Ed Markey: Donald Trump and his allies are coming for it, and we have to be prepared for an incredible political battle.

Brooke Gladstone: Federal funding for public media is once again on the chopping block. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. On this week's show, we track the essential role local public radio stations play in keeping our local governments in check and how they sometimes save lives from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina.

Laura Lee: We have heard stories and seen images of people gathered around one little hand-crank radio at the cul-de-sac to listen to our updates.

Micah Loewinger: To remote Southwestern Alaska.

Sage Smiley: During freeze-up, people do fall into holes in the river, people do go missing, being able to communicate with the public through KYUK about search efforts, about travel advisories. There's no other place to get that information.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this.

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Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Last week, the Senate met to discuss the president's giant rescission package, which includes a proposal to claw back $1.1 billion in public media funding, money that's already been approved by Congress to support public media for the next two years. The House voted yes on rescission. The Senate has a few weeks to debate it, and then they'll vote, too. Meanwhile, Congress is considering whether to cut off funds longer term.

Male Speaker: Republicans are attacking Elmo.

Rep. Lisa McClain: I never realized Elmo was more important to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle than the American people.

Reporter: It's part of the president's effort to cut what he says is waste, fraud, and abuse from the federal government.

Micah Loewinger: Of course, the president's feelings about public broadcasting are pretty well known at this point.

Reporter: President Trump has signed an executive order directing the Center for Public Broadcasting to end federal funding for the nation's two largest public broadcasters.

William Brangham: The president argues that public media, in general, has a liberal bias and that taxpayers should not be supporting that. The president wrote this, "Republicans must defund and totally disassociate themselves from NPR and PBS, the radical left monsters that so badly hurt our country."

Micah Loewinger: In this hour, first broadcast in January, we'll speak to a critic who says it's time to kill federal money for public media altogether. You'll also hear from NPR member stations across the country about the work they do and their essential roles in their communities. First, a quick history. Back in 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson, mired in Vietnam, was trying to build the Great Society at home by passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act, creating Medicare, and crucially for the purpose of this story, creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has been marked for death repeatedly. What is it?

President Lyndon Johnson: The Corporation of Public Broadcasting will assist stations and producers who aim for the best in broadcasting on the whole fascinating range of human activity. It will try to prove that what educates can also be exciting. It will get part of its support from our government, but it will be carefully guarded from government or from party control. It will be free and it will be independent and it will belong to all of our people.

Micah Loewinger: It was a hard sell. Conservatives worried the CPB would promote liberal ideas. After all, Johnson's agenda was indisputably liberal. Some suspected its funds would flow more to some regions than others. Commercial broadcasters feared the competition. Even after the dust settled, well, actually the dust never really settled, it's been kicked up by every Republican administration since. Yet through the decades, somehow every effort to slash or burn the CPB has failed, thanks to such battle-scarred warriors as Big Bird and this guy.

Fred Rogers: I end the program by saying, you've made this day a special day by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are. I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.

Brooke Gladstone: Despite Fred Rogers' appeal to empathy, Richard Nixon, not known for manageable feelings, viewed public broadcasting as an enemy to slay. In 1975, it was left to Gerald Ford to set up a funding scheme to shield it, theoretically at least, from the immediate political winds. Congress was directed to appropriate CPB's funding two years in advance. Of course, Congress could kill future funding or even rescind what had already been allocated, but some insulation was better than none. Fast forward to 2017. Donald Trump tries to cut CPB's funding several times in his first term.

Karen Everhart: This morning, President Trump made public his proposed budget blueprint for the coming fiscal year. Among the items included, the elimination of all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Brooke Gladstone: He didn't get it done.

Karen Everhart: No, he did not. Those proposals did not fly in Congress.

Brooke Gladstone: Karen Everhart is the managing editor of Current, a nonprofit newsroom covering public media.

Karen Everhart: Members of Congress, particularly in rural states, recognize that public broadcasting is one of the only local originating sources of news and information and programming, and they value that. Their constituents value that. What typically happens is the House goes along with a recommendation, especially when it's dominated by Republicans. The House will eliminate CPB's funding from its appropriations budget, and then the Senate will propose an alternative number, and that number or something around that amount will end up in the final budget.

Brooke Gladstone: More than 70% of CPB's annual appropriation goes directly to public media stations in the form of community service grants, CSGs, of which about 45% are rural. They can be used as they need to be, to keep the station running and for programming, both local and national. They're not obligated to buy programs from PBS, nor do they have to buy from NPR.

Karen Everhart: Although most of them do because they're very popular with their audiences. They can choose to buy programs from American Public Media or PRX, or the BBC.

Brooke Gladstone: Last year, CPB received $525 million plus another $10 million in interest, about half of which went to local public TV stations in direct grants, about 15% to local radio stations. A big chunk went out in programming grants, mostly to TV. More went out to support the distribution system, et cetera. That said, the bigger stations are less vulnerable to attacks on CPB because it's not a significant part of their budgets.

Karen Everhart: They don't rely on CPB funding for essential services. That doesn't go towards their programming budget. It's the small stations where it really makes the biggest difference in what they do on a day-to-day basis. Those are the stations that are most at risk.

Ed Markey: Every single time they have the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, they think, "Ah, now we have a chance." Every time, they find how much support there is for this program.

Micah Loewinger: Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey is a member of the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Media, which oversees the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He's been fighting off Republican efforts to defund NPR and PBS for decades.

Ed Markey: Whether it be the children's programming that's on all day long all across the country for free or the news, the entertainment made available on NPR in the remotest parts of America, in Alaska, in Aroostook County, Maine, wherever people in the United States live, there is access. Each time, there has to be a re-education of the Republican members of Congress because they learn how central it is. Every time, we've been able to hit the pause button and just stop them from making those dramatic cuts. That's what we're going to have to do again.

Micah Loewinger: One line of rhetoric I'm sure you're familiar with is, "Okay, we can see why so many different kinds of Americans support this, but why don't the viewers and the listeners pay for it themselves? Why does the government need to be paying or contributing for the production of this work?" What do you say to that?

Ed Markey: Because we do need one source of news which is free. If public broadcasting did not exist, we would be trying right now to invent it because we need public broadcasting more than ever.

Micah Loewinger: As the effort to defund and demonize NPR's coverage ramps up, Republicans will almost certainly point to an essay in the Free Press substack by a former NPR editor named Uri Berliner who claimed that NPR doesn't employ enough conservatives, that the news organization caters too heavily to a left-wing audience, that conservative listenership has declined.

Ed Markey: Follow-up reporting revealed that the accusations were cherry-picked and mischaracterized NPR's reporting. The truth is, NPR receives a relatively small amount of its funding directly from the government, and there is zero evidence that NPR manipulated its coverage to protect its funding because it simply didn't happen. The conservative backlash against NPR is a threat against NPR's actual independence, a partisan effort to force NPR to alter its objective coverage. That is the true threat to free speech, that objective journalists are told that they've got to conduct journalism more like the Fox network, which is biased in order to keep funding.

Micah Loewinger: Back in 2005, during an interview on C-SPAN, you said.

Ed Markey: "There has been a radical right-wing agenda to undermine the Public Broadcasting System forever, really. At the end of the day, there always is a moderate center in Congress, Democrat and Republican, that sticks together, that ensures that proper funding for the Public Broadcasting System stays intact."

Micah Loewinger: Senator, do you think that remains true today, or is this political moment fundamentally more split than in congresses of years past?

Ed Markey: The newer members of the House and Senate who are more extreme may bring an ideological perspective to the issue, but for the members who have served for years, they've been through this debate. I don't think it's going to be easy for the ideologues to convince the pragmatists that the pragmatists should just give up. They understand how their communities rely upon public television and public radio. We'll see how it all plays out. Ultimately, as the old saying goes, all politics is local, and there's nothing more local than your local NPR station.

Micah Loewinger: Part of what we're trying to understand in this episode of our show is whether an emboldened Donald Trump, a Republican-controlled House and Senate, all in a very anti-media political moment, presents a new and unique threat to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, given all the technological disruption, the fact that many Americans can get news for free, it's not always good, but they can get lots of news for free online. Are these threats unique?

Ed Markey: There is going to be an intensity to this campaign against the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, especially NPR, that is unprecedented. Donald Trump and his allies are coming for it, and we have to be prepared for an incredible political battle. We're going to have to build a powerful coalition. My own belief is that they're going to quickly see how much Americans value these media sources because public broadcasting is a public good.

Micah Loewinger: Ed Markey is a Democratic senator for Massachusetts. Senator, thank you very much.

Ed Markey: Great to be with you. Thank you so much.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, why local news is critical across the country.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Lowinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Now, we go to a staunch CPB critic, Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation who's called for defunding CPB for over a decade. He articulated his chief reasons why at a hearing about the future of public broadcasting before the House DOGE subcommittee in March.

Mike Gonzalez: The ultimate factor is the broadcaster's unforgivable political bias. Democrats unanimously vote for more and more money for public media. In exchange, Public Media heavily tips the scale in their favor.

Brooke Gladstone: When the Heritage Foundation released Project 2025, he wrote the chapter on why CPB should end. His reason was that it was unfair, first to the competition, who did not have the benefit of federal funding, and second to the taxpayers, especially the conservative ones, forced to support programming that does not only not reflect their values, but actually undermines them. Because we both had dogs in this fight. We debated with a lot of conviction, but ultimately too little agreement. Sometimes, though, such conversations are useful, even if only to see how differently two well-intended people can see the world.

Mike Gonzalez: Thank you very much for having me. I'm very happy to be on your show.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that every Republican president since Nixon has tried to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, that's a fact, and that it's time for it to finally happen. Those efforts have always failed because there seems to be broad support for the service. A 2017 PBS survey conducted by both Republican and Democratic polling teams found that 70% of Trump voters opposed eliminating federal funding for public TV.

Mike Gonzalez: Well, weak members of Congress have come in and saved your bacon.

Brooke Gladstone: Why would they?

Mike Gonzalez: Because you give them awards. They love the awards that you give them. They put them on their website. I don't want to name any names. Why do you have to do this perennially?

Brooke Gladstone: To defend the funding against the quadrennial attacks.

Mike Gonzalez: Why not just be less biased? Why not just be objective in reporting the news?

Brooke Gladstone: All right. I'm not going to argue that NPR does or doesn't have a liberal bias. We once spent several episodes addressing the issue with a lot of conservatives who, like you, listen to public radio every day. They don't like the attitude, but they like the information.

Mike Gonzalez: I disagree. I think the information is tainted. Let's look at the fact-checking that NPR did on President Trump's press conference in August. Do you want me to tell you what the headline was? "162 lies and distortions in a news conference. NPR fact-checks former President Trump." Trump said we are very close to a world war. NPR's fact-check said, "No serious person thinks that the US, Russia, and China are about to start a world war." It just so happens that the next week, I was at the Vatican and I attended a set of remarks by the Pope, and he talked about a looming world war. I think that we can qualify the Pope as a serious person. The NPR fact-check "was wrong." Another one was when he called Kamala Harris a very liberal senator.

Brooke Gladstone: He didn't say that she was liberal. He said that she's a radical left person at a level nobody has seen.

Mike Gonzalez: Okay.

Brooke Gladstone: All right. When he goes hyperbolic, you are of the camp that says, don't take him literally.

Mike Gonzalez: Here's another one, Brooke. NPR chose not to report on the Hunter Biden laptop. NPR put out a statement. Here's what the statement said. "We don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' times on stories that are just pure distractions."

Brooke Gladstone: Even Fox News passed on the story amid credibility concerns at that very point.

Mike Gonzalez: The way that NPR reported on the news that Meta, that is Facebook and Instagram, are renouncing censorship.

Brooke Gladstone: Are renouncing fact-checking.

Mike Gonzalez: I know. Censorship, they actually said it was biased.

Brooke Gladstone: To fact-check.

Mike Gonzalez: That's right.

Brooke Gladstone: I don't agree with that. I think it's fundamental to good journalism.

Mike Gonzalez: People with conservative views saw that as a stride towards freedom of expression. NPR's reporting did not reflect that at all. Here's a quote from NPR repeating talking points long used by President-elect Donald Trump and his allies. "Zuckerberg said the company's content moderation approach resulted too often in censorship." NPR reported it as Zuckerberg just repeating President Trump's talking points. A person who gets the lion's share of her news from NPR would have no way of finding out that what Mark Zuckerberg announced yesterday was seen by many of us as a victory for freedom of expression. NPR has a vision that is the Univision, the vision of the bicoastal elite.

Brooke Gladstone: You're saying if NPR would just be more, I don't know, centrist, by whose standards?

Mike Gonzalez: By the standards of conservatives, because conservatives pay for you as well. If conservatives complain perennially about you, you don't think that's a problem?

Brooke Gladstone: I'm just saying this is not all conservatives. That was what this research I quoted earlier suggested, that if you actually talk to conservative consumers of NPR, they may dislike what they perceive as a liberal perspective, but they value the journalism.

Mike Gonzalez: Uri Berliner, 25-year veteran of NPR, wrote a very eye-opening whistleblowing piece about NPR, how it handles the news. He said only 11% of listeners are now conservatives, while 67% are liberal, and 20% describe themselves as middle-of-the-road. Public radio is driving away even moderates and traditional liberals.

Brooke Gladstone: You don't think the facts are more reliable on National Public Radio?

Mike Gonzalez: No, I don't at all. I think, again, that you become an educated news consumer, you consume a wide variety of news, and then you make up your own mind.

Brooke Gladstone: You need the information to do that accurately reported. There are very few sources of that.

Mike Gonzalez: NPR is not one of them.

Brooke Gladstone: Then we come down to facts again, just plain naked information.

Mike Gonzalez: You think that the left has a monopoly on them, and I don't.

Brooke Gladstone: I think that journalists who have been working the field for a long time, and public broadcasting among them, they don't lie. Now, your main gripe is with PBS and especially NPR, but public media, as you note, is so much more than that. Most of CPB's funding, some 70%, goes to local stations, not directly to NPR. Those stations play crucial roles, especially in rural areas, in news deserts.

Mike Gonzalez: They turn around then, and they use that money to buy NPR and PBS broadcasting. As to the news deserts, let's take Alaska, for example. I know that you talk to people in Alaska. The figures that I got were from four or five years ago, has an Internet penetration of 80%, 20%, which is not insignificant, but a lot of those people just don't want Internet. I think that this argument that there are news deserts out in the Dakotas and in Alaska, continue to get news through social media. They do not need the taxpayer to pony up.

Brooke Gladstone: They aren't getting news from the Internet about their local area. In 2024, there were 208 counties that were considered news deserts. More than 1,500 had only one local news source. That means that more than half of the nation's counties have little to no local news. News deserts have been associated with lower household incomes, lower rates of educational attainment, higher poverty. A recent study from Medill's School of Journalism, Northwestern University's journalism school, says that there was a net increase of 81 standalone local digital news sites in the last year, but nearly 90% of those are in metro areas, not in rural counties.

Mike Gonzalez: I think it's a question of demand. If there really is a demand, a supply will be there. I have never seen any area where demand surges and it's not met by a supply.

Brooke Gladstone: Not all listeners can afford to support their public stations, and they rely on them for local news, emergency updates. In fact, rural stations are the ones that are reliant on CPB funding, and they don't spend all that money on simply sending it to National Public Radio.

Mike Gonzalez: They buy NPR programming.

Brooke Gladstone: They do, but that's not where all their money goes. The rest of it is for their physical plant and for local news, and for partnering with emergency services in their area.

Mike Gonzalez: As I said, I think that if there's a demand, the market will supply a response to it. If some local communities have disaster response in weather-related needs that the market does not supply a solution to, I am sure the state and local governments can devise and set up systems that can take care of the problem on a much cheaper basis than the entire public broadcasting apparatus and without the attendant ills that accompany the prison system.

As for local news, which as you mentioned local news, I just don't buy that state funding is the only business model for local news. We've had private funding before, so I don't know why all of a sudden state funding is the only business model for local news. Now, if you're asking me, Brooke, is it a good thing that Alaskans will no longer be captured by NPR's liberal vision, do I think that's a good thing? Yes, I think that's a good thing.

Brooke Gladstone: We did speak to Alaska and not just Alaska. In some of these areas, there is no Internet. There are constant disruptions. This is how they get the information about the emergency services that they absolutely need.

Mike Gonzalez: I'm not sure that's the case. It used to say it's for the children. You're trying to kill Big Bird. Big Bird has flown the coop--

Brooke Gladstone: Big Bird has been fired by HBO in the last few months.

Mike Gonzalez: Now that you can no longer say it's for the children, you're saying, "Oh, it's for rural Alaskans." If there's a need for them, people will step in. There will be charity money. Soros will pay for it, the Tides Foundation, the Ford Foundation, membership model. We're talking about paying half a billion dollars a year to NPR and PBS. To continue to make the argument that this is for these rural communities, I don't think it passes the laugh test.

Brooke Gladstone: Many people on the local level that you say have been harried into supporting public radio, actually do it because they recognize that their communities need this local service.

Mike Gonzalez: I can see now clearly how NPR is going to build its lobbying efforts. This year, they're going to say, "Oh, it's the local rural communities. We have to save their news coverage." In fact, we live in the age of the Internet.

Brooke Gladstone: You think that will take care of it?

Mike Gonzalez: You think that will take care of it? Yes. When there's a demand, there's a supply, and it's unfair. As Jefferson said, it's a tyranny to ask a man to pay for views with which he disagrees. That's pure tyranny.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you very much.

Mike Gonzalez: Thank you, Brooke. Anytime.

Brooke Gladstone: Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Micah Loewinger: We all know that local news is in retreat. As you just heard, the Medill Local News Initiative found, as of 2023, that more than half of US counties have no or very limited access to anything other than national outlets.

Brooke Gladstone: One well-observed impact of losing local news. Local officials were more inclined to misbehave. Researchers at George Mason University in Tulane tallied corruption charges in federal districts that had lost a major daily newspaper from 1996 to 2019. After those papers closed, the districts collectively saw a 6.9% increase in charges of bribery, embezzlement, fraud. The authors noted that only counts the people who got caught. The study also checked if the some 350 websites that sprang up as substitutes for those papers could make a dent in that number. They didn't.

Micah Loewinger: Wouldn't it be great if a solid piece of accountability reporting always resulted in a change for the better? It's rarely so simple. Its power is in the act of showing up with a microphone to every statehouse hearing or school board meeting, reading through police files, or putting in that umpteenth FOIA request. Even after all that and more, it can take years to see results, if at all, but sometimes all that tedious incremental reporting does start to add up. Government malfeasance is exposed, and good things happen.

Take this example from Colorado in 2022, when the state was still recovering from the Marshall Fire, which destroyed over 1,000 homes. Scott Franz, a reporter for KUNC Public Radio serving northern Colorado, noticed that a popular bipartisan bill to fund investigations into the origins of wildfires mysteriously died.

Scott Franz: Why did this bill die? How did it die?

Micah Loewinger: Scott Franz.

Scott Franz: When I started talking to lawmakers, I discovered that there was a secret ballot system that lawmakers were using to anonymously rank the bills that they thought should get funding and ultimately get passed at the state house. The sponsor of this bill blamed its death on this secret ballot system.

Micah Loewinger: He wasn't the only one reporting on the new system, but he was the first to ask.

Scott Franz: Hey, wait a second, is this legal?

Micah Loewinger: Franz spent two years reporting dozens of stories on this secret ballot system used by state Democrats, probing how the system worked and its impact on legislation.

Scott Franz: The public has a right to see how bills go through the process because, at the end of the day, if bills can just die quietly without explanation or accountability, it shuts the public out of an important part of the decision-making process.

Micah Loewinger: Last January, a judge ordered lawmakers to stop using the system because it violated state law. In Colorado's 2024 legislative session.

Scott Franz: For the first time, lawmakers made this process public. They published the results down to how each individual lawmaker voted in this process.

Micah Loewinger: Here's another example of the grind of accountability journalism paying off. In 2018, Matt Katz, former WNYC reporter and current executive producer of City Cast Philly, started reporting on immigrants detained by ICE in three New Jersey county jails. He spent the next few years covering how these counties, run by Democratic politicians who publicly protested Trump immigration policies, were at the same time raking in millions of dollars from ICE under Trump.

Matt Katz: There was immediate concern about this because people didn't know that, in fact, their county budgets were being subsidized by ICE and therefore their taxes were lower.

Micah Loewinger: The public was also unaware of the horrific conditions in these jails.

Matt Katz: I reported on allegations of sexual assault by officers, inhumane medical care like Bengay prescribed for a broken rib, or long delays in access to treatment for chronic illnesses.

Micah Loewinger: Other local outlets picked up on Katz's reporting, and people showed up outside the jails to protest. In 2021, New Jersey banned ICE detention facilities from opening in the state. That ban was appealed in 2023, and ICE has since tried opening a new facility this year. While the case was just heard in May, the law remains on the books.

Matt Katz: It's always hard as a reporter to know if something you reported is directly what caused some change. We were told on background that our reporting is what led to this. Certainly, the addition of reporting from other news outlets, editorials from local newspapers also put pressure on policymakers to do something about this.

Brooke Gladstone: Sometimes the grunt work of investigative reporting kicks in long after the spotlight on a story fades. In early 2015, ACLU reporter, Curt Guyette, broke the story of the Flint water crisis in Michigan to a national audience, painting a picture of millions of Flint residents exposed to tap water contaminated with staggering amounts of lead. Soon after Flint switched to a cleaner, safer reservoir in late 2015 and Barack Obama's emergency declaration in January 2016, much of the national media moved on. That's when local reporters like Michigan Public Radio's Lindsey Smith doubled down.

Lindsey Smith: We really held onto it and did not let go. It was really wild, the number of times that we had to keep saying, "No, State, this is your responsibility. No, EPA, pretty sure that is your responsibility." That continued just for months and months.

Brooke Gladstone: Smith and her environmental reporting team spent years covering the state's response to the crisis. They also turned their eyes to other districts in Michigan.

Lindsey Smith: After the dust settled with Flint, it was very intuitive to turn our attention to places like Grand Rapids, Saginaw, Midland, Battle Creek. They had tons of lead lines. They had not been testing at any homes with lead lines for decades. We really were able to keep the pressure on to see, "Okay, let's resolve this in other places."

Brooke Gladstone: As the government started admitting its wrongs and implementing new water safety rules, Michigan Public Radio was still pushing.

Lindsey Smith: Michigan now has adopted the toughest rules in the country because of the water crisis and because, frankly, we kept reporting on it as they went through this rulemaking process. Now the EPA has gone in and finally adopted some changes to their federal lead and capital rules, too.

Brooke Gladstone: They didn't do it alone.

Lindsey Smith: Flint Journal has some great reporters who did excellent, excellent job reporting on the Flint water crisis throughout, the Detroit Free Press, the Flint Journal, Curt Guyette at the ACLU, and us. I would really package those together. It was almost what needed to happen to make the state not ignore us.

Brooke Gladstone: This kind of painstaking reporting takes time and money and the trust of bosses who might not have anything to air for years. It's certainly not profitable. It's merely a public trust, what Jefferson called the agitation produced by a free press. He said that, "It must be submitted to. It is necessary to keep the waters pure."

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, public radio's most crucial mission doesn't emanate from Washington or even Brooklyn.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. We'll finish this hour by looking at a few public radio stations that met their communities in a time of need.

Tom Michael: I came to Marfa around 2000, and I had a front-row seat of watching Marfa become what it is now.

Micah Loewinger: Journalist Tom Michael founded Marfa Public Radio, a station that serves Far West Texas.

Tom Michael: It's in Presidio County, one of the poorest counties in the United States. Marfa is known as an art town, the home for The Chinati Foundation, which was where a minimalist New York artist, Donald Judd, did a large-scale installation.

Micah Loewinger: Maybe you've seen pictures of a lonely Prada store on a barren highway. That's Marfa. The radio station is one of a few local media shops, but its airwaves reach listeners far afield in what's otherwise basically a news desert and a literal desert.

Tom Michael: The Chihuahuan Desert, which is mostly in Mexico. It's a dry climate.

Micah Loewinger: Which helps explain what happened on April 9th, 2011, a hot day in the middle of a drought.

Tom Michael: It was a Saturday, I believe. We had a meeting at the station because we were preparing for our next on-air fundraiser. I think we had three employees at the time. Myself, Anne Adkins, and office manager Rachel Osier Lindley. I remember Rachel had to go to her second job at the grocery store, so was headed home. Then she called and noticed that what she thought was originally her neighbor's house was on fire.

Rachel Osier Lindley: It's my neighbor's house. I can't get to my house. My neighbor's entire house burst into flames. There's grass fire. Oh my God, there's fire. Oh my God.

Micah Loewinger: Tom didn't know this at the time, but his team was the first to report on what would become one of Texas's largest grassland wildfires.

Tom Michael: We were a relay point for a lot of critical information about what was happening to the fire. You had Steve Odell up on Blue Mountain, looking where the smoke was going.

Steve Odell: I've got the smoke moving to the northwest towards Monopareto. The heaviest part of the smoke cloud is over Monopareto.

Tom Michael: Pretty soon, we're in regular contact with the fire chief at that time.

Jim Fowler: In all my years of firefighting, this is the worst fire I've had.

Micah Loewinger: Jim Fowler is the spokesperson for the Fort Davis Volunteer Fire Department.

Jim Fowler: The first time I've had to evacuate my residence for a fire.

Ty Mitchell: My first concern was my horses.

Tom Michael: You had Ty Mitchell, cowboy there moving his horses.

Ty Mitchell: One of the deputies jumped in my pickup, got my pickup out so I wouldn't lose it, and I just bareback headed the horses out of the flames and onto the highway.

Micah Loewinger: The Rockhouse Fire, as it was later named, scorched over 300,000 acres, consuming countless cattle and dozens of homes, but no humans died, thanks in part to Marfa's award-winning, diligent coverage.

Tom Michael: We knew it was our duty to do that, and that was our moment. We've seen great service from public radio stations since most recently Blue Ridge Public Radio in North Carolina.

Brooke Gladstone: Neighborhoods, communities, businesses along the Swannanoa River, just absolutely devastated. It has been a mess, and it's going to be a long time before things get back to normal.

Micah Loewinger: This is coverage from BPR, Blue Ridge Public Radio, in Asheville. Shortly after Hurricane Helene brought historic flooding to western North Carolina.

Laura Lee: We had a lot of flooding. We also had a lot of landslides that unfortunately caused a lot of the fatalities.

Micah Loewinger: Laura Lee, Blue Ridge Public Radio news director.

Laura Lee: Then the aftermath of that, we had no power and we had no water. We didn't have water that was non-drinkable for quite some time.

Micah Loewinger: The radio station in downtown Asheville was one of the fortunate businesses that could operate on a backup generator. Lee remembers her conversations around the newsroom as their small team of reporters and hosts sprang into action.

Laura Lee: Hey, what we do typically is narrative and storytelling and driveway moments that people love public radio for. Right now, what we're doing is serving as a conduit of information that is critically important to this community.

Micah Loewinger: BPR quickly transitioned into 12 hours a day of live coverage, bringing life-saving information in Spanish and English to listeners without power and Internet access.

Laura Lee: Telling people where they could access water, telling people where they could get their oxygen tanks refilled, telling people what we knew about road closures. "Hi, it's Laura Lee at Blue Ridge Public Radio. Wanted to ask about the quantity of supplies at these distribution centers. Can you give us a sense of the scale?"

Buncombe County Resident: We have tractor-trailers of water. We did receive that shipment of water that we've been waiting on for several days now.

Micah Loewinger: This is an exchange from one of the official Buncombe County briefings, which the station aired twice a day.

Laura Lee: We have heard stories and seen images of people gathered around their neighbor's car, people gathered around one little hand-crank radio at the cul-de-sac to listen to the briefings and to listen to our updates.

Micah Loewinger: As Asheville recovered from the storm, BPR listeners left voicemails at the station.

Listener 1: I clung to every word and waited for the daily updates at 10:00 and 4:00.

Listener 2: You guys were wonderful, and you sustained me. I was isolated on and out inside.

Listener 3: My wife and I are so thankful for your constant presence during this crisis. Keep it up. We love you.

Listener 4: Thank you guys so much for being there. It's just going to make me cry because you're the only source of information that we've had. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Micah Loewinger: Laura Lee told me that cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would hurt BPR, which receives about 6% of its budget from the government. She seemed even more concerned about how it would affect smaller stations with less cushion, like, say, Marfa Public Radio, which gets about 27% of its funding from the government. Today, Marfa's founder, Tom Michael, runs a station in Boise, Idaho, and worries a lot about the cuts.

Tom Michael: A commercial broadcaster might not find a return on investment in a small community. It just doesn't make sense for them to be there. For us, it's a mission of service. Today in Idaho, as part of Boise State Public Radio, we spend a lot of funds on infrastructure in rural areas. Cambridge, Idaho, population 250, we have two stations. Challis, Idaho, population 920, we have three stations. Stanley, Idaho, population 120, we have three stations.

We're committed to that. I feel like with a loss of federal funding and we'd have to tighten our belts and such things, I'd be afraid that we wouldn't be able to serve these rural areas because we'd have to make some cuts.

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Brooke Gladstone: One of the remotest areas served by public radio is Southwestern Alaska, just 40 miles from the Bering Sea. Bethel, perched on the edge of the icy Kuskokwim River, population 6,500, is the largest city in the region and also home to public radio KYUK, the only media source for hundreds of miles.

Sage Smiley: KYUK serves over 50 different villages, most of which are predominantly Alaska Native.

Brooke Gladstone: Sage Smiley is the news director at KYUK.

Sage Smiley: That's Yup'ik, Cup'ik, and Athabaskan. Our call letters, Y-U-K, in the Yup'ik language in Yugtun means person. KYUK means people's station.

Brooke Gladstone: Many of them are connected by the Kuskokwim River, the longest river in Alaska.

Sage Smiley: Yes, along with the Yukon River, which stretches all the way into Canada. It's a lot of river systems and tributaries that connect these people. In the summers, people travel from village to village by boat. In the winters, people travel on the ice road to get to other places in the region.

Brooke Gladstone: The rivers are your highway?

Sage Smiley: Absolutely. It's either an ice highway or a water highway.

Brooke Gladstone: KYUK is the only radio station for how many miles?

Sage Smiley: I believe the closest public media news station to us is 300 or 400 miles away, as the crow flies. Public radio is just absolutely vital in this region as both a source of emergency information and a source of connection. People call into our talk line shows, they call into the river watch shows that help people be aware of river conditions. Our Internet is very limited out here. People are starting to have Starlink, but low earth orbit satellites are only so reliable, and we still don't have fiber optic Internet.

Brooke Gladstone: You mentioned incessant coverage of the ice road. One of your station's notable programs is called River Watch. Let's take a listen.

KYUK's Presenter: How much snow do you guys have left?

Listener 5: We don't have very much snow.

KYUK's Presenter: How about your temperature this morning?

Listener 5: This morning was about six below.

KYUK's Presenter: Wow, quite a bit colder then. I was holding my breath this past weekend when it started raining. Oh, man, I hope this isn't it. We've seen the river break up upriver several times during November. If we can make it to December without a big warmup, then it'll probably hold together.

Sage Smiley: When the ice road is plowed, it is a real road. You absolutely see trucks and cars and even hovercraft out on the river, delivering goods and transporting people from place to place. The tundra can be very treacherous. Sometimes snow will blow over an open hole.

KYUK's Presenter: We've started out the winter on a tragic note. We lost one person right off the bat, and we'll all be striving to let that be the only person we lose this winter.

Sage Smiley: There's a concept in the Yup'ik language called Pulazarak, which is the good trail to follow. Traditionally, trails are marked by willows. There are individuals who are going out to the area surrounding their village that they know better than anybody else, putting down willows, marking this Pulazarak the way to follow.

Listener 6: We try and stay away from using long skinny trees that hardly have any branches because those are hard to see in the blizzard.

Brooke Gladstone: You think KYUK has ever saved a life?

Sage Smiley: Absolutely. During freeze-up, there are unfortunate tragedies. People do fall into holes in the river. People do go missing during a whiteout on a snow machine. Being able to both communicate with the public through KYUK about search efforts, about travel advisories, what trails have been set by the experts, the people who know this tundra better than anyone.

Brooke Gladstone: There is no alternative?

Sage Smiley: Oh, no, no, no. There's no other place to get that information other than Facebook. Again, sometimes the Internet doesn't work.

Brooke Gladstone: I noticed that some of your coverage on the ice road is bilingual. Do emergency alerts always go out in both languages?

Sage Smiley: Always. Every day, we have six newscasts, three in English and three in Yugtun. We live in a region that has deep roots in Yup'ik, Cup'ik, and Athabaskan culture. To be able to broadcast, especially for elders, many of whom lived through the era of boarding schools and were compelled forcibly to not speak their language, to be able to broadcast news and information and allow people to call in and share their opinions in this language that has been so thoroughly rebuilt by the people of the YK Delta is just incredible to me.

Brooke Gladstone: This part of Western Alaska is the state's poorest, the biggest outlet in the state. The Anchorage-based newspaper often reports articles about the region's crime. You think that angle is unfair?

Sage Smiley: People in this region don't always live by a Western economic system. People here subsist. They hunt for moose, they trap beaver, they fish. That doesn't show up on a tax statement. This is a region that is touched very intimately by climate change, that has a very recent and very raw history with colonialism, that is dealing with the impacts and the fallout of that still on a daily basis, but there is also so much beauty and joy.

To be able to reflect that, in addition to the developments and the struggles that happen in the YK Delta, it's just so important for a station to be based in this region and to be focused on serving this region instead of serving a narrative that has developed over a long time, and that does not reflect the nuance and reality of the world out here.

Brooke Gladstone: Could you give me a rundown of how much of KYUK's funding comes from CPB? How much from other sources? You've already explained that money doesn't have a big presence in a lot of the communities you serve.

Sage Smiley: Living in this subsistence-heavy region, we don't rely on monetary donations from people who otherwise support and share KYUK's articles and engage with our news coverage or community affairs programming.

Brooke Gladstone: Do they bake you pies?

Sage Smiley: Yes. We also get moose dropped off or salmon or salmon roe. We have caviar sometimes in the break room fridge. We rely incredibly heavily on CPB funding and on grant funding. Around 50%, on a given year, does come from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, both through television and through radio funding. We are the smallest CPB-funded public television station in the United States, which puts us in an incredibly tenuous position. We already exist 40 miles from the Bering Sea, way on the edge of the United States, living what can be an incredibly harsh life.

You go from 90 degrees in the summer sometimes, and the air full of dust, and there can be tundra fires to negative 35, colder with the wind chill. To exist on what feels like a razor edge with funding when this is such a vital community resource in so many ways, it's tough and a bit scary.

Brooke Gladstone: Sage Smiley is the news director at KYUK, which serves the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta in Southwestern Alaska. Sage, thank you very much.

Sage Smiley: Quyanaqvaa. Thank you for your time.

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Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Michael Loewinger.

 

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