Ocean Springs Congress in the first recission or clawback of a legislatively approved appropriation since 1999 under President Clinton canceled $9 billion in funding for foreign aid, which included more than one-billion for public broadcasting, targeting NPR and PBS. Defunding public broadcasting has been on the conservative wish list since the Nixon administration.
Republican Senators from rural states like Alaska and Maine, that depend on these grants to keep local television and radio stations alive for their communities, voted against the cutback and are still trying to find an end-around that would replace some of the money in their states at the least. Conservative proponents of the bill claimed there were liberal biases embedded in these public broadcast facilities, and, besides they argued, the public money was only a small part, between a quarter and a third of the overall funding. So, yes, in some rural areas the problem might be worse, they postured, but NPR and PBS would survive.
It’s complicated. I got a call from one of our partners where we are building a low-power station in Helena, Arkansas. He was distressed on two accounts. First, he had hoped the Corporation for Public Broadcasting might have been a funding source for the station at some point. Secondly, he had thought they might be able to access some NPR content in the future as well. I assured him that his worries in general were valid, but in specific were not. CPB requires a minimum staffing of a radio station, usually 3 or 4 full-time equivalents, and significant gross income, before it will even consider offering support, all of which are improbable for a low-power station. In fact, I’m not sure that they even consider low-power outlets. Much of CPB’s funding is also in the form of loans. KABF in Little Rock had received such funding and had a bear of a time repaying. KNON in Dallas, after the ACORN attacks in 2009, was barred from CPB funding. As for NPR, qualifying to be part of their network is both arduous, expensive, and blocked, if in the range of any existing NPR affiliate, which would likely be the case in eastern Arkansas, if they would even have deigned to consider a low-power station.
When it comes to long-term sustainability, our partner is right to be worried of course, although there’s a fix, if there was any real commitment to fairness or even the much-vaunted conservative religion of “free” enterprise. If there won’t be the possibility of public funding, why not allow noncommercial stations, which are by definition nonprofit, accept advertising? Being nonprofit and community-based would still mean no private owners or investors were making bank, but allowing such stations to advertise, rather than simply underwrite programs in a neutral fashion, would give them an opportunity to compete in the marketplace. This is only fair, and there’s no ideological reason for Congress not to allow this change in the face of its withdrawal of other support.
Under the Biden FCC there were pilots for some stations to do direct advertising to judge the impacts. In a recent decision in Trump-time, the FCC seems increasingly inclined to offer more leeway in this area as well. Importantly, in making a determination on a complaint by a commercial station that a noncommercial had crossed the line on its underwriting into direct advertising, essentially, the FCC said, “tut-tut,” this was no big deal, the infraction, if there was one, was de minimus, and then dismissed the complaint. Admittedly, that’s not a greenlight for public and noncommercial stations to go hog wild into advertising, but it’s a signal of a shift that would not be hard to accelerate.
Fair is fair. If Congress is unwilling to continue to support public and noncommercial broadcasting, as a vital service in general and especially in emergencies, they should at least loosen the handcuffs and allow stations an even shot at surviving and thriving in the dog-eat-dog world by letting their listeners determine their future, based on how much they are willing to stomach advertising, and how willing advertisers might be to sell to their audience.