Rural America and kids will suffer if PBS is defunded, its chief says
The Public Broadcasting Service will survive - in some form - no matter how the Senate votes this week on a bill aimed at eliminating the $1.1 billion in federal funding allotted for public media over the next two years, according to PBS chief Paula Kerger. But for local member stations, the legislative package poses an “existential” threat, she told The Washington Post in an interview Monday at PBS headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.
Kerger, who has been the president and chief executive of PBS since 2006, is accustomed to making the case for funding public media. But now she is up against a many-headed hydra: Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, PBS has faced a Federal Communications Commission inquiry, cuts to funding it receives through the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Education Department, an executive order cutting off PBS and NPR for having “fueled partisanship and left-wing propaganda with taxpayer dollars,” and now this rescission bill. The attacks, she said, are coming from “every angle.”
Senators are expected to vote by Friday on the rescission bill, which the House passed by a narrow margin in June. Republican senators including Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine), and Mike Rounds (South Dakota) have expressed concern over how the cuts would affect the local stations - especially in rural areas - that depend most heavily on government money. That puts this week’s vote on a knife’s edge.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How has this week been so far?
A: Intense. I want to make sure, before the vote, we’ve done everything that we can to make sure that senators are fully briefed on the consequence of this vote.
Q: Do you feel like you’ve gotten there yet?
A: I don’t know. It’s really our stations talking to their senators, because ultimately that’s who they care about. They’re going to care about their constituents. They want to understand what’s going on locally.
I think one of the biggest misunderstandings is that we’re not a network. We are really an aggregation of local stations. That’s why PBS was put together, so we could do at scale for them what they can’t do individually.
Most of the money goes to local stations. I was just talking to someone about our station in Kansas, in Smoky Hills; 54 percent of their money comes from the federal government. It is obviously an existential circumstance for them. They do a call-in medical show because they’re serving a very large rural area. A lot of what they do - as all of our stations do - is try to understand what the local market needs, and then they step up to it. A lot of people don’t understand that big parts of the country are still without broadband.
This is what broadcast television does. It’s one-to-many, helping people understand that we’re part of the emergency alert system for this country, helping people understand that a huge piece of what we do is around kids, and it’s particularly focused on kids before they enter school. Half the kids in this country aren’t in pre-K. This is why “Sesame [Street]” was created to begin with. That’s why Fred Rogers thought that television would be a great educational tool, in addition to an entertaining medium.
Q: Will rural stations be hit hardest?
A: Absolutely. If your funding is 40 or 50 percent reliant on federal funding - and this funding would go away Oct. 1 - that’s a pretty significant hit.
When you listen to some of the discussions about defunding public broadcasting, in the Marjorie Taylor Greene hearing, she talked about liberal elites on the coast.
We have great stations everywhere. I’m proud of WETA [in Washington]. I’m proud of my old station in New York. I’m proud of Boston. Those are important stations. I don’t want to diminish their work at all. But when I go to a place like Cookeville, Tennessee, or Granite Falls, Minnesota, these are all stations that are very important to those communities.
Q: What happens if Cookeville, Tennessee, loses this federal funding?
A: No change on Oct. 1 - and I know that our small stations should speak for themselves in terms of how they would try to bridge this - but it’s hard for me to imagine that there’s a long-term path there.
If you lose a local newspaper in a small community, someone can come in at another point and start up another local newspaper. But once broadcast licenses are gone, they’re gone. I can imagine they would be auctioned off for whatever purpose and you won’t have a local television station again in a community.
Q: What makes this fight different from previous times you’ve advocated for PBS on Capitol Hill?
A: If you go back to the first of the year, what has happened to us since January: The FCC launched an inquiry to try to take away our opportunity to raise corporate sponsorship and has been questioning policies the FCC put into place, I believe, under Reagan.
Then there was the Marjorie Taylor Greene-DOGE hearing, where we were referred to as “un-American.” Then there was the effort to actually pull away some of the FEMA funding that gives our stations equipment to help them in some of the early alerting - that was pulled away, put back, pulled away again, I can’t even tell you the current status of that. There was the effort to remove the three Democratic members of the [Corporation for Public Broadcasting] board. There’s the executive order, making it illegal for any federal money to come to PBS or to NPR. Less than 24 hours after that, the cancellation of the Ready to Learn funding, which has helped us to not only create new kids’ programming, but also to do all the research behind it, as well as it funds a lot of community work that stations do, including a lot of summer learning camps. There is the effort to take back money that had already been appropriated.
So this isn’t like budget fights that we’ve had in the past. This is to pull back money that Congress has already appropriated in a bipartisan way.
So this is a lot in just five months.
Q: On Truth Social last week, Trump called the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) a “monstrosity” and said he wouldn’t support any Republican who let it keep broadcasting. What was your reaction when you saw that?
A: I was shocked. I mean, it is just - I was shocked.
Q: How much do you see this as being specific to PBS and NPR and the CPB, and how much as part of a larger salvo from this administration against media?
A: I really cannot tell, and I cannot understand how, with all of the issues that are being wrestled with, we ended up in the very first rescission package. It’s just so disproportionate to the amount of money we’re talking about and the work that we do, for which we’ve always had bipartisan support.
I don’t know if it’s part of the larger concern about media. We’re not a news organization; 10 percent of the programming that we do is news-related.
Q: Have you tried to meet with the president?
A: Have I? No.
Q: Have you asked to meet with him?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: That’s a good question. I don’t know that it would change anyone’s mind.
Q: In terms of changing minds, most of your effort is now in the Senate.
A: Because that’s actually where the budgets are usually done. It’s not like I’m ever asked to meet with the president for PBS, because, in the usual world, the budget is actually owned by Congress. And its stations are usually talking to the legislators.
Q: So what’s different about your conversations with senators this time?
A: Again, most of the conversations have been with our stations, and many of them have relations between the stations and their senators.
And some have expressed concerns. This is where you hear from people like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, both of whom are in states that have very large rural populations. And especially in the case of Alaska, where there are big parts of the state that would have no television or radio service, but for the local services. And so I think they certainly understand. I have seen other statements from senators that are just parroting what the president has said.
Q: Do you think you have the votes right now?
A: We need four. I hope so. There’s discussion about different amendments. I think it’s going to be close.
Q: If you lose this fight, what’s your strategy moving forward?
A: We have to immediately pivot to the budget, and that’s going to be a much harder battle - to try to get something put back in the budget process.
And then obviously we’re going to have to make very hard decisions about what we would be able to afford to do. Ironically, I think PBS would exist in some form, but it would be different. And if the goal is to take PBS out, this actually doesn’t accomplish that.
What it does do is it removes stations from a lot of communities. It’s just heartbreaking to think about it again, because, for me, it’s all personal. When I think about all the different visits that I’ve had, not just with the people that work at the station, but the community and how much they treasure their local stations. I especially feel for kids, because kids are getting hit on so many different fronts: from the nutrition programs, from Medicaid, and then this is just yet another thing on top of it.
Q: You’re also suing the administration.
A: I have to say, it was a very sad day when we filed. I wanted to really think through whether there was any other way beyond filing a suit against the government. And there was none. So, you know, we need to win it for two reasons. One, to protect our stations’ ability to be able to spend their resources in whatever way they see fit. And the second is, to preclude us from any government funding at all is inappropriate. It violates the Public Broadcasting Act. It was on that principle basis that we filed, and we also filed around the First Amendment.
Q: Do you have a sense of why Trump keeps likening PBS to commercial media when the point of public media is to provide an alternative to it?
A: I don’t know. We were created to fill the gaps the commercial media was never going to be able to fill, or would fill. Even in this era of abundance, the best example is kids programming. A lot of kids producers are challenged now because the streamers aren’t ordering. Unless you’re Disney, people don’t subscribe to anything because of the kids’ content.
A lot of kids are ending up on YouTube. MrBeast is one of the most popular programs for young kids. It is not a show for young kids.
I think that this idea that somehow the commercial marketplace can somehow pick up the gap is what’s completely missing. I think there should be an effort to scrub how federal investments are made, to always look for efficiencies. There’s not anyone who would debate that, but that’s not this. It’s not what they’re doing.