
Rescission of public broadcast funding threatens rural areas
July 30 (UPI) -- Publicly funded radio and television broadcasts bring news and emergency alerts to rural and underserved populations and the congressional rescissions bill will have some at risk of going off air.
The U.S. Senate passed the rescissions bill earlier this month, peeling back about $9 billion in funding for public broadcasting, foreign aid and other services as recommended by the Department of Government Efficiency. The decision could lead to growing news deserts as rural communities lose what is often their main source of local coverage and critical information.
For public broadcasting, the bill cuts the funding allocated for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. For fiscal year 2026, $535 million had been approved in the appropriations bill passed in March 2024. Earlier this year, Congress approved $535 million in funding for fiscal year 2027.
Public broadcast funding is directed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It is a private, nonprofit organization that was authorized by Congress to oversee government public media funds in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Funding is distributed to more than 1,500 public television and radio stations.
"The vote by the U.S. Senate and House to eliminate federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will have profound, lasting, negative consequences for every American," Patricia Harrison, CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, said in a statement. "Without federal funding, many local public radio and television stations will be forced to shut down. Parents will have fewer high quality learning resources available for their children. Millions of Americans will have less trustworthy information about their communities, states, country, and world with which to make decisions about the quality of their lives."
Government funding for public media is distributed to stations based on need. Stations that broadcast to rural, underserved and minority populations receive a higher portion of their funding from the CPB due in part to not having access to as many resources as those in highly populated areas.
Tribal radio
Tribal stations will be among those most deeply affected by the loss of federal funding.
KSUT Tribal Radio broadcasts to the Four Corners region of the Southwest. It has served listeners in Northwest New Mexico, Southwest Colorado, Southeast Utah and Northeast Arizona since it was founded in 1976 by the Southern Ute Tribe. Four tribes are served by the station as well: the Southern Ute Tribe, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Jicarilla Apache Nation in Northern New Mexico and the Navajo Nation in northeast Arizona and Northwest New Mexico.
Much of KSUT's coverage area is already considered a news desert -- an area that lacks adequate local news coverage. Each of the states KSUT broadcasts to have lost at least 15% of their local newspapers since 2004, according to The Expanding News Desert project at the University of North Carolina's Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
"We chose with the limited resources we have for original reporting to focus on indigenous affairs. That certainly is not a service that folks get of regional news and information on Native American issues," Tami Graham, KSUT executive director, told UPI.
About 20% of KSUT's budget, about $330,000, comes from federal funding, Graham said. With that funding source gone, the station is planning to fundraise rapidly to maintain its level of service. Due to its rural coverage area, it does not have access to the kinds of philanthropic resources that stations in larger markets have."
"It's a double whammy losing that funding and not being in major markets," Graham said. "We have great listeners who are very supportive. We're looking for where we can shave and cut costs. We're trying our best to avoid any major staffing cuts."
KSUT's goal is to raise about $600,000 in the next two years to backfill the lost federal funding. Fundraising, listener membership, business underwriters and grant funding outside of the federal government are four revenue resources it will lean on.
"How we survive in the meantime is resilience. We're going to survive," Graham said. "There will be stations that will go dark. I have no doubt about it. Hopefully that will just be temporary."
Emergency broadcasts
Public media is oftentimes the only source of emergency alerts and critical information in rural areas. State and local alerts are pushed through public radio and television broadcasts through the Emergency Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alerts.
Public media stations were crucial in Southern California during the wildfires in January. According to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 111 Wireless Emergency Alerts were shared with more than 18 million people in affected and at-risk areas.
In 2024, there was a 30% increase over 2023 in Wireless Emergency Alerts issued by federal, state and local authorities.
Public radio is particularly crucial in rural regions where cell and Internet service is unreliable if not completely unavailable.
"Turning on your radio can be a lifeline," Graham said. "Old-fashion radio in a lot of these tribal communities is really important because they know that's how they're going to get their information if it's a rapidly developing wildfire or COVID information. We were hugely important to communities about what restrictions there were on tribal lands related to COVID."
Wildfires are the most persistent threat in the KSUT coverage area.
"There's wildfires happening now in our region," Graham said. "We pride ourselves on keeping any updates around evacuation notices and road closures on our airwaves. We put a lot of energy into making sure we're taking the information we're finding and then relaying that to the degree that we can for those folks who may not have the ability to gather that information for themselves because of a lack of connectivity."
Viktor Pickard, C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania, told UPI cuts to public media are likely to cost lives.
"Many rural communities are going to lose emergency alert systems," he said. It's not hyperbolic to say these cuts will at least indirectly lead to people losing their lives."
'An already vulnerable system'
Pickard said a significant percentage of local public media stations are likely to shut down in the next year with a disproportionate number of them serving rural areas. The Trump administration may oversee this significant blow to public broadcasting but partisan attacks on the system are not new.
"The budgetary concerns are really a red herring," Pickard said. "It's much more ideological."
Republican opposition to public media can be traced back to its inception, according to Pickard. President Richard Nixon was critical of PBS and its content. Republican administrations that followed shared at least some of Nixon's ire, seeking to cut funding, claiming public broadcasts held a liberal bias.
"Every democratic country in the world does it though," Pickard said of funding public media.
However, the United States lags behind other countries in its financial support. According to Pickard, the United States spends about $1.50 per person on public media funding. Great Britain spends more than $100 per person.
"We've always impoverished our public media system in the United States compared to other media systems in the world," Pickard said.
The funding model is designed, in part, to keep publicly-funded media organizations independent from government influence. It has also made organizations vulnerable.
"The system was already vulnerable," Pickard said. "We're already a global outlier compared to how public media systems are funded around the world. In many ways, [President Donald] Trump is exploiting an already vulnerable system."
Pickard worries that the further degradation of the news media ecosystem will ultimately be a major blow to U.S. democracy.
"We have these natural experiments on what happens when a local community loses news institutions," he said. "People are less likely to vote. They're less physically engaged. They're less politically knowledgeable. There are higher levels of extremism and higher levels of corruption."
Pickard cited studies by the Democracy Fund, a nonprofit foundation with the mission of supporting democracy. Senior director Joshua Stearns penned a compilation of more than 50 studies that indicate journalism, especially local coverage, increases engagement with policy.
"When people lose local media, they are no longer well informed," Pickard said. "That's a critical area alongside losing emergency alert systems. We have these news deserts that are rapidly expanding all across the country. In many cases, public media are the last institutions standing that could provide some level of news and information."
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