ubet63 NPR and PBS Stations Brace for Funding Battle Under Trump

Elon Musk is gunning for public media.ubet63

In his new role advising President-elect Donald J. Trump, Mr. Musk has floated sweeping cuts to the federal government, including the elimination of entire departments and the firing of agency leaders. One of the most concrete proposals on his list is eliminating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding that the government funnels to PBS and NPR stations, home to cultural touchstones like Elmo, Big Bird and “Fresh Air.”

For decades, NPR and PBS have overcome similar threats. But this year, “the attention and intensity” of the calls to defund public media seem greater, said Michael Isip, the president and chief executive of KQED, which operates NPR and PBS stations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

NPR and PBS stations are bracing for the fight. After the election, leaders of NPR’s biggest member stations circulated a report that warned “it would be unwise to assume that events will play out as they have in the past,” with regard to their federal funding. PBS received an update on the situation from political consultants at a board meeting in early December. And station directors in some states are already making their case to legislators.

Internally, NPR is preparing for a variety of funding possibilities, including that government money will be clawed back immediately, according to two people briefed on the network’s planning.

While many Americans know NPR and PBS by popular programs like “Sesame Street” and “All Things Considered,” those national organizations are merely the most visible part of a network of local stations crisscrossing the United States — a network that depends on public funding for local news, educational programming and emergency alerts. More than 98 percent of the U.S. population lives within listening range of at least one of the more than 1,000 public radio stations that carry NPR programming, and many stations use government funding to buy shows and pay for their newsrooms.

The accountability office said many of those systems “have critical operational impacts” on air traffic safety and efficiency. Many of them are also facing “challenges that are historically problematic for aging systems,” according to the report.

Robinson’s history of comments that have been widely criticized as antisemitic and anti-gay made him a deeply polarizing figure in North Carolina long before his bid for governor was upended last week by a CNN report that he had called himself a “Black NAZI” and praised slavery while posting on a pornographic website between 2008 and 2012. Now, some of his allies are abandoning him. Most of his senior campaign staff members have resigned. The Republican Governors Association said that its pro-Robinson ads would expire tomorrow and that no new ones had been placed. And former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Robinson in the spring, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” did not mention him once during his rally in the state over the weekend.

“The most vulnerable stations serving the most vulnerable people are going to be the ones that are hurt the hardest,” said Eric Nuzum, a former NPR executive and a co-founder of Magnificent Noise, an audio consulting and production company. “We’re talking about very rural parts of the United States.”

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