By Greta Mart (MJ ’15)
Until this year, a network of hundreds of independent, locally owned public media stations reached nearly every single American, offering anyone with a television or radio access to high-quality news and educational and cultural content for free. In many places in the United States, a public station may be the only offering on the dial, because a small population means no profit to be made by commercial broadcasters selling advertising.
When Congress created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in 1967 via the Public Broadcasting Act, the CPB’s mission was to support a system that would achieve universal service by delivering trusted content and vital services to every corner of the country, making public media “a national resource accessible to everyone.”
The CPB has done that extremely well for 60 years. But this summer, the Trump administration convinced Congress to stop all future federal funding of public media, and to take back the funding already promised to stations through 2027. The lost funding added up to more than $1 billion.
On Oct. 1, the CPB effectively closed its doors. That didn’t hit home for me until I went to do my routine weekly scan of the CPB job board, and got a “page not found” message. It was shocking. For years, one of the CPB’s services was maintaining a comprehensive listing of public media job openings across the country, updated daily. Some of the financial support stations got from the CPB paid reporters’ salaries, enabling local news coverage in places where commercial media simply doesn’t exist. Or, where it does exist, offering independent and balanced coverage that is solely focused on serving and informing the public.
As the industry publication Inside Radio wrote on Oct. 10: “With no new federal dollars … CPB has slashed its staff by 70% and begun closing out grants and contracts, leaving stations scrambling to cover costs for interconnection, royalties, shared infrastructure, and emergency alerting.” KQED in San Francisco, Wisconsin Public Radio, Boston’s WGBH, D.C.’s WETA and Houston Public Media have already made big cuts to staff and programming.
Since before I began working in public radio during my time at the J-School, public media newsrooms have been growing – not shrinking like so many print newsrooms or magazines have. Now, without federal funding from CPB, which has provided an estimated 14-18% of public media stations’ budgets, those newsrooms will contract as well. Dozens of Berkeley Journalism alums work in public media across the country, and they now face either layoffs or additional workloads.
To try to make up for the loss of federal funding, NPR and PBS member stations have appealed to their membership base with messages like “Defunded but not defeated,” and “By the People, For the People.” But for a radio station like KUCB in the Aleutian Islands, which broadcasts to a population of about 10,000 people, there’s no way individual donations are going to make up for the missing federal dollars.
So what is being done to try to save public media stations? We spoke with the head of one organization at the forefront of the effort.
TIM ISGITT: I’m Tim Isgitt, CEO of Public Media Company. We are a nonprofit service organization, and we primarily serve local public radio and television stations across the country. We provide a lot of business services to these stations, anything from strategic planning to business modeling. We facilitate a lot of mergers and acquisitions, and we’re also the virtual CFO for a few dozen stations as well. We’ve been doing this for 24 years.
NORTH GATE UPDATE: So, this is not something that just happened since the defunding?
ISGITT: That’s right. So we’ve been building on our own expertise and experiences in the public media system for the last 24 years, and earlier this year developed the idea of a “Public Media Bridge Fund,” which is a philanthropic pool of funds aimed to help the most distressed stations out there: those that received a significant portion of their revenue from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Now that CPB has been defunded, these are the stations most vulnerable to going dark, of failing, and we know if they do, about 43 million Americans will lose local public media service. So we’re trying to prevent that from happening.
NGU: Do you have any data about the actual stations? Like how many are close to closing?
ISGITT: We have some estimates based on prior station financial data that they provide to CPB, and the New York Times actually published our research back in July. Our initial analysis suggested that about 115 local public media organizations are at risk of going dark, and these are organizations that receive 30% or more of their revenue from CPB. That’s 78 public radio stations and 37 public television stations.
NGU: Can you briefly describe the current status of public media? I mean, is it just in total free fall?
ISGITT: I think it’s important to sort of illuminate three interesting design principles about U.S. public media. Number one, it’s not centralized. In fact, it’s decentralized. There are over 1,500 local public media organizations throughout the country. These are stations that are owned and operated locally, governed locally, and they’re making decisions about how best to serve their local communities. There’s not a centralized national organization that’s doing that. PBS and NPR provide some programming, so does PRX and American Public Television and American Public Media, but it’s local stations, local people in your neighborhood making decisions about how best to serve local communities. That’s really, really unique, very unlike the BBC in the U.K. or NHK in Japan.
NGU: How so?
ISGITT: Those are nationalized services. This is not. It’s decentralized. Secondly, U.S. public media was always set up to be a public-private partnership by which money that goes through CPB is used to leverage support from local communities. So in 2024, CPB received about $600 million in appropriations from the federal government. That money went back into the system, most of it directly to stations, and that $600 million leveraged an additional $3.2 billion that local stations were able to raise from their communities. Congress just defunded CPB, but they haven’t killed public media because of the public-private partnership. There’s an opportunity for it to continue and it will continue, if stations can figure out how to work on their business models in a new way without reliance on federal funding.
The third thing: It’s supposed to be a service that’s available for free, right? To anybody in the country. Right now, those 1,500 organizations I mentioned serve 99% of the country, so almost anywhere you live, you can have access to public television and public radio. That’s a really important design principle because those stations that are most vulnerable right now are almost all in rural and underserved areas of the country, where they don’t have a lot of access to resources and other forms of local news and information. That’s a really critical part of this.
NGU: So where does the Bridge Fund fit in?
ISGITT: We developed the Bridge Fund to help secure local service in these communities now and also to begin working with these local stations to find some pathway to sustainability over time. Our North Star for the Bridge Fund is preserving local service and we think that given some time and some resources, we can help do that and prevent the loss of service for 45 million Americans.
NGU: Applications for help from the Bridge Fund closed on Nov. 3. What happens next?
ISGITT: We’ve been able to fundraise for the Bridge Fund; our goal is $100 million. That’s roughly what CPB would have given these stations that are most at risk over a two-year period. We think the opportunity to sustain services is gonna take at least two years. We’ve raised about $58 million in commitments so far, and we are trying to move money to the stations starting this month. That’s when CPB would have normally provided its annual grants to these stations. This has all come together very, very quickly over the course of about 12 weeks, but we’re really pleased to be in a position where we can help right now.
NGU: I feel like over the past few months, a lot of people working in public media have expressed frustration that there wasn’t more of a fight to stop the defunding – like the CPB just rolled over and called it quits. What do you say to that?
ISGITT: CPB funding has been in the crosshairs since the Nixon administration for a variety of reasons, and CPB and other organizations have been fighting to preserve funding for local stations for this service for decades. I did not see them roll over at all. I saw a tremendous amount of fight. But in point of fact, CPB’s budget, all of its money, comes from the federal government. It is the administrator, the steward of that federal investment in public media. They no longer have the funding. And on Oct. 1 of this year, the Treasury did not submit the money to CPB. There was no choice but to close.
NGU: What do you say to folks who say: If we can just hold on until the midterms, maybe Congress will change and funding will suddenly be restored. Is that a possibility?
ISGITT: I think public media is obviously a public good. And I want to live in a country that invests in the public good, right? And public media is a direct public good to local communities. It’s one of the things that stitches us together. It connects communities, which is so important, particularly in a moment where media is being utilized to pull us apart in so many ways, whether from corporate interests or political interests or algorithms or AI. Public media is like the last bastion of human-developed, mission-driven, community-rooted media out there. Accountable to people in communities, not to corporate or political interests. I think it’s worth fighting for, and that’s what we’re trying to do right now.
I hope that we can be in a conversation about the role of media and democracy. We need to be in that conversation right now. What do we want? What kind of country do we want to leave for our kids? And what’s the role of the media in either fostering or tearing down? The way that we interrelate with one another and the way we engage in civic conversations and the way we build our future together. I mean, that’s the question we need to be asking. I think there is a role for public funding for a media system that serves those interests. I hope it happens, but I think we have to be facing the reality that it’s not happening this year or next. Maybe the political winds will change, but if they don’t, we need to be working to secure service, and that’s what we’re doing right now.
NGU: And that’s through philanthropic work. Are there people working on other models? Is there R&D on different kinds of models for public media?
ISGITT: Yeah, sure. I mean, public media exists in a vastly changing, rapidly changing media and technology landscape. There are ways of operating and serving community needs that are coming online almost every day. It’s gone from a broadcast model over the air to digital models where stations are multimedia players, serving their communities in digital platforms, and social media as well. And stations will continue to evolve based on what their local communities need and want. They can’t do that if they’re about to fail. And once these community institutions go away, they’re not coming back. So this is a do-or-die moment for public media, and we’re very much trying to keep the lights on and service continued so they can continue to evolve and serve future generations.
NGU: So for new journalists, those either in school or ready to embark on a career, what do you want those folks to know about public media at this time?
ISGITT: It’s a public good and it’s worthy of our investment. Public media has been demonized, largely through political attacks against PBS and NPR, but that doesn’t define what public media is. It’s always been meant to be a decentralized network of local community institutions. That’s the heart of what public media is, and that’s how it should be defined. For journalists and aspiring journalists, public media ought to be seen as a place where you can go and do really, really good, impactful work for local communities and help bridge divides and bring people together and connect neighbors. That’s always been the promise, and the need is greater than ever.
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Greta Mart (MJ 2015) is news director at Northern California Public Media, a PBS and NPR member station serving the San Francisco Bay Area. Reach her at gretamart@icloud.com.
