up in the 70’s, Congress set it up so the money was set aside on a two-year cycle,” he said. “In principle, we already have not just next year’s funding, but also the following year’s funding promised to CPB by Congress.”
He said if the decision was made to cut those funds off after local stations have already planned out how to use them, there would be an almost immediate cut off for local content.
“We’d have to pull back on a lot of the activities we do, the education, some of local presence, events, education, content, and there would be staff reductions,” Prasuhn said.
Both Prasuhn and Teich rejected the argument that they or the national networks their organizations are a part of are biased. Prasuhn noted that PBS, although it does produce a news program, spends more time and energy on educational content for children, which is also true of WPBS.
“For our part, news and current affairs, including talk shows, is under 10% of our local schedule,” he said. “It is an important, and we are pleased to bring people the nightly PBS news, and we think it’s balanced.”
Teich at NCPR noted that NPR and his stations have come under attack from Republicans frequently in recent years. Just a two years ago, NCPR ended up in the crosshairs of Congresswoman Elise M. Stefanik after a former NCPR employee and candidate for local office accidentally sent an appeal for support for local Democrats from her NCPR email address. Stefanik, conflating NCPR and the national NPR network, started calling for the full defunding of all NPR stations, a call she’s maintained and infrequently repeated over the years.
“The truth of it is that, for everybody out there complains that NPR specifically is biased one way or another, what they tend to forget is that stations like ours provide a full range of service and it doesn’t matter if we’re serving Democrats or Republicans.”
He said NCPR’s local coverage of town and village meetings, flood and severe weather alerts, musical programs and more are delivered freely and consumed by people of all political stripes.
“I hope when people talk about this subject, and they think about what defunding would actually do, they think about the whole range of services a station like NCPR provides a community,” Teich said.
The Trump executive order was met with nearly immediate legal action from CPB. The organization contends that it is not under Presidential jurisdiction, as it was established as a private nonprofit corporation by Congress. They argue the money they send to local stations and to both NPR and PBS directly is designated by Congress, and only Congress can set restrictions on that funding.
As for the budget cuts themselves — the Trump budget plan is only an opening offer in a long negotiation process with Congress. The President has tried to cut all CPB money out before, in his last term in office, but Congress rejected those cuts and continued to fund CPB anyway. It’s not clear if this Congress, controlled by Republicans, will do the same.
That uncertainty over the future is having its own effects too. Prasuhn said that WPBS pivoted after the pandemic to focus more on educational programs, out in the community and on the airwaves. To produce those educational programs, WPBS has to do nearly a year of preplanning and prep work, workshopping the program, vetting the educational aspects with teachers and experts, and securing national distribution.
“It’s all a balancing act, but we are being conservative,” he said. “In my mind, I’m thinking about the things we’re starting now with bills that will come in six, nine months. and I’m wondering if the money will be there. But what we’re not doing, what I am reluctant to take the step to do right now, is cut back on what we’ve been doing for the North Country.”