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Foundations step in to offer $37 million lifeline to public media

Multiple large foundations are committing a combined $37 million to help public media organizations like PBS and NPR, which have lost federal funding. Public Media Company, the consultancy who set up the bridge fund, hopes to raise $100 million in the next two years. (Tom Brenner/For The Washington Post)
By Scott Nover Washington Post

Major philanthropic organizations said Tuesday that they are committing nearly $37 million in emergency funding to keep public media stations afloat after Congress passed President Donald Trump’s rescissions bill, which eliminated $1.1 billion in federal funding from PBS and NPR stations over the next two years.

The names are already ones you might hear on an underwriting announcement on your local public radio station: the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, plus the Schmidt Family Foundation (co-created by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt) and the Melinda Gates-led group Pivotal Ventures.

A consultancy, Public Media Company, said it launched a “bridge fund” Tuesday to aid the most at-risk public radio and TV stations across the country; “stabilize the system” in the aftermath of the federal funding loss; and help public media become more sustainable in the long run. The company will offer “grants, low-interest loans, and advisory services,” it wrote in a news release. Knight said about $27 million from collective foundation support is going to the bridge fund, while another $10 million from MacArthur will go to directly support organizations, stations and programs in the public media ecosystem.

Tim Isgitt, Public Media Company’s CEO, said the fund aims to raise $100 million over two years – roughly equivalent to what the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would have provided to the most vulnerable stations. “Mass station failure could lead to other stations failing – a bit of a ripple effect through the system,” Isgitt said.

The Knight Foundation said it is most focused on helping the organizations that derived 30% of their annual budgets or more from federal funding doled out by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which recently announced it is shutting down in the face of defunding. “Local public media stations are trusted community anchors that connect people to vital news, culture and civic life,” Knight Foundation President and CEO Maribel Pérez Wadsworth wrote in a statement. “This is an urgent moment that calls for bold action.”

Isgitt said his fundraising goal is $100 million over two years to stave off the full effects of federal defunding, which he said immediately threatens 115 stations serving 43 million people. “They’re all in rural and underserved areas of the country with very little access to philanthropy and other news sources,” he said. “The idea is to move resources to stabilize these at-risk stations, but also to help put them on some sort of pathway to sustainability.”