Public broadcasters are glued to their screens this week, watching Congress move toward eliminating their funding as requested by President Donald Trump.
“I actually have a link to the Senate floor so I usually have that on the background,” Cara Williams Fry, general manager of Pullman-based Northwest Public Broadcasting, told me on Tuesday.
Clawing back the $1.1 billion already promised to public broadcasters will have a ripple affect across the local news industry.
It does almost nothing to improve the federal budget but gives legislative imprimatur to Trump’s corrosive attacks on the press.
The Senate on Tuesday voted 51-50, with Vice President JD Vance breaking the tie, to proceed with the executive branch request to cancel $9 billion worth of allocations.
That teed up a debate and another House vote in a budget rescission process that must be completed Friday to take effect.
The loss of federal funding won’t kill public broadcasters in Washington state, which benefit from generous donors and other support.
But they are already under financial pressure, experiencing revenue losses similar to other traditional media, and now face losing the foundation of their budgets.
Williams Fry said Northwest Public Broadcasting would lose about 21% of its funding if Congress cancels the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NWPB also saw state funding decline this year.
NWPB operates regional public-radio and TV stations across much of the state, reaching people from Forks to Idaho and from British Columbia to Oregon.
Its news team employs at least 15 full-timers, she said, and overall it employs 55 plus around 15-part-timers, including WSU students.
They work from studios in Pullman, Tri-Cities, Wenatchee and Tacoma. Its public TV stations broadcast in Tri-Cities and from Spokane through Pullman, she said.
Williams Fry wouldn’t say how many employees could be affected.
“I can’t guarantee that no one will lose their job but the goals are trying to keep some positions open when people leave … maybe merge some departments,” she said.
Individuals have donated more to public broadcasters since the federal cuts were proposed. They’ll be asked to give even more if the cuts are finalized this week.
“We’re ready to go with an emergency on-air pledge drive to try to raise about $1.4 million,” said Kerry Swanson, interim general manager at Seattle-based NPR affiliate KUOW.
KUOW relies on federal funding for about 5% of its budget, or around $1 million dollars plus around $400,000 in services and infrastructure provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The Seattle station has 115 full-time employees, about 45% of whom are in its newsroom.
KUOW laid off eight employees to cope with a budget shortfall last year, when it drew $3.5 million from reserves. This year it’s not expected to need reserves again and a June fundraising campaign exceeded its goal, a spokesperson said.
That community support is terrific. But people can only give so much and they’re being asked to give more often, as all kinds of local news outlets are increasingly dependent on donations.
That’s why the federal cuts will have a ripple effect. If the total pool of funding plunges because of White House pique, every outlet raising money for its journalism will be affected.
Then, of course, there’s the loss of public broadcasters’ reporting and programming that Americans enjoy and benefit from, especially in rural and remote places where newspapers and other local media have evaporated.
Perhaps this episode will help Americans understand that journalism is not free. If you want quality local news and information, you have to pay for it somehow.
“You’ve got to understand, we all have a responsibility to help fund that,” Swanson said, “and benefit from that for our democracy.”
Local-news decline: A new report found a 75% decline in local journalists since 2002, further documenting the steep decline in local news coverage across the United States.
The “Local Journalist Index” was produced by Rebuild Local News, a nonprofit advocacy group, and Muck Rack, a public-relations software firm that maintains a database of journalists.
They created a measurement called “local journalist equivalents” to estimate the number of journalists per 100,000 residents in counties.
The report said the U.S. had about 40 journalists per 100,000 residents in 2002 and now has 8.2 per 100,000. It found more than 1,000 counties, 1 out of 3, don’t have a single full-time local journalist equivalent.
Steve Waldman, Rebuild Local News president, said the group will use the study to help persuade policymakers to support local news. It may also help philanthropies and entrepreneurs target investments in news, he said.
The decline roughly corresponds to earlier reports that found the U.S. lost two-thirds to three-fourths of newspaper jobs over the last two decades.
The tally is based partly on a count of bylined local news articles found online in the first quarter of 2025. That’s useful but misses journalists who don’t have bylines, including copy editors, desk editors, news producers and other newsroom roles.
As a result, I think the study undercounts the number of journalists at mid-size and regional outlets with many non-bylined newsroom employees. It also doesn’t factor in the quality they provide.
That can give the impression that metro areas, with denser newsrooms, are much worse off than low-population areas with a small news outlet where most of the staff writes articles.
Of course all local news outlets are now understaffed, including urban dailies gutted by corporate owners, rural weeklies hanging on by a thread and public broadcasters losing their funding.
The study provides more evidence that the industry desperately needs help. But further research is needed to quantify the loss of newsroom jobs and how different communities are affected.
