When a magnitude-7.3 earthquake struck off southern Alaska on Wednesday, officials were concerned about a potential tsunami. It was local public media that helped relay a tsunami alert, Sen. Lisa Murkowski said.
But now, looming GOP-led funding cuts are concerning media allies that local public broadcasters would be forced to downsize or shutter, damaging news operations and hurting locals’ ability to get timely emergency alerts like the one issued in Alaska.
“Their response to today’s earthquake is a perfect example of the incredible public service these stations provide,” Murkowski, of Alaska, one of two Republican senators to oppose the cuts, said Wednesday on X. “They deliver local news, weather updates, and, yes, emergency alerts that save human lives.”
More than 50 years after NPR and PBS first hit the airwaves, the two public broadcasters with hundreds of member stations face millions in budget cuts after Republican senators voted to claw back previously appropriated funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds public media like NPR and PBS. President Donald Trump is expected to sign the legislation into law when it reaches his desk.
Republicans have framed the spending cuts bill as part of an effort to target purported “waste, fraud and abuse” in government-funded programs. GOP lawmakers have accused NPR and PBS of having a liberal bias, and in March, Republicans claimed that they were “anti-American airwaves.”
But media advocates argue that the cuts would have devastating effects on the American media landscape and an especially harmful impact on rural Americans, who may rely more heavily on local NPR and PBS stations for local news.
“I think unfortunately this is cutting off their constituents’ noses to spite NPR’s face,” NPR CEO Katherine Maher said Wednesday on CNN. “It doesn’t help anyone to take this funding away.”
PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger said in a statement after the vote that the cuts would “significantly” affect PBS stations, saying they “will be especially devastating to smaller stations and those serving large rural areas.”
“Many of our stations, which provide access to free unique local programming and emergency alerts, will now be forced to make hard decisions in the weeks and months ahead,” she said.
‘Death sentence’ for local stations
More than 70% of the government funding appropriated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting goes to the 1,500 public television and radio stations, according to the company. (In contrast, NPR says it gets about 1% of its annual funding from the government, though it also gets about a third through member stations, which are partly government-funded to varying degrees. PBS says it gets about 15% of its funds from the government.)
Patricia Harrison, the president and CEO of CPB, said in a statement that eliminating funding for CPB would force many local stations to shut down.
“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,” she said.
The cuts would come as the number of local outlets in the United States continues steadily declining. A report last year by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative found that newspapers were disappearing at a rate of more than two per week and that 3.5 million people live in counties with no local news outlets consistently producing content.
“This could be a death sentence for a number of local stations,” said Tim Franklin, the initiative’s director.
NPR and PBS rely on a combination of federal sources, including the government and private donations. Media experts warned that local stations in more rural areas could bear the brunt of cuts.
Stations in rural areas “are more reliant on the federal funding because there is a smaller population for them to raise additional funds from and there’s less of a commercial incentive to be there,” said Kate Riley, the president and CEO of the nonprofit America’s Public Television Stations.
Some stations are already downsizing in anticipation of funding cuts.
Shawn Turner, the general manager of WKAR Public Media in Michigan, said he has already had to lay off nine staffers in anticipation of federal cuts. About 16% of WKAR’s budget comes from federal funding, he said.
The cuts, Turner said, would affect the newsroom’s ability to devote resources to deep dives into issues like the impact of tariffs on Michigan’s manufacturing industry.
“We’ve been able to ask them to begin to do a deep dive in really understanding how that’s going to impact the community so that we have that reporting ready to go,” Turner said. “Our ability to do that going forward is going to be limited.”
Local public broadcasters also play a key role in disseminating emergency alerts and timely updates during natural disasters, advocates say.
There are no viable alternatives in some communities, and locals cannot rely on social media for accurate updates, said Clayton Weimers, the executive director of Reporters Without Borders in the United States.
“Going online is not a viable alternative because it is such a cesspool of false information, and that cesspool gets even murkier in times of crisis,” Weimers said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday shot down concerns over the impact of public media cuts on safety.
“I am not sure how NPR helps the public safety of our country, but I do know that NPR, unfortunately, has become really just a propaganda voice for the left,” she said.
Trump signed an executive order in May directing CPB to cut funding for NPR and PBS, framing them as “biased media.”
Maher, NPR’s CEO, said Thursday that national programming makes up a quarter of programming of all stations, with the other 75% representing “local programming, local needs and other national programmers.”
“We want to make sure that we’re available and relevant to the entire American public, regardless of where you sit and regardless of what your political beliefs are, and we’ve been taking the steps from an editorial standpoint to better understand what audience needs are and have more voices on air,” Maher said on NBC’s “Meet the Press NOW.”
Local station leaders are also pushing back against the administration, some of them arguing that it is interfering with a free and independent media.
“I think that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created to be independent and free from political interference and that the U.S. government has no place meddling in the editorial decisions or punishing the editorial decisions of NPR and PBS,” said Sage Smiley, the news director of Alaska public media station KYUK.
Tim Richardson, the program manager for journalism and disinformation at the free expression advocacy group PEN America, called the new GOP cuts punitive.
“These cuts are not about fiscal responsibility. It’s once again about punishing independent journalism, independent outlets that don’t adhere to the administration’s narrative of events,” he said. “It’s a viewpoint discrimination with the end goal of, you know, undermining editorial, editorial independence.”
White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields responded in a statement Thursday that “NPR and PBS will have to learn to survive on their own” without “taxpayer subsidies.”
Public media have faced threats from Republican presidents before, including during Trump’s first term. Richard Nixon, for example, “pounced on it almost immediately,” said Victor Pickard, a media professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
“I think it’s fair to say that every Republican president, save for perhaps Gerald Ford, has had somewhat of an adversarial position towards public broadcasting,” Pickard said.
