Trump's US budget hacksaw leaves public broadcasting on precipice
The cuts follow Trump's accusations of ideological bias and will deal a bitter blow to information dissemination nationwide, including rural areas with limited news resources.
At the Republican president's urging, lawmakers along party lines approved the clawback of $1.1 billion in funding already allocated by Congress over the next two years to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Created in 1967 by President Lyndon Johnson, the non-profit CPB finances a minority share of the budgets of national radio and television mainstays NPR and PBS.
But the unprecedented rescission will also critically impact some 1,500 local radio and TV stations, from the East Coast to Alaska, that air part of the public broadcasters' content.
"Without federal funding, many local public radio and television stations will be forced to shut down," warned CPB president Patricia Harrison.
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Stations have been sounding the alarm for months.
Prairie Public Broadcasting, which has served North Dakota for 60 years, estimates it could lose 26 percent of its budget between combined cuts in state and CPB funding.
For Vermont Public, a broadcaster in the US Northeast, $4 million in funding is at stake.
"We're going to be forced to make some really difficult decisions about what local programming stays and what local programming we have to cut," said Ryan Howlett, who heads the financial arm of South Dakota Public Broadcasting, which oversees a dozen local radio stations and as many local TV stations.
In this rural and conservative state, "you're going to lose a connection point that binds us together," he told AFP.
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