Which public TV and radio stations most rely on federal funds
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Public TV and radio stations may find themselves with big holes in their budgets after Congress rescinded $1.1 billion in Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) funding, based on publicly available financial data collected by a former NPR staffer and shared with Axios.
Why it matters: Public media outlets serve essential community newsgathering and emergency roles, but the Trump administration and others on the right have long accused them of left-leaning bias.
Driving the news: For hundreds of stations with available data, CPB grants made up about 10.3% of U.S. public TV stations' overall funding as of fiscal 2023, and 4.1% for radio stations.
- That share is much greater for some specific stations.
- For example, it's over 90% for KCUW in Pendleton, Oregon; KUHB in St. Paul, Alaska; and WVLS in Monterey, Virginia.
How it works: That's based on data manually collected from station websites by Alex Curley, a former NPR staffer who has been tracking public media financing on his blog, Semipublic.
- Curley's dataset is extensive, but incomplete.
- For the above maps, Axios averaged stations with matching affiliations in the same city to reduce visual clutter.
- Location and financial data is based on information in stations' CPB filings. Some stations may be physically located elsewhere, and/or part of larger station groups.
Caveat: Public media stations can also receive other forms of federal grants, plus corporate sponsorships and donations from (ahem) viewers like you.
- Yes, but: "CPB grants make up the majority of federal funding for most public media entities," Curley writes.
What they're saying: The maps above show "a very clear picture" of less-populated states "at risk of losing their public media station, whether it's radio or television or whether they're affiliated with NPR or PBS," Curley tells Axios.
- "The people who stand to lose those stations are the people who need them most. ... It's not to say that super rural areas don't have other options, but many of them don't, or their public media station is one of two options."
- "Newspapers have collapsed in a lot of places, and local journalism is a vital public service that provides accountability locally — and when it's not there, its absence is felt."
Between the lines: Public media stations in relatively populous, high-income cities tend to have better access to donors.
- But rural stations tend to be more reliant on federal dollars — while also serving key roles for local news and emergency broadcasts, including weather and AMBER alerts.
- "The interconnected public broadcasting system is the only system capable of broadcasting [emergency] alerts to every corner of our nation — and at the county and state levels we rely upon it frequently throughout the year," dozens of local public safety and emergency management officials wrote in a recent letter to Congress.
The latest: Many public TV and radio stations recently have been upping their pleas for donations, hoping to appeal to viewers and listeners in their time of need.
The bottom line: The odds of survival for some stations — especially those in less-populated, low-income areas — appear long at best.
Editor's note: This story has been corrected to reflect that WVLS is in Monterey, Virginia (not Dunmore, West Virginia).
