As Trump seeks to defund NPR and PBS over ‘woke propaganda,’ Inland Northwest public broadcasters appeal to Congress and the public

WASHINGTON – Nearly 200 representatives of public radio and television stations from around the country converged on the Capitol last week to appeal to members of Congress for support amid President Donald Trump’s effort to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the broadcasters it supports.

John Decker, president and general manager of Spokane Public Radio, said the group was in Washington, D.C., for an annual meeting at the headquarters of National Public Radio, which sells its programming to local stations but doesn’t control what they broadcast.

“It just so happens that we’re here at a time when all hell is breaking loose, as far as federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” Decker said in an interview between meetings with aides to Northwest lawmakers.

Trump signed an executive order on May 1 directing the CPB – a nonprofit created by Congress in 1967 – to stop funding NPR and its television counterpart, PBS. While that move hasn’t directly cut off funding to local stations, the president has signaled his intent to ask Republican lawmakers to claw back money Congress has already allocated to the CPB, which represents an existential threat to public media across the country.

“Public radio and television have enjoyed fairly wide bipartisan support for a very long time, and that’s why this whole push to defund the CPB and to rescind the money that’s already in Treasury – that’s why this whole thing is a bit surprising,” Decker said, adding that Congress will ultimately decide whether the funding is cut.

“It’s one thing for me to stand in their office and say, ‘Funding is really important,’” he said. “It’s another thing for a teacher or a community leader or even a mayor to step up and say, ‘Look, Spokane Public Radio is important to the Inland Northwest, and here’s why.’”

In an article accompanying the executive order, the White House provided examples of what it called “radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’” Those examples include a PBS-produced documentary about the debate over reparations for slavery, as well as several PBS and NPR programs that treated transgender people in a favorable light.

The Trump administration also pointed to an NPR segment that describes the Declaration of Independence as “a document with flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies” that “also laid the foundation for our collective aspirations.” Before several of its journalists read the document in full on July 4, NPR cited its use of a slur to describe Indigenous people and its assertion that “all men are created equal” at a time when women, Native Americans and enslaved people weren’t treated equally.

“Year after year, public radio is one of the most trusted news organizations in the country,” Decker said by phone in an earlier interview. “The Trump administration does not like dissent. They don’t want journalists or publications or radio stations or TV stations or online sites – whatever the case might be – to report news or to report facts that are somehow different from the way this administration sees things.”

In April, Trump sought to fire three of the five members of the CPB’s board. The board filed a lawsuit, arguing that the corporation isn’t a federal agency and a president doesn’t have the authority to dismiss members, only to appoint them with the consent of the Senate.

Although the administration’s ire has been focused on NPR and PBS, local broadcasters see the administration’s moves as a broader threat to public media. Congress appropriates money to the CPB in advance and has already allocated $535 million for the current fiscal year, but Trump has suggested he may send a “rescission package” to Congress that could take back that money.

Although the CPB directly funds only about 1% of NPR’s budget, local public radio stations receive an average of about 10% of their funding from the federally funded nonprofit, according to NPR’s public editor. Those local member stations, in turn, provide about 30% of NPR’s budget through programming fees to air shows like “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”

PBS and the local public TV stations operate on a similar model, but Gary Stokes, president and general manager of KSPS, said CPB funding represents almost 20% of his station’s budget.

“We know that there’s always a possibility that something like this could happen,” Stokes said. “But with this, it happened pretty quickly.”

KSPS is already reeling from the loss of a federal “Ready to Learn” grant from the Department of Education, which forced the station to cancel its free summer camps and other programs intended to improve local schools, said Angela Riley, the station’s education director.

“We’re looking at just a total restructure,” Riley said. “We definitely are going to have to look at how we’re going to do things differently in the future.”

It’s unclear if Trump’s decree bars local stations from using money they receive from the CPB to buy programs like “the PBS NewsHour” or similar shows from NPR, which local stations typically air along with their own programming and their choice of other content.

Stokes, who has worked in TV since 1980 and at KSPS since 2011, said that what makes Spokane’s public TV station special is the camaraderie among its staff. He said the station started coming up with contingency plans when they “saw the writing on the wall,” but they have limited options to replace federal funding.

While he’s doing everything he can to avoid layoffs, Stokes said, he and his colleagues are “dealing with the reality” that they could happen. Emphasizing that support for public media shouldn’t be a partisan issue, the KSPS leader said its fate is up to Congress.

“That’s where all of this is going to start and finish,” he said. “I don’t want to make this political. What I really want people to hear is it’s important for us to continue to do what we do best, which is making sure that people who watch us see a balanced presentation, that the news content that we have is the same content that we’ve been doing for years and years, and doing it quite well.”

Rural broadcasters often rely more heavily on CPB funding and have more to lose, said Cara Williams Fry, general manager at Northwest Public Broadcasting, which is based in Pullman and broadcasts both TV and radio across Washington and in parts of Idaho, Oregon and British Columbia. About 20% of NWPB’s budget is funded by the CPB, she said, but that figure is over 50% at some smaller stations.

“We have had some threats here and there, but nothing as serious, powerful and existential as the executive order, the rescission package and reconciliation,” Williams Fry said. “It’s a big deal.”

In a statement on May 7, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate committee whose jurisdiction includes the CPB, called Trump’s actions illegal and said they “threaten the viability of local public broadcasting stations across the country.”

Republicans in Congress are still crafting what Trump has called “one big, beautiful bill” – now the legislation’s official name – using a process called budget reconciliation that would allow them to bypass the Senate filibuster and send the bill to Trump’s desk with only GOP votes. If they choose to attach a rescission package to that legislation, Democrats would be virtually powerless to stop it.

Rep. Michael Baumgartner, R-Spokane, said by phone on Thursday that although he grew up watching Sesame Street on his local PBS station and his kids watch Dora the Explorer and the Odd Squad, he would vote to rescind CPB funding if it came to the House floor.

“I listen to public radio and I watch public television, and I have to say it has gotten more liberal,” Baumgartner said, adding that he finds the “overwhelming left-wing political bias” he sees on public broadcasting “really concerning.”

Citing the more than $36 trillion national debt, Baumgartner said the government needs to cut spending and suggested that taxpayer dollars should benefit lower-income Americans, while he said the audience of NPR and PBS is relatively well off.

Congress has already appropriated money for the CPB through for the next two fiscal years, and public media advocates hope lawmakers will continue their long tradition of bipartisan support for that funding. In addition to channeling taxpayer money to local stations, they point out, it also plays an important role in licensing music and coordinating the emergency alert system.

Sueann Ramella, NWPB’s audience director, said the president’s executive order also seems to prohibit local stations that receive CPB funding from licensing programs from NPR or PBS.

“That’s going to be a huge hurdle for small stations that can barely afford to be on the air anyway,” she said. “We as a local station are holding our breath and trying to be optimistic that the American people will reach out to their representatives.”

Ramella said public media would benefit from constructive criticism, but she hopes the Trump administration won’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Public broadcasters also need to do a better job of telling their own stories, she said, and making it clear that they are each part of their respective communities, not part of a monolithic media company.

“It’s a fundamental misunderstanding, and that’s kind of our fault, because we’re so busy telling people’s stories, we’re not really good at telling our own story to explain to the American people how we operate,” she said. “PBS and NPR do not tell me what to air. I don’t have control over what NPR puts on their show, but I sure as hell can send a message to my rep that maybe a story could have used a little bit more input from the GOP or input from the Dems.”

Ramella said the people who work in public broadcasting aren’t in it for the money, but rather because they believe they’re doing a public service. She lamented that all the attention on stations like NWPB has turned her into “a crisis communication manager,” something she never wanted to be.

“I just wanted to tell the stories of people who live in rural Idaho and Washington and how they’re making their communities better,” she said. “We’re supposed to be the conduit for the American people to educate themselves, learn about each other, and find insightful content that isn’t bound to a financial mechanism. We’re doing it because we know that this type of education is valuable to make citizens.”