US Public Broadcasters Brace for Vote on Sharp Funding Cut This Week
Excerpted from The NY Times
At the urging of President Trump, Congress is expected to vote on whether to cut $500 million per year for public radio and TV stations.
If the package passes, the federal funding for public media will dry up beginning in October. NPR and PBS would survive — they get a small percentage of their funding from the federal government. But the cuts would force many local stations to sharply reduce their programming and operations. Many public broadcasters receive more than 50 percent of their budgets from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The cuts could even be a death sentence for some stations, which have survived several attempts to choke off funding over the decades.
The disappearance of U.S. public TV and radio stations would result in the elimination of local newsrooms that would probably not be replaced in the short term, said Neal Zuckerman, a managing director at the Boston Consulting Group who published a research paper on the economics of local media.
It would cost roughly $1 billion annually to fund significant journalism across the United States, requiring an endowment of $20 billion to be sustainable, he said.
“These are essential services,” Mr. Zuckerman said. “If the federal government isn’t a viable source of funding for the health of our local communities, we need a fiscally sustainable solution.”