Public Media is Starting to Disappear. Health Consequences Will Soon Follow.
When the stations are gone, people will be in the dark without the important weather and safety updates these public broadcasters provide.
By Allyn Brooks-LaSure
This summer, I and others warned that the administration’s decision to slash funds for “woke” public broadcasting would ultimately punish the very communities it claims to represent. Just months later, we see how the administration’s desire to end funding for public broadcasting is disproportionately harming its own supporters.
The administration’s cuts have forced Alabama Public Television and Mississippi Public Broadcasting to slash 15% of their respective workforces or budgets. KUAC in Fairbanks, Alaska, has lost one-third of its budget, compelling station leaders to eliminate overnight broadcasting hours on both TV and radio. Kentucky Educational Television, which manages PBS broadcasts statewide and is a key component of Kentucky’s Emergency Alert System, lost three dozen staffers through layoffs and attrition. Public radio outlets in Louisiana are pleading with their listeners for donations to stay afloat.
These states all voted for President Donald Trump by significant margins in the 2024 election. But the consequences of the administration’s disastrous decision are falling at its feet. The administration’s cuts are decimating these and many other stations. Some, if not many, will eventually disappear completely.
The resulting threats to lives and health are real. As one public radio executive in another red state, Tennessee, put it: “If you’re isolated in a rural part of Tennessee, and you need to know what the weather is going to be, or view an Amber Alert, or know where the tornado might be, you turn on your television. Well, if you turn it on and it’s dark, how are you going to get your information?”
That was very nearly the case in Pennsylvania. In September, Penn State University announced that WPSU—which serves hundreds of thousands of residents in rural, north-central Pennsylvania, in counties that overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2024—was going to shut down because the administration had cut all its federal funding. Fortunately, the community mobilized and local foundations got involved, and the university ultimately found a way to keep the station’s lights on.
But the fact that stations now must divert their severely limited resources to fundraising to save their programming shows how much trouble lies ahead.
For more than 40 years, my organization, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has provided grant funding to local, regional, and national public broadcasting outlets. In the face of these monumental attacks against public broadcasting, we understand the stakes and are doing our best to step up. Recently, we joined several philanthropic partners in committing nearly $37 million in additional funding to public broadcasting outlets. These funds will help stations at risk of immediate closure while also helping outlets budget for long-term sustainability in light of the administration’s decision.
However, no amount of donations from individuals or charitable organizations can replace the billions of dollars in federal funds that for generations have undergirded our nation’s public broadcasting system. Nor should they have to. Yet here we are.
Even before these cuts, local news was in dire straits. Some 50 million Americans live in counties with limited or no local news access, according to a new report. This reality stems primarily from 40% of local newspapers shutting down in the United States over the past two decades. These news deserts tend to be concentrated in rural areas that have poorer health and economic outcomes and less access to high-speed internet. These trends should prompt an “America first” administration to increase federal investments in public broadcasting. But not so for an administration that is dunking on the very communities that support it.
We applaud how communities are meeting this challenge and urge them to keep fighting back. Philanthropy will continue to do the same. But it is absolutely essential that Congress—which appropriated public broadcast money in the first place—re-establish funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting instead of standing idly by while it closes its doors. It is Congress, not the executive branch, that controls the power of the purse. Members should remember that.
It is a relief that stations like WPSU are living to see another day. But that reassurance is likely only temporary. If and when public media outlets are forced to cut their signals for good, millions of Americans—including many who cast their ballots for this administration—will be left in the dark.
Allyn Brooks-LaSure is chief communications officer and vice president for communications programs at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
I’m in the Great Smoky Mountains just outside Knoxville Tennessee as I read this sometimes there are forest fires here. If there’s no public media to warn people then we’re in a heap of trouble. Forest fires wouldn’t be that unusual here especially since Eastern Tennessee has been exceptionally dry. Trees in this area are under stress and have shed a good many leaves 🍁 hoping to see more autumn colors in the deep woods!
The saying goes, God helps those who help themselves. If Trump voters can’t or won’t look after their own interests either by self-education or by abandoning a losing cause, I don’t see how we can save the country other than by advocacy and the franchise. It is weary, plodding work over the long run, even with bursts of joy like Kings Day, so it requires stamina more than magic bullets (eg, the Epstein files). Public media is a vital part of our democracy, but has always been dependent on public support, even with government assistance, and the public will have to save it now, fundraiser after fundraiser.