Rural Republicans used to back NPR. Then MAGA changed everything.

WESTBY, Wis. – Fourteen years before he joined President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, Sean P. Duffy rode a tea party wave into Congress. But within months, the conservative Republican from northern Wisconsin bucked his party and voted to preserve funding for NPR.

The vote by Duffy and half a dozen other House Republicans offered a sign that NPR, despite its liberal reputation, had a reservoir of bipartisan backing, especially in rural areas where member stations are often the most robust source of local news.

Now, the politics around public radio and television have changed dramatically. The swing state’s most vulnerable congressional Republican, Rep. Derrick Van Orden, is eager to eliminate federal funding for public media by slashing more than $1 billion in aid. His constituents are split, often along partisan lines, with Democrats backing taxpayer funding and Republicans opposed or ambivalent.

Polarized views of public broadcasting, along with a splintered and increasingly online media environment, pose a problem for NPR, PBS and their audiences, who will need some Republicans to break ranks to prevent the cuts that Trump is demanding as part of a larger package of budget reductions that the House will consider as soon as Tuesday. In two dozen interviews in Van Orden’s district, voters’ views on NPR and PBS exposed the rifts of a divided region in a divided state in a divided country.

“Most of the people who work for those – PBS and all that – are Democrats,” said Sandy Pedersen, 73, a Trump voter from nearby La Crosse who visited this rural hamlet last week for breakfast with her brother. “It’s too lopsided.”

Les Danielson, a 55-year-old dairy and crop farmer in Cadott in northern Wisconsin, said preserving taxpayer funding is essential to ensuring that quality programming reaches remote communities. Danielson, who said he considers himself left of center, listens to public radio in his tractor and doesn’t consider the coverage liberal.

“We would definitely be poorer in rural America without the voice of public radio,” he said.

Others are mystified by the fight as more listeners and viewers turn to streaming platforms for news, information and entertainment.

“I know a lot of people now have smart TVs and they use Netflix and Disney+,” said Ralph Alger, 22, as he waited for his lunch at the bar of the Nordic Lanes bowling alley in Westby. “I haven’t been to anyone’s house in a long time that still watches TV.”

For decades, NPR and PBS relied on a well of public support to combat threats to their funding. Fred Rogers made the case before Congress in 1969. In the years that followed, local stations leaned on Big Bird and the rest of the “Sesame Street” cast. But “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” has been off the air for more than two decades, the nonprofit organization behind “Sesame Street” recently laid off employees and cross-partisan support for public media can be hard to find.

According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in March, 43% of Americans supported continuing federal funding for NPR and PBS, 24% backed ending funding and 33% were unsure. But the survey found a close correlation between partisan leans and views on funding. Just 19% of Republicans wanted to continue federal funding, while 69% of Democrats did.

Polling from AP-NORC conducted in 2024 found that confidence in public broadcasting’s coverage of the government had eroded over the previous five years – mirroring trends across all media – with 46% saying they trust it only a little bit or not at all, up from 39% in 2019.

“People are free to communicate in whichever way they want, and you can have whatever viewpoint you want. But if it is going to be an outlet that has a viewpoint, in that case, I don’t think that taxpayer subsidies should necessarily be funding viewpoints,” said David Turk, a self-described conservative and the chairman of the Richland County Board in southwestern Wisconsin.

Dylan Bruce, a farmer who runs a seed supply business and calls himself a liberal, disputed claims that NPR and PBS have a left-leaning bias, saying they provide their listeners and viewers with content that differs from cable television. “We might not all agree politically out here, but we do agree on the need for facts, I think, and public broadcasting just gives us context,” said Bruce, 32. “We don’t need shouting matches. We need community.”

In southwestern Wisconsin – a verdant area where cars give a wide berth to Amish horse-drawn buggies along winding highways – public media listeners and viewers said they tune in for news, children’s shows, wildlife documentaries and a gardening program. They take regional pride in “Wisconsin Foodie,” a television show hosted by chef Luke Zahm, the owner of the Driftless Cafe in Viroqua, a town of 4,500 people.

They called public radio a lifeline in a hilly region where many other radio signals are staticky and internet service can be patchy.

“We’re put in the crosshairs of those types of cuts a little bit because it’s not going to hurt the big-city stations, where there’s a plethora of different stations,” Bruce said. “It’s going to hurt rural places like us, where it’s often the only independent option for folks to use and stay tapped in and connected.”

But Bruce’s views, once shared by some conservative lawmakers, have not been able to weather the MAGA revolution within the Republican Party.

Trump signed an executive order last month aimed at eliminating funding for public media because of what he labeled biased coverage, and NPR and PBS separately sued to stop what they called illegal cuts. Last week, Trump increased the pressure by asking Congress to rescind $1.1 billion in funding for public media along with $8.3 billion for foreign aid.

A similar vote put Duffy in a bind soon after he was elected to his district in Wisconsin’s rural north in 2010. Duffy – now Trump’s transportation secretary – at the time said he made the right call even as he acknowledged “my conservative base will not be happy with this vote.” The measure passed the House that year but died in the Senate, where Democrats held the majority.

A spokesperson for Duffy did not respond to a request for comment. But Van Orden, who represents an adjacent district that he won in 2024 with 51.4% of the vote, expressed enthusiasm for cutting funding.

“Like the Washington Post, NPR and PBS have become left-wing propaganda machines,” Van Orden said in a statement. “American taxpayers should not be forced to fund any organization that hates America.”

With sentiments like that coming from a member of Congress in a swing district, the risk for public media is high. Even so, its fate is not certain. Some Republican senators have expressed opposition to some of the foreign aid cuts, and leaders can afford to lose only a handful of votes in each chamber.

In public statements, officials with NPR and PBS have said they provide coverage that others don’t at no charge. Their websites have directed supporters to a page telling supporters the cuts “would rip essential services out of communities and force rural stations off-air.”

Wisconsin Public Radio has one of the oldest stations in the nation, but it is now preparing for tough times and avoiding scrutiny. Officials there told employees this spring they planned to cut staff, but their leaders declined to answer questions about personnel in an interview last month with the Capital Times of Madison, which first reported on the staff reductions. Wisconsin Public Radio’s and PBS Wisconsin’s leaders declined interview requests for this story and a spokesperson did not say what cuts they would make if Congress withdraws funding.

Wisconsin Public Radio and PBS Wisconsin are affiliated with the University of Wisconsin, where officials are warily watching Trump’s attacks on Harvard, Columbia and other universities. They received $5.75 million in federal funding this fiscal year, accounting for about 10% of their budget. Much larger shares come from state taxpayers, foundations, sponsors and individual donors.

Across the country, local stations rely on federal funding to varying degrees, and some would be at risk of severe cutbacks or closure.

Andy Moore joined public television in Wisconsin soon after he finished college, and he stayed there until he retired in 2021 because the work gave him the opportunity to produce long-form stories that aren’t possible on commercial television.

He’s sweated through past efforts to cut funding, but said that in his 31 years at the network, he never saw a situation as grave as the one public broadcasting faces today.

“Does it feel more real this time?” he said. “The unavoidable answer is yes.”