As local broadcast stations like KSPS grapple with loss of federal funds, Washington lawmakers work to build state support

Spokane Public Radio and KSPS-PBS abruptly lost all of their federal funding Jan. 5 following the dissolution of the national Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but Washington lawmakers aim to restore the revenue for local outlets.

Congress rescinded $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting last summer, spurred by an executive order from President Donald Trump. The White House posted that the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio fuel “partisanship and left-wing propaganda with taxpayer dollars.”

“It’s like the opposite of a vote of confidence,” KSPS-PBS interim manager Skyler Reep said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m hearing that my government doesn’t value this thing,’ and these things we’re talking about – connection, inspiration, education – these are shared American values, right? This is not a partisan issue.”

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was a nonprofit corporation authorized by Congress in 1967 under President Lyndon B. Johnson. During its 58-year run, it became the largest single source of funding for public television, radio and related services. The money the corporation received from the federal government was largely distributed directly to local TV and radio stations, which often in turn paid PBS or NPR for the rights to broadcast materials.

The loss of corporation funding left a $1.2 million hole in Spokane’s KSPS-PBS television station’s annual budget – about 18% of the station’s annual income, Reep said. Six station staff were laid off, and another six workers had their compensation cut. The station will produce fewer episodes per season of some local shows, and multiple youth outreach programs were ended.

“We saw it as a line item in Project 2025, so we knew that it was on the current administration’s radar,” Reep said. “When inauguration day happened, we were like, ‘OK, we’ll see,’ but it seemed really unlikely because it’s just been decades and decades and decades of history, and it has enjoyed bipartisan support.”

Not to mention, KSPS-PBS and other local stations enjoy millions of viewers (or listeners) around the country, spanning from the largest cities to the most rural communities. Millions of people reached out to congressional representatives as a part of a public media campaign when public media funding was initially on the chopping block, Reep said.

“It was really hard to see how much support we were able to drum up and how much of that support was directly sent to representatives, and they voted (to cut funding) anyways,” he said.

Anecdotally, Reep said he knows locals “who had the opportunity to vote for federal funding for public media,” but didn’t, despite saying that they support the values of public media.

“The drumbeat for them was, if it’s good, the market will support it,” he said. “They’re missing the point, which is that what we do is not profitable by nature.”

Sesame Street, Reep pointed out, is “like the keystone of public media for kids,” but when it was sold to HBO, the company “got rid of it almost instantly because they couldn’t do anything. It’s not monetizable. Teaching kids to read – you can sell some toys or whatever, but it’s just not a commercially viable product.”

“In a country that doesn’t have preschool,” Reep said, referencing low enrollment rates in state programs.

A 2023-2024 schoolyear study by the National Institute for Early Education Research reported only 37% of 3-year-olds and 8% of 4-year-olds in the country were as enrolled in preschool.

“PBS is this country’s preschool. It just is. And so I think we have a mandate, as Americans, to keep PBS Kids going,” Reep said.

All but two Republicans in Congress voted to cease funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting last July, including Spokane’s Rep. Michael Baumgartner. He told the Spokesman-Review at the time that the vote was not in response to a question of the value of public media, but a question of whether the federal government should spend taxpayer dollars on it.

“Congress has to do a better job of stewarding every dollar, particularly at a time when we’re deeply in debt and have a 20% annual budget deficit,” Baumgartner said at the time. “I’m somebody who enjoys public radio and public television, but at a time when we’re deeply in debt, one, there’s a cost issue there, but also there’s an issue of ideological balance.”

Taxpayer dollars should instead go toward benefiting lower-income Americans, Baumgartner said in an interview on the same topic in May, rather than a comparatively well-off PBS and NPR audience base.

Reep disputes that consumers of public media are better-off than the average American. With 30 broadcast towers across the northwest, viewers only need an antenna to pick up KSPS-PBS’ signal on their TV.

“We’re broadcasting into the most marginalized, minoritized, impoverished rural regions in our area,” he said. “We’re reaching people who – 20% of Americans don’t have access to broadband. A lot of them don’t have access to a lot of the things that we take for granted, and we provide that stuff for free.”

Further, public broadcasting equipment is used for emergency alert systems throughout the country.

“When Congress took away funding for public media, they’re actually defunding the backbone of emergency contact with Americans,” Reep said.

Spokane Public Radio, a member of NPR, took a roughly $250,000 hit with the rescission vote, about 12% of its typical budget. Though the station needed to fill the hole, President and General Manager John Decker firmly believes the station will be “just fine.”

“We’re in good shape for now,” he said. “I’m not immediately worried about what happens in the next six months because there’s been such a generous outpouring of support from our audience and our donors.”

Both KSPS-PBS and Spokane Public Radio reported a huge increase in donations following the end of federal funding. Donations have historically made up a large portion of the nonprofits’ revenues, and Reep and Decker are both counting on them continuing moving forward, but are looking for longer-term stability.

A newly introduced state house bill aims to provide that stability for Washington’s public media outlets.

The bill aims to create a grant funding stream within the state that public media outlets could apply for, along with allocating some funds for expanding broadband digital equity, said Rep. Chris Stearns, a Democrat in the Covington area.

“For me personally, I feel like my life depends on public radio,” he said. “I listen to a station here called KEXP and it is maybe one of the finest things in my life that connects me with humanity.”

Stearns is one of the primary sponsors of the bill, along with Seattle’s Rep. Liz Berry. He is driven largely by a personal love for music and a sense of need for the emergency notifications, children’s programs and local news that small stations offer their communities. He thinks that Washington, D.C., feels attacked by public radio, but isn’t sure why.

“I don’t listen to a lot of talk radio, so I know there’s a lot of opinions,” Stearns said. “But it’s sort of confounding, I would say, to see something that really benefits rural communities more than urban areas being threatened. It’s counterintuitive, I guess I would have to say.”

Right now, the bill proposes a 20-cent surcharge on phone bills, which Stearns said would raise around $16 million per year for public media across the state.

If the bill passes, Washington would join the dozens of states that already have state support for public media. Stearns believes this will be the case, given the built-in funding model and a general love for public media among the population.

“For me, music is – I think it is what connects us all,” he said. “And people, deep down, really want to be connected… it summons the best in us, and people are looking for that, especially when times are pretty grim.”

Decker and Reep are hopeful for the future, too, despite the funding hurdle. With the outpouring of community support, it is clear to them that their respective organizations are valued.

“I am still very optimistic that Spokane Public Radio will grow, and we have plans in place that are going to make that happen,” Decker said. “And it’s going to happen without CPB funding or without anything from the federal government – and that’s fine. We’re going to figure it out.”

Reep said that KSPS-PBS is in the process of creating a new, free channel centered on local Indigenous voices, despite program cuts in other areas.

“Our budget, even before the loss of federal funding, we were playing with toy money compared to Netflix or Paramount or something. And so the way we beat them is by being intensely local,” he said. “That’s going to be our differentiator in the coming years. I want people to think of us as a gathering place, a heart.”

Public media outlets are not going to change what they are doing at their core, regardless of funding levels, Decker said.

“This is not the death knell for public media or SPR. It is not,” he said. “Our funding model is more complicated than what it was in the past, but we are going to continue to make it, and we are committed to being a significant and trustworthy community partner for the Inland Northwest, just like we have been.”