July 30, 2025

Taking the Ax to Public Broadcasting: Keeping ScOR #11

It was well into the spring semester of my senior year in college and I had no plan for my post-graduation life. Oops.

Plan A had just fallen through. I’d tried to join the Peace Corps, hoping they’d send me to Africa, Asia, or South America to do something useful while having a life-changing international experience. Everything went well with the application process until the letter came: I’d been rejected because of a chronic (though not serious) health condition.

I went to see my favorite philosophy professor, Deane Curtin, to share the news and consider next steps. I had no idea this brief conversation would set the trajectory for my professional life.

At the time, my only Plan B was graduate school – in philosophy, my major – presumably leading to a life in academia. But it was too late to apply for the coming fall. Maybe, I told Doc Curtin, I’ll just get a job waiting tables before applying for the following year.

“Aw, you should find something more interesting to do in the meantime,” Doc said casually. “How about going to work for MPR?”

M-P-huh?

“What’s MPR?” I asked.

MPR, he explained, was something called Minnesota Public Radio. (In Minnesota, where I lived, most of the NPR stations were MPR stations.)

This was 1983. NPR was a thing but nowhere near the force it would become. The Public Broadcasting Act, the law that created the public radio and TV systems, was only 16 years old, and NPR had gone on the air in 1970. I compare public radio in the early ‘80s to the food co-op movement – a fringe-y alternative. If I’d ever heard of MPR or NPR, it hadn’t stuck, and to the extent that any of their signals reached my hometown in southern Minnesota, I hadn’t discovered them down there on the left end of the FM dial. I’d grown up on AM stations that played the Top 40 with some news and sports sprinkled in. I knew from Casey Kasem, not Susan Stamberg.

Needless to say, I took Doc Curtin’s advice – looked into internship opportunities at the MPR stations and got invited to spend the summer working for free at WSCD on the shores of Lake Superior in Duluth. Staying in a spare room at the home of a college friend — I didn’t have the money to pay real rent — I was trained by the two guys in the newsroom to make cassette recordings, write news copy, and cut reel-to-reel tape with a razor blade. They put me to work doing “phoners” to fill the newscasts and riding my bicycle up and down the hills of Duluth to cover school board and city council meetings. (Note: Unpaid internships ended decades ago at MPR.) That fall I got a full-time job as a cub reporter at another small MPR station on the other side of the state: KCCM, in Moorhead, Minnesota — which served its larger sister city, Fargo, ND.

Public broadcasting was and is a powerful public good in a society with too few of them.

Even as I learned the job, I’d become a new listener. Having known only commercial broadcasting I was amazed by NPR. Here was journalism that took its time, went into some depth, didn’t shout at you, and, most startling of all, respected your intelligence. Astonishing.

Still, I didn’t yet know I would spend most of the next 40-plus years doing audio journalism and documentary – more than half of those years within the public radio system. First, in the storied tradition of 20-somethings, I had to knock around and get some other options out of my system. In 1985 I left my job at KCCM and moved to Japan to teach English for a couple of years. I also ventured into a PhD program in philosophy, only to abandon it within weeks. At 26 I wound up back with MPR, having come to feel that, lo and behold, I’d stumbled into a line of work that suited me very, very well. 

Why public radio? First and above all, I loved the work. From the privilege of going out and talking to people about their lives, to all the learning about the world and how it works, to the script writing and the sheer fun of cutting tape (in those analog days) and crafting a production in sound. This was my idea of a good time, and I was getting paid – not at all extravagantly, but enough – to do it. 

The “mission-driven” part was a bonus. It felt good that my job was to ask questions, learn stuff, and then explain to (a sliver of) the public what I’d learned. Sure, people who work in public radio want to reach as many listeners as possible and care about the financial strength of their institutions – in part, of course, for their own job security. But no boss ever told me to find the most sensational story or to drive any political agenda. In the newsrooms where I worked, we didn’t report on day-to-day crimes, accidents, or fires, except as they came up in public policy discussions. We covered local government, talked to smart people who were thinking about problems and solutions, made feature stories about people and events in the community. I understood my job to be essentially this: find the most meaningful and illuminating story I could tell that day.  

It was clear to me that NPR and its stations occupied a valuable space in communities across the country. The system wasn’t perfect. I would eventually leave it for podcasting in part out of frustration with NPR’s limitations. But public broadcasting was and is a powerful public good in a society with too few of them. If NPR stations are weakened, and if some go silent, that will be an enormous loss. It will make America less great. Again.

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The rescission bill that Congress passed on July 17, clawing back $1.1 billion dollars in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) – and more than $7 billion in foreign aid – scratches a right-wing itch that dates to my baby reporter days during the Reagan Administration. It zeroes out funding for the independent, congressionally-created corporation that distributes federal money to NPR, PBS, and hundreds of their member stations.

The sum withdrawn from CPB is a pittance in the federal budget. That $1.1 billion is two years of federal funding for public TV and radio. The BBC, by comparison, receives ten times as much, $5 billion a year, through the UK’s licensing fee, in a nation with roughly one-fourth the population of the United States. Under Trump’s proposed $1 trillion military budget for next year, the Pentagon will spend a billion dollars every few hours. Considering that this same Congress just passed a “big beautiful” bill that adds trillions to the national debt, the zeroing out of public broadcasting money is patently not about cost savings. 

This rescission won’t kill NPR or PBS – that is, the national networks based in Washington, D.C. Only 1% of NPR’s budget, and a heftier 15% of PBS’s, come from taxpayers. For member stations it’s a different story, and the smaller and more rural the station, the more painful the hit. Some in isolated places get nearly all their funding from the CPB. Many if not most stations will be forced to cut staff, and analyses by public broadcasters have estimated that some 15% of NPR’s 1,000 member stations could be forced off the air in the next few years.

This will only delight many on the right. For decades, leading Republicans have accused PBS and, even more loudly, NPR of left-leaning bias in their journalism – an allegation the networks perennially reject. 

I won’t settle that argument here. But briefly, with respect to NPR, the system I know and worked in (including at the national network): On certain social matters including race, women’s rights, and LGBTQ issues, I’d agree that the reporting on NPR tilts left of center – if the “unbiased” “center” would mean somehow splitting the difference between, or “both-sidesing,” the dominant positions on the political left and right in the United States. Is that bad? It has long seemed to me that acceptance of people regardless of their ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation – and support for equal rights – is about justice and basic decency, not left vs. right. These matters are partisan only because large swaths of society persist in holding fearful or bigoted views and wish to have them enshrined in policy — and one of America’s two major political parties tends to carry that water. Who’s “biased” in this picture? 

On other core issues, including the economy, foreign policy, and threats to American democracy, NPR regularly frustrates its more progressive listeners by playing the both-sides game all too well. When the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene accuse NPR and PBS of being “radical left wing echo chambers,” those on the actual left can only roll their eyes.   

In any case, none of the above necessarily applies to local stations and their news coverage. One Republican congressman from Nevada, Mark Amodei, made this point to his fellow conservatives. "If you're mad at the [NPR] editorial people, that's fine. But you shouldn't be mad at the stations," he said. "And, oh, by the way, you ought to look at where those stations are, because it's a lot of Trump country, and they're not the problem." 

As a dutiful member of the party of Trump, Amodei voted for the rescission bill anyway, saying he hopes Congress will restore the public broadcasting funding in the coming months.

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What are these cuts really about? The people now in power want to rein in independent sources of news and information. Trump and his allies are particularly hostile to any journalism or documentary work they consider “woke” – that is, which looks at U.S. history with complexity and honesty. Just days after the rescission vote, GBH, the Boston-based public TV powerhouse that produces the documentary series American Experience, announced it will lay off 13 staffers and pause the production of new AE documentaries indefinitely.  

More fundamentally, the right-wing assault on public broadcasting is deeply ideological. The far-right forces that have hitched their wagon to MAGA are actively hostile to government-supported public goods. The new Trump regime is moving aggressively on this front – attacking disaster relief, public health programs, environmental protection, and health insurance and food aid for poor people. Subsidies for EV charging stations and other renewable energy projects? That’s “green new scam” stuff. Elon Musk’s DOGE went after funding and staffing for our national parks. The national parks! And now public broadcasting.

This all brings to mind Nancy MacLean, the Duke historian and author of Democracy in Chains, who appeared in Scene on Radio’s 4^th season and again in our 7^th. Reflecting on the men who launched the neoliberal era half a century ago, she said: “For people to grasp how radical this libertarian cause is, it's helpful to know that they see only three legitimate functions for government: providing for the national defense, ensuring the rule of law, and guaranteeing social order. In shorthand, armies, courts, and police. Beyond that, they do not think government should be going.”

MacLean was talking about an earlier generation of ideologues. This current bunch is even more extreme. The Trump regime has contempt for the courts, too, and is defying judges’ orders at an unprecedented rate. That leaves only armies and police as favored government functions. As it starves and slashes branches of government that serve everyday people in our everyday lives, the administration has proposed a major increase in military spending and authorized, through the “big beautiful bill,” a vast expansion of ICE. 

What kind of political price will Trump and his allies pay for this disfigurement of the U.S. government into an ever more massive “security” apparatus that does precious little else? We’ll see.

I’ve just increased my monthly donation to my local public radio station, WUNC, which will lose $800,000 a year in CPB support. I encourage you to do likewise for the stations where you live, if you can. Or donate to one or more of the stations that need the money most.

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A Season 8 tease

The next season of Scene on Radio is very much under construction. The theme? Well, speaking of news media and America’s information crisis…. Here’s a glimpse behind the scenes. We’ve assembled a brilliant team,

and I’ve recorded dozens of interviews — with historians and other experts, some everyday citizens and media consumers, and one North Carolina tractor.

We’re aiming for release of the new season in early-ish 2026.

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Scene on Radio the podcast is available wherever you get your shows, and at sceneonradio.org.