Public Broadcasting Is In Danger (Again)
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Donald Trump and his allies are coming for it. And we have to be prepared for an incredible political battle. Federal funding for public media is once again on the chopping block. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Olinger. On this week's show, we track the essential role local public radio stations play in keeping our local governments in check.

And how they sometimes save lives from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. We have heard stories and seen images of people gathered around one little hand crank radio at the cul-de-sac to listen to our updates. To remote southwestern Alaska. During freeze up, people do fall into holes in the river. People do go missing. Being able to communicate with the public through KYUK about things.

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From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Donald Trump, who says journalists are scum and thinks fact-checking is really unfair, won the election. So now all those accused of scummily fact-checking are scrambling to adjust. And I'm Michael Loewinger.

After all, Mr. Trump has already vowed to seek retribution for media offenses by, say, suing CBS for a billion dollars because of, quote, biased editing of a Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview, suspending ABC's broadcast license because it fact-checked him during a debate, and suing the Des Moines Register for printing a poll suggesting Harris would win, a poll that turned out to be, wait for it...

And there's more. We're involved in one which has been going on for a while and very successfully against Bob Woodward where he didn't quote me properly from the tapes. And then on top of everything else, he sold the tapes, which

This week, the Washington Post's budget was cut by its stupefyingly rich owner, Jeff Bezos, two months after he killed its endorsement of Kamala Harris, and just as Amazon signed a big deal to bring out a Melania Trump-endorsed Melania Trump documentary.

He's also given a million bucks to Trump's inauguration, as has Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, who just announced that Facebook is ending its fact-checking program, leading the president-elect to say that Zuck's company had, quote, come a long way. The point is, fact-based journalism is in trouble.

So this hour, we're going to look at the plight of public radio, which we are, because who else is going to do it? But first, a quick history. Back in 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson mired in Vietnam, was trying to build the great society at home by passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act.

creating Medicare, and crucially for the purpose of this story, creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has been marked for death repeatedly. So what is it? The Corporation for Public Broadcasting will assist stations and producers who aim for the best in broadcasting on the whole fascinating range of human activity. It will try to prove that what educates can also be exciting.

It will get part of its support from our government, but it will be carefully guarded from government or from party control. It will be free and it will be independent, and it will belong to all of our people.

It was a hard sell. Conservatives worried the CPB would promote liberal ideas. After all, Johnson's agenda was indisputably liberal. Some suspected its funds would flow more to some regions than others. Commercial broadcasters feared the competition. And even after the dust settled, well, actually, the dust never really settled, it's been kicked up by every Republican administration since.

Yet, through the decades, somehow, every effort to slash or burn the CPB has failed, thanks to such battle-scarred warriors as, you know, Big Bird and this guy. I end the program by saying, you've made this day a special day by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.

And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.

But despite Fred Rogers' appeal to empathy, Richard Nixon, not known for manageable feelings, viewed public broadcasting as an enemy to slay. So in 1975, it was left to Gerald Ford to set up a funding scheme to shield it, theoretically at least, from the immediate political winds.

Congress was directed to appropriate CPB's funding two years in advance. Of course, Congress could kill future funding or even rescind what had already been allocated, but some insulation was better than none. Fast forward to 2017, Donald Trump tries to cut CPB's funding several times in his first term. This morning, President Trump made public his proposed budget blueprint for the coming fiscal year.

Among the items included, the elimination of all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But he didn't get it done. No, he did not. Those proposals did not fly in Congress. Karen Everhart is the managing editor of Current, a non-profit newsroom covering public media. Members of Congress...

particularly in rural states, recognize that public broadcasting is one of the only local originating sources of news and information and programming. And they value that, and their constituents value that.

So what typically happens is the House goes along with a recommendation, especially when it's dominated by Republicans. The House will eliminate CPB's funding from its appropriations budget, and then the Senate will propose an alternative number, and that number or something around that amount will end up in the final budget.

More than 70% of CPB's annual appropriation goes directly to public media stations in the form of community service grants, CSGs, of which about 45% are rural. And they can be used as they need to be to keep the station running and for programming, both local and national.

They're not obligated to buy programs from PBS, nor do they have to buy from NPR. Although most of them do because they're very, you know, popular with their audiences. They can choose to buy programs from American public media or PRX or the BBC. Last year, CPB received $525 million plus another $10 million in interest.

about half of which went to local public TV stations and direct grants, about 15% to local radio stations, a big chunk went out in programming grants, mostly to TV, more went out to support the distribution system, etc. That said...

the bigger stations are less vulnerable to attacks on CPB because it's not a significant part of their budgets. They don't rely on CPB funding for essential services that doesn't go towards their programming budget. It's the small stations where it really makes the biggest difference in what they do on a day-to-day basis. And those are the stations that are most at risk.

Every single time they have the House, the Senate and the presidency, they think, ah, now we have a chance.

And every time they find how much support there is for this program. Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey is a member of the Subcommittee on Communications, Media and Broadband, which oversees the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He's been fighting off Republican efforts to defund NPR and PBS for decades.

Whether it be the children's programming that's on all day long, all across the country for free, or the news, the entertainment made available on NPR in the remotest parts of

of America, in Alaska, in Arusta County, Maine. Wherever people in the United States live, there is access. And each time there has to be a re-education of the Republican members of Congress because they learn how central it is. And

Every time we've been able to hit the pause button and just stop them from making those dramatic cuts. So that's what we're going to have to do again. One line of rhetoric I'm sure you're familiar with is, OK, we can see why so many different kinds of Americans support this policy.

But why don't the viewers and the listeners pay for it themselves? Why does the government need to be paying or contributing for the production of this work? What do you say to that? Because we do need one source of news which is free.

If public broadcasting did not exist, we would be trying right now to invent it because we need public broadcasting more than ever. As the effort to defund and...

and demonize NPR's coverage ramps up, Republicans will almost certainly point to an essay in the free press substack by a former NPR editor named Uri Berliner, who claimed that NPR doesn't employ enough conservatives, that the news organization caters too heavily to a left-wing audience, that conservative listenership has declined.

Follow-up reporting revealed that the accusations were cherry-picked and mischaracterized NPR's reporting. The truth is, NPR receives a relatively small amount of its funding directly from the government, and there is zero evidence that NPR manipulated its coverage to protect its funding because it simply didn't happen.

The conservative backlash against NPR is a threat against NPR's actual independence, a partisan effort to force NPR to alter its subjective coverage. And that is the true threat to free speech, that objective journalists are told that they've got to conduct journalism more like the Fox network, which is biased in order to keep funding

Back in 2005, during an interview on C-SPAN, you said... There has been a radical right-wing agenda to undermine the public broadcasting system forever, really. But at the end of the day, there always is a moderate center in Congress, Democrat and Republican, that sticks together, that ensures that proper funding for the public broadcasting system stays intact. Senator...

Do you think that remains true today? Or is this political moment fundamentally more split than in Congress's of years past? Well, the newer members of the House and Senate

Senate who are more extreme may bring an ideological perspective to the issue. But for the members who have served for years, they've been through this debate. I don't think it's going to be easy for the ideologues to convince the pragmatists that the pragmatists should just give up. They understand how their communities rely upon public television and public radio. We'll see how it all plays out.

But ultimately, as the old saying goes, all politics is local. And there's nothing more local than your local NPR station.

Part of what we're trying to understand in this episode of our show is whether an emboldened Donald Trump, a Republican-controlled House and Senate, all in a very anti-media political moment, presents a new and unique threat to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Given all the technological disruption, the fact that many Americans can get news for free—it's not always good, but they can get lots of news for free online—

Are these threats unique? There is going to be an intensity to this campaign against the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, especially NPR. That is unprecedented.

Donald Trump and his allies are coming for it. And we have to be prepared for an incredible political battle. We're going to have to build a powerful coalition. And my own belief is that they're going to quickly see how much Americans value these media sources because public broadcasting is a public good. Ed Markey is a Democratic senator for Massachusetts. Senator, thank you very much. Great to be with you. Thank you so much.

Coming up, why local news is critical across the country. This is On The Media. WNYC Studios is supported by Intuit TurboTax. Taxis was waiting to get your money back, which turned into worrying about getting your money back.

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This is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Now we're going to a staunch CPB critic to hear that argument directly. We reached out to Senator John Kennedy, the Louisiana Republican who last month introduced a bill to defund CPB, calling it the No Propaganda Act. He said,

He didn't respond. Nor did the like-minded Pennsylvania Congressman Scott Perry. So we asked Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who's called for defunding CPB for over a decade. When the foundation released Project 2025 last April, he wrote the chapter on why CPB should end.

His chief reason was that it was unfair on two counts. First, to the competition, which did not have the benefit of federal funding. And second, to the taxpayers, especially conservative ones, forced to support programming that not only doesn't reflect their values, but actually undermines them.

Because we both had dogs in this fight, we debated with a lot of conviction, but ultimately to little agreement. Sometimes, though, such conversations are useful if only to see how differently two well-intended people can see the world. Thank you very much for having me. I'm very happy to be on your show.

You say that every Republican president since Nixon has tried to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That's a fact. And that it's time for it to finally happen. But those efforts have always failed.

because there seems to be broad support for the service. A 2017 PBS survey conducted by both Republican and Democratic polling teams found that 70% of Trump voters opposed eliminating federal funding for public TV. Well, weak members of Congress have come in and saved your bacon. Why would they? Because you give them awards. They love the awards that you give them. They put them on their website. I don't want to name any names,

Why do you have to do this perennially? To defend the funding against the quadrennial attacks. Why not just be less biased? Why not just be objective in reporting the news? All right. I'm not going to argue that NPR does or doesn't have a liberal bias. We once spent several episodes addressing the issue with a lot of conservatives, conservatives

who, like you, listen to public radio every day. They don't like the attitude, but they like the information. I disagree. I think the information is tainted. You know, let's look at the fact-checking that NPR did on President Trump's press conference in August. Do you want me to tell you what the headline was?

162 lies and distortions in a news conference. NPR fact-checks former President Trump. Trump said, we are very close to a world war. NPR's fact-check said, quote, no serious person thinks that the U.S., Russia, and China are about to start a world war. It just so happens that the next week I was at the Vatican and I attended a set of remarks by the Pope

And he talked about a looming world war. I think that we can qualify the Pope as a serious person. So the FPR fact check, quote unquote, was wrong.

Another one was when he called Kamala Harris a very liberal senator. He didn't say that she was liberal. He said that she's a radical left person at a level nobody has seen. That's just tea. OK, OK. All right. So when he goes hyperbolic, you're of the camp that says don't take him literally. Here's another one, Brooke.

NPR chose not to report on the Hunter Biden laptop. NPR put out a statement. Here's what the statement said. We don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' times on stories that are just pure distractions. Even Fox News passed on the story amid credibility concerns at that very point. Yeah.

The way that NPR reported on the news that MEDA, that is Facebook and Instagram, are renouncing censorship. Are renouncing fact checking. No, censorship. They actually said it was biased.

OK, to fact check. That's right. I don't agree with that. I think it's fundamental to good journalism. People with conservative views saw that as a stride towards freedom of expression. NPR's reporting did not reflect that at all. Here's a quote from NPR. Repeating talking points long used by President-elect Donald Trump and his allies.

Zuckerberg said the company's content moderation approach resulted too often in censorship. NPR reported it as Zuckerberg just repeating President Trump's talking points. A person who gets...

The lion's share of her news from NPR would have no way of finding out that what Mark Zuckerberg announced yesterday was seen by many of us as a victory for freedom of expression. NPR has a vision that is the univision, the vision of the bi-coastal elite. You're saying if NPR would just be more conservative,

I don't know, centrist? You know, by whose standards? - By the standards of conservatives, because conservatives pay for you as well. And if conservatives complain perennially about you, you don't think that's a problem?

I'm just saying this is not all conservatives. That was what this research I quoted earlier suggested, that if you actually talk to conservative consumers of NPR, they may dislike what they perceive as a liberal perspective, but they value the journalism. Uri Berliner, 25-year veteran of NPR...

wrote a very eye-opening, whistleblowing piece about NPR, how it handles the news. He said only 11% of listeners are now conservatives, while 67% are liberal, and 20% describe themselves as middle-of-the-road, public raiders driving away even moderates and traditional liberals.

You don't think the facts are more reliable on national public radio? No, I don't at all. I mean, I think, again, that you become an educated news consumer. You consume a wide variety of news, and then you make up your own mind. You need the information to do that, accurately reported.

And there are very few sources of that. NPR is not one of them. Then we come down to facts again. Just plain, naked information. And you think that the left has a monopoly on them, and I don't. I think that journalists who have been working in the field for a long time and public broadcasting among them, they don't lie.

Now, your main gripe is with PBS and especially NPR, but public media, as you know, it is so much more than that. Most of CPB's funding, some 70 percent, goes to local stations, not directly to NPR. And those stations play crucial roles, especially in rural areas, in news deserts. They turn around then and they use that money to buy NPR and PBS broadcasting. As to the news deserts,

Let's take Alaska, for example. I know that you talk to people in Alaska. The figures that I got were from four or five years ago has an Internet penetration of 80 percent, 20 percent, which is not insignificant. But a lot of those people just don't want Internet. So I think that this argument that there are news deserts out in the Dakotas and in Alaska continue to get news through social media. They do not need the taxpayer to pony up. But they aren't getting news online.

from the internet about their local area. In 2024, there were 208 counties that were considered news deserts. More than 1,500 had only one local news source. That means that more than half of the nation's counties have little to no local news. News deserts have been associated with lower household incomes, lower rates of educational attainment, higher poverty. And a recent study found

from Medill's School of Journalism, Northwestern University's journalism school, says that there was a net increase of 81 stand-alone lawyers

Local digital news sites in the last year, but nearly 90% of those are in metro areas, not in rural counties. Well, I think it's a question of demand, but, and it really is a demand, a supply will be there. I've never seen any area where demand surges and is not met by a supply. Not all listeners can afford to support their public stations, and they rely on them for local news, emergency updates. In fact...

Rural stations are the ones that are reliant on CPB funding, and they don't spend all that money on simply sending it to National Public Radio. They buy NPR programming. They do, but that's not where all their money goes. The rest of it is for their physical plant and for local news and for partnering with emergency services in their area. Yeah.

As I said, I think that if there is a need, if there's a demand, the market will supply a response to it. But, you know, if some local communities have disaster response in weather-related needs that the market does not supply a solution to, I am sure the state and local governments can devise and set up systems that can take care of the problem on a much cheaper basis than the entire public broadcasting apparatus

and without the attendant ills that accompany the prison system. As for local news, which is you mentioned local news, I just don't buy that state funding is the only business model for local news. We've had private funding before. So I don't know why all of a sudden state funding is the only business model for local news. Now, if you're asking me, Brooke, is it a good thing that Alaskans will no longer be captured in

by NPR's liberal vision. Do I think that's a good thing? Yeah, I think that's a good thing. We did speak to Alaska, not just Alaska. And in some of these areas, there is no internet. There are constant disruptions. This is how they get the information about the emergency services that they absolutely

absolutely need. I'm not sure that's the case. It used to say it's for the children. You're trying to kill Big Bird. Well, Big Bird has flown the coop. Big Bird has been fired by HBO in the last few months. So now that you can no longer say it's for the children, you're saying, oh, it's for rural Alaskans. If there's a need for them, people will step in. There will be charity money. They

Soros will pay for it, the Tide Foundation, the Ford Foundation, membership model. We're talking about paying half a billion dollars a year to NPR and PBS and to continue to make the argument that this is for these rural communities.

I don't think it passes the laugh test. Many people on the local level that you say have been harried into supporting public radio actually do it because they recognize that their communities need this local service.

I can see now clearly how NPR is going to build its lobbying efforts. This year, they're going to say, it's the local rural communities. We have to save their news coverage. In fact, we live in the age of the internet. And you think that will take care of it? You think that will take care of it, yeah. And when there's a demand, there's a supply. And it's unfair. As Jefferson said, it's a tyranny.

to ask a man to pay for views with which he disagrees. That's pure tyranny. Thank you very much. Thank you, Brooke. Anytime. Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

We all know that local news is in retreat. As you just heard, the Medill Local News Initiative found as of 2023 that more than half of U.S. counties have no or very limited access to anything other than national outlets. One well-observed impact of losing local news, local officials are more inclined to misbehave.

Researchers at George Mason University in Tulane tallied corruption charges in federal districts that had lost a major daily newspaper from 1996 to 2019. After those papers closed, the districts collectively saw a 6.9% increase in charges of bribery, embezzlement, fraud, and, the authors noted, that only counts the people who got caught.

The study also checked if the some 350 websites that sprang up as substitutes for those papers could make a dent in that number.

They didn't. Wouldn't it be great if a solid piece of accountability reporting always resulted in a change for the better? But it's rarely so simple. Its power is in the act of showing up with a microphone to every statehouse hearing or school board meeting, reading through police files, or putting in that umpteenth FOIA request.

Even after all that and more, it can take years to see results, if at all. But sometimes all that tedious incremental reporting does start to add up. Government malfeasance is exposed and good things happen.

Take this example from Colorado in 2022, when the state was still recovering from the Marshall Fire, which destroyed over 1,000 homes. Scott Franz, a government watchdog reporter for Colorado Public Radio, noticed that a popular bipartisan bill to fund investigations into the origins of wildfires mysteriously died.

Why did this bill die? How did it die? Scott Franz. When I started talking to lawmakers, I discovered that there was a secret ballot system that lawmakers were using to anonymously rank the bills that they thought should get funding and ultimately get passed at the statehouse. So the sponsor of this bill blamed its death on this secret ballot system. He wasn't the only one reporting on the new system, but he was the first to ask...

Hey, wait a second. Is this legal? Franz spent two years reporting dozens of stories on this secret ballot system used by state Democrats, probing how the system worked and its impact on legislation. The public has a right to see how bills go through the process because at the end of the day, if bills can just die quietly without explanation or accountability, then

It shut the public out of an important part of the decision-making process. In early 2024, a judge ordered lawmakers to stop using the system because it violated state law. And in the state's most recent legislative session... For the first time, lawmakers made this process public. They published the results down to how each individual lawmaker voted in this process. Here's another example of the grind of accountability journalism paying off.

In 2018, Matt Katz, former WNYC reporter and current executive producer of CityCast Philly, started reporting on immigrants detained by ICE in three New Jersey county jails. He spent the next few years covering how these counties, run by Democratic politicians who publicly protested Trump immigration policies, were at the same time raking in millions of dollars from ICE under Trump.

There was immediate concern about this because people didn't know that, in fact, their county budgets were being subsidized by ICE and therefore their taxes were lowered. The public was also unaware of the horrific conditions in these jails. I reported on allegations of sexual assault by officers, inhumane medical care, like Bengay prescribed for a broken rib or...

Long delays in access to treatment for chronic illnesses. Other local outlets picked up on Katz's reporting, and people showed up outside the jails to protest.

In 2021, New Jersey banned ICE detention facilities from opening in the state, but that ban was contested by a federal judge in 2023, and now New Jersey is appealing that federal decision. It's always hard as a reporter to know if something you reported is directly what caused some change.

But we were told on background that our reporting is what led to this. And certainly the addition of reporting from other news outlets, editorials from local newspapers also put pressure on policymakers to do something about this. Sometimes the grunt work of investigative reporting kicks in long after the spotlight on a story fades.

In early 2015, ACLU reporter Kurt Guyette broke the story of the Flint water crisis in Michigan to a national audience, painting a picture of millions of Flint residents exposed to tap water contaminated with staggering amounts of lead.

But soon after Flint's switch to a cleaner, safer reservoir in late 2015 and Barack Obama's emergency declaration in January 2016, much of the national media moved on. That's when local reporters like Michigan Public Radio's Lindsay Smith doubled down. We really held on to it and did not let go.

It was really wild the number of times that we had to keep saying, no, state, this is your responsibility. No, EPA, pretty sure that is your responsibility. That continued just for months and months. Smith and her environmental reporting team spent years covering the state's response to the crisis. They also turned their eyes to other districts in Michigan.

After the dust settled with Flint, it was very intuitive to turn our attention to places like Grand Rapids, Saginaw, Midland, you know, Battle Creek. They had tons of lead lines. They had not been testing at any homes with lead lines for decades. We really were able to...

keep the pressure on to see like, okay, let's resolve this in other places. And as the government started admitting its wrongs and implementing new water safety rules, Michigan Public Radio was still pushing. Michigan now has adopted the toughest rules in the country.

because of the water crisis and because frankly we kept reporting on it as they went through this rulemaking process and now the EPA has gone in and finally adopted some changes to their federal lead and copper rules too. But they didn't do it alone. Flint Journal has some great reporters who did excellent, excellent job reporting on the Flint water crisis throughout.

The Detroit Free Press, the Flint Journal, Kurt Guyot at the ACLU, and us, I would really package those together. It was almost what needed to happen to make the state not ignore us. This kind of painstaking reporting takes time and money and the trust of bosses who might not have anything to air for years.

It's certainly not profitable. It's merely a public trust, what Jefferson called the agitation produced by a free press. He said that, quote, Coming up, public radio's most crucial mission doesn't emanate from Washington or even Brooklyn. This is On The Media. On The Media.

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Only available with TurboTax Live Full Service. See guarantee details at TurboTax.com slash guarantees. On the Media is supported by Rocket Money. The start of a new year is the perfect time to get organized, set goals, and prioritize what matters most. One common top priority for many of us is financial wellness.

Thanks to Rocket Money, financial goals can feel achievable. They show you all of your subscriptions right in one place and pull together spending across different accounts to track spending habits.

Rocket Money's dashboard also gives you a clear view of your expenses across all of your accounts and can help you easily create a personalized budget with custom categories to help keep your spending on track. Whether your goal is to pay off credit card debt, put away money for a house, or just build your savings, Rocket Money makes it easy. Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved users a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions.

Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of content we know the world needs. Since then, New York Public Radio's rigorous journalism has gone on to win a Peabody Award and a DuPont Columbia Award, among others.

In addition to this award-winning reporting, your sponsorship also supports inspiring storytelling and extraordinary music that is free and accessible to all. To get in touch and find out more, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org. This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. We'll finish this hour by looking at a few public radio stations that met their communities in a time of need. I came to Marfa yesterday.

Around 2000, and I had a front row seat of watching Marfa become what it is now. Journalist Tom Michael founded Marfa Public Radio, a station that serves far west Texas. It's in Presidio County, one of the poorest counties in the United States, but Marfa's known as an art town, the home for the Chinati Foundation, which was where a minimalist New York artist, Donald Judd, did a large-scale installation.

Maybe you've seen pictures of a lonely Prada store on a barren highway. That's Marfa. The radio station is one of a few local media shops, but its airwaves reach listeners far afield in what's otherwise basically a news desert and a literal desert. The Chihuahuan Desert, which is mostly in Mexico, you know, it's a dry climate.

Which helps explain what happened on April 9th, 2011, a hot day in the middle of a drought. It was a Saturday, I believe. We had a meeting at the station because we were preparing for our next on-air fundraiser.

And I think we had three employees at the time, myself, Ann Adkins, an office manager, Rachel Osher Lindley. And I remember Rachel had to go to her second job at the grocery store, so was headed home. And then she called and noticed that what she thought was originally her neighbor's house was on fire. It's my neighbor's house. I can't get to my house. My neighbor's entire house is bursting to flame. There's grass fire. Oh, my God. There's fire. Oh, my God.

Tom didn't know this at the time, but his team was the first to report on what would become one of Texas' largest grassland wildfires. We were kind of a relay point for a lot of critical information about what was happening to the fire. You had Steve O'Dell up on Blue Mountain, like looking at where the smoke was going. I've got the smoke moving to the northwest towards Mono Pareto. So the heaviest part of the smoke cloud is over Mono Pareto at

Pretty soon we're in regular contact with the fire chief at that time. In all my years of firefighting, this is the worst fire I've had.

Jim Fowler is the spokesperson for the Fort Davis Volunteer Fire Department. The first time I've had to evacuate my residence for a fire. And my first concern was my horses. You had Ty Mitchell, cowboy there, kind of moving his horses. So one of the deputies jumped in my pickup, got my pickup out so I wouldn't lose it. And I just bareback headed the horses out of the flames and onto the highway. The

The Rock House Fire, as it was later named, scorched over 300,000 acres, consuming countless cattle and dozens of homes. But no humans died, thanks in part to Marfa's award-winning, diligent coverage. We knew it was our duty to do that, and that was our moment. And we've seen great service from

public radio stations since, I mean, most recently, Blue Ridge Public Radio in North Carolina. Neighborhoods, communities, businesses along the Swannanoa River just absolutely devastated. It has been a mess and it's going to be a long time before things get back to normal. This is coverage from BPR, Blue Ridge Public Radio in Asheville, shortly after Hurricane Helene brought historic flooding to western North Carolina.

We had a lot of flooding. We also had a lot of landslides that unfortunately caused a lot of the fatalities. Laura Lee, Blue Ridge Public Radio news director. And then the aftermath of that, we had no power and we had no water. We didn't have water that was non-drinkable for quite some time. The radio station in downtown Asheville was one of the fortunate businesses that could operate on a backup generator.

Lee remembers her conversations around the newsroom as their small team of reporters and hosts sprung into action. Hey, what we do typically is a narrative and storytelling and driveway moments that people love public radio for. But right now, what we're doing is...

serving as a conduit of information that is critically important to this community. BPR quickly transitioned into 12 hours a day of live coverage, bringing life-saving information in Spanish and English to listeners without power and internet access. Telling people where they could access water, telling people where they could get their oxygen tanks refilled.

telling people what we knew about road closures. It's Laura Lee at Blue Ridge Public Radio. Wanted to ask about the quantity of supplies at these distribution centers. Can you give us a sense of the scale? We have tractor trailers of water. We did receive that shipment of water at being waited on for several days now. This is an exchange from one of the official Buncombe County briefings, which the station aired twice a day. And we, you know, have heard stories and seen images of people

People gathered around their neighbor's car. People gathered around one little hand crank radio at the cul-de-sac to listen to the briefings and to listen to our updates. As Asheville has begun to recover from the storm, PPR listeners have been leaving voicemails at the station. I clung to every word and waited patiently.

for the daily updates at 10 and 4. You guys were wonderful and you sustained me. I was isolated on a mountainside. My wife and I are so thankful for your constant presence during this crisis. Keep it up. We love you. Thank you guys so much for being there. It's just going to make me cry because you're the only source of information that we've had. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Laura Lee told me that cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would hurt BPR, which receives about 6% of its budget from the government. But she seemed even more concerned about how it would affect smaller stations with less cushion. Like, say, Marfa Public Radio, which gets about 27% of its funding from the government.

Today, Marfa's founder, Tom Michael, runs a station in Boise, Idaho, and worries a lot about the cuts. A commercial broadcaster might not find a return on investment in a small community, right? It just doesn't make sense for them to be there. But for us, it's a mission of service. And today in Idaho, as part of Boise State Public Radio, we spend a lot of

on infrastructure in rural areas. Cambridge, Idaho, population 250. We have two stations. Chalice, Idaho, population 920. We have three stations. Stanley, Idaho, population 120. We have three stations. We're committed to that. And I feel like with a loss of federal funding and we'd have to kind of tighten our belts in such things, I'd be afraid that we wouldn't be able to serve these rural areas because we'd have to make some sort of cuts.

One of the remotest areas served by public radio is southwestern Alaska, just 40 miles from the Bering Sea. Bethel, perched on the edge of the icy Kuskokwim River, population 6,500, is the largest city in the region and also home to public radio KYUK, the only media source for hundreds of miles.

KYUK serves over 50 different villages, most of which are predominantly Alaska native. Sage Smiley is the news director at KYUK. That's Yupik, Chupik, and Athabaskan. And our call letters, YUK, the Yupik language in Yurtun means person. So KYUK means people's station. Mexico.

Many of them are connected by the Kuskokwim River, right? The longest river in Alaska. Yes, along with the Yukon River, which stretches all the way into Canada. It's a lot of river systems and tributaries that connect these people. In the summers, people travel from village to village by boat. And in the winters, people travel on the ice road to get to other places in the region. The rivers are your highway. Right.

Absolutely. It's either an ice highway or a water highway. KYUK is the only radio station for how many miles? I believe the closest...

Public media news station to us is 300 or 400 miles away as the crow flies. Public radio is just absolutely vital in this region as both a source of emergency information and a source of connection. People call into our talk line shows. They call into the Riverwatch shows that help people be aware of river conditions. Our Internet is very limited out here. People are starting to have Starlink connections.

But low Earth orbit satellites are only so reliable, and we still don't have fiber optic internet. You mentioned incessant coverage of the ice road. One of your station's notable programs is called River Watch. Let's take a listen. How much snow you guys have left? We don't have very much snow. How about your temperature this morning, D? This morning was about six below. Wow. Yeah.

It's quite a bit colder than I was holding my breath this past weekend when it started raining. Oh man, I hope this isn't it. We've seen the river break up upriver several times during November. If we can make it to December without a big warm-up, then it'll probably hold together. When the ice road is plowed, it is a real road. You absolutely see trucks and cars and even hovercraft out on the river delivering goods and transporting people from place to place.

The tundra can be very treacherous. Sometimes snow will blow over an open hole. We've started out the winter on a tragic note. You know, we lost one person right off the bat and

We'll all be striving to let that be the only person we lose this winter. There's a concept in the Yupik language called pulazarak, which is the good trail to follow. And traditionally, trails are marked by willows. There are individuals who are going out to the area surrounding their village that they know better than anybody else, putting down willows, marking this pulazarak, the way to follow. We try and stay away from using long, skinny trails

trees that hardly have any branches because those are hard to see in the blizzard. You think KYUK has ever saved a life?

Absolutely. During freeze up, there are unfortunate tragedies. People do fall into holes in the river. People do go missing during a whiteout on a snow machine. And being able to both communicate with the public through KYUK about search efforts, about travel advisories, what trails have been set by the experts, the people who know this tundra better than anyone. And there's no alternative. Oh, no, no.

No, there's no other place to get that information other than Facebook. But again, sometimes the internet doesn't work. I noticed that some of your coverage on the ice road is bilingual. Do emergency alerts always go out in both languages?

Always. Every day we have six newscasts, three in English and three in Jurten. We live in a region that has deep roots in Yupik, Chupik, and Athabaskan culture. And so to be able to broadcast, especially for elders, many of whom lived through the era of boarding schools and were compelled forcibly to not speak their language, to be able to broadcast news and information energetically

and allow people to call in and share their opinions in this language that has been so thoroughly rebuilt by the people of the YK Delta is just incredible to me. This part of western Alaska is the state's poorest, the biggest outlet in the state. The Anchorage-based newspaper often reports articles about the region's crime. You think that angle is unfair, right?

People in this region don't always live by a Western economic system. People here subsist. They hunt for moose. They trap beaver. They fish. That doesn't show up on a tax statement. And this is a region that is touched very intimately by climate change, that has a very recent and very raw history with colonialism, that is dealing with the impacts and the fallout of that still on a daily basis.

But there is also so much beauty and joy. So to be able to reflect that in addition to the developments and the struggles that happen in the YK Delta, it's just so important for a station to be based in this region and to be focused on serving this region instead of,

serving a narrative that has developed over a long time and that does not reflect the nuance and reality of the world out here. Could you give me a rundown of how much of KYUK's funding comes from CPB? How much from other sources? You've already explained that money doesn't have a big presence in a lot of the communities you serve.

Living in this subsistence-heavy region, we don't rely on monetary donations from people who otherwise support and share KYUK's articles and engage with our news coverage or community affairs programming. Do they bake you pies? Yeah. We also get moose dropped off or salmon or salmon roe. You know, we have caviar sometimes in the break room fridge, but...

But we rely incredibly heavily on CPB funding and on grant funding. Around 50% on a given year does come from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, both through television and through radio funding. We are the smallest corporation.

CPB-funded public television station in the United States, which puts us in an incredibly tenuous position. We already exist 40 miles from the Bering Sea, way on the edge of the United States, living what can be an incredibly harsh life. You know, you go from 90 degrees in the summer sometimes and the air full of dust and there can be tundra fires to negative 35, colder with the wind chill and...

To exist on what feels like a razor edge with funding when this is such a vital community resource in so many ways, it's tough and a bit scary. Sage Smiley is the news director at KYUK, which serves the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in southwestern Alaska. Sage, thank you very much. Thank you for your time.

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Calendar, Candice Wong, and Katerina Barton. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Ellinger.

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