New Mexico public radio and television station heads talk funding cuts with US senators

The day the music dies on public radio stations could be in January, and children’s programming might be out of luck after federal funding cuts.

That was the reality coming into view Thursday morning as heads of public radio and television stations gathered around the microphones at KANW.

In a role reversal, station managers were interviewed by New Mexico’s U.S. senators and their staff about recent cuts to public media.

Congress clawed back the next two years of funding for public media last month, giving station heads little time to adjust their operations ahead of the new fiscal year in October.

“Defunding the (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) is really hurting all the Native stations,” said Barbara Maria, who runs KTDB in Ramah. The public radio station provides about 80% of its programming in Navajo. CPB dollars were funding much of the station’s children and local programming.

CPB announced last week it would shut down operations after almost 60 years, because Congress has provided no funding for it. When Congress appropriates funds for public media, CPB distributes them to 1,500 public media stations with Community Service Grants.

In New Mexico, 18 radio and television stations received funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, amounting to more than $5.8 million in federal dollars.

For KRWG out of Las Cruces, CPB funding represents 35% of its television station budget and 25% of its radio station budget. For Albuquerque-based KUNM, the CPB cuts are a 12% hit to its budget. For New Mexico PBS, a television station that serves central and northern New Mexico, CPB makes up 18% of its budget.

Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján, both Democrats, have vocally supported funding public media.

“As somebody who is intellectually curious, I am very much the person I am today because of public broadcasting and to see the current hostility and the funding cuts that we’ve just experienced in Congress really deeply concerns me,” Heinrich said.

Defunding the CPB was a campaign promise for President Donald Trump, who has long railed against PBS, and especially, NPR for being politically biased. He has argued that publicly funded journalism should reflect the entire electorate.

“At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage,” Trump wrote in his May 1 executive order rescinding CPB’s funding. “No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the Government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize.”

Leadership at New Mexico’s Republican Party supported the cuts.

“Taxpayer dollars should not be used to underwrite political activism disguised as journalism,” Republican Party of New Mexico Chair Amy Barela said in a statement.

But supporters say public broadcasting serves up more than news, including natural disaster warnings, children’s programming, entertainment and music. CPB negotiates licensing agreements for music that is used by stations all over the country, a role that could be eliminated by the end of December.

“Now, each of us have to go negotiate with five or six music licensing organizations starting on January 1, at a higher rate,” said Jeff Pope, general manager at KUNM.

The majority of CPB’s staff will be out of a job by the end of September, but a small team is staying on to “focus on compliance, final distributions, and resolution of long-term financial obligations, including ensuring continuity for music rights and royalties that remain essential to the public media system,” according to a CPB news release.

CPB and NPR are trying to finalize an agreement on music rights, said Michael Brasher, general manager at KANW.

Children’s programming is especially at risk because on top of CPB cuts the Department of Education has also cut $23 million in Ready to Learn grants, which pay for the PBS Kids programs, said Katie Stone, executive director of The Children’s Hour. The Children’s Hour is a public radio show made in New Mexico and carried on almost 300 radio stations.

“Children’s public broadcasting is actually surgically under attack, and the impact that has on children is that they cannot hear or see people who sound and look like themselves,” Stone said.

While station leaders expected the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to halt operations, last week’s announcement still had a psychological impact, according to Pope.

“CPB is a sinew that holds public media together. We all follow similar regulations to receive our grants, and it’s this connective tissue that has now been severed radically and quickly. So it was still a shock to the system,” Pope said.

CPB still exists on paper and could be resurrected with new funding under a different presidential administration and Congress, according to Franz Joachim, general manager of New Mexico PBS.

“One of their primary roles is to decide how to distribute the funding that Congress appropriated equitably to all these radio and TV stations. They spent decades refining a formula that does that. That formula still exists,” Joachim said.

But at minimum, it will be more than three years until another administration might consider how to resurrect the CPB, and in the meantime the dismantlement will continue.