A Mighty Own Goal

     As I write this, the U. S. Senate is poised to pull the rug out from under funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for the next couple of years.  CPB gets less than 0.01% of the Federal budget.  Oh, it's big money for you, me or your local factories, but it's still a rounding error compared to military expenditures, highways or servicing the Federal debt.  The House has already approved this recission, and the Senate just had a tie-breaking vote from Vice-President Vance (wearing his President of the Senate hat, and I do wish the Framers had come up with a different title for the job) to keep the legislation moving.

     CPB is a Federally-funded private non-profit corporation that in turn funds National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) -- largely indirectly.  By law, they're only allowed to spend five percent of their budget on themselves -- salaries, staplers, coffee machines.  65% of their budget goes directly to public radio and TV stations, everything from tiny, one-man stations deep in the Alaskan wilds to massive operations like the WGBH stations in Boston.  About 25% goes to production companies, which make programs for public radio and TV.

     The big public stations have multiple income streams -- those annoying pledge drives, strings of grants, endowments and "underwriting" sponsorships.  NPR has been a political football for decades, and set out some time ago to ease off the Federal spigot; around one percent (1%) their funding comes directly from CPB.  PBS has taken similar steps, but -- television's spendy -- are more reliant on CPB.  There's a catch, though; I'll get back to that.

     The Trump administration doesn't think NPR and PBS are being fair to them, and that's why they want to defund CPB.  I have not noticed this in actual NPR news segments, those five-minute blocks at the top and/or bottom of the hour; they're radio newscasts, strictly limited for time and focused on things that are, in fact, newsworthy.  While they're a little more relaxed than the ABC "Contemporary" news of my youth and more buttoned-down than NBC's hipper "The Source" a decade later, NPR matches any of the old classic top-of-the-hour radio news, CBS, NBC, Mutual or what ABC branded as "The American Information Network."*  The long-form stuff has a much greater proportion of opinion to information, and both NPR and PBS have had controversies.  While CPB's rules have some sober language about balance and perspective, the Fairness Doctrine is long gone, and nobody benefited more from the ending of it than the political Right.

     But NPR and PBS are not living off CPB dollars.  NPR outright sells ads on their streaming services (it's legal), albeit delivered in the same subdued manner as their over-the-air underwriting announcements.  Nope, the CPB cuts hit local stations.  This does loop back around, and there's the catch: in the indirect way networks operate in the U. S., member stations pay the networks, and between a quarter and a third of the funding for NPR and PBS come from membership and programming fees those stations pay.  The big stations will tighten their belts, lay off janitors and newspeople, and keep on keeping on; they'll probably drop some programs, too.  But those tiny little stations, in Alaska or Montana or wherever, in backwater towns where the commercial AM station went dark and the FM got moved to the nearest sizable city?  Their local NPR station, over at the State School of Cow Mining (etc.), is the only source of local news and weather warnings, and it's got a staff of three, or two, or one: they don't have any janitors to lay off.  Those stations rely on CPB money to meet payroll, rent tower space and pay the power bill, and when it goes away--  Hey, maybe the Cow-Mining College or the Town Board will kick in a few more bucks, for old time's sake -- if they can afford it.  And if not?  Well, gee.  Better buy a NOAA weather radio, if you can pick up one of their low-power stations. (Kinda thin in some states.)

     Those small towns, those rural spaces, they're not generally hotbeds of big-city liberalism, and neither are their radio stations.  They're red spots on red maps -- and they'll be hardest hit. 

     The CPB cuts are an own goal.  NPR and PBS stations -- the survivors -- will have less reason to toe the Federal government's line, and more reason to be fractious.  
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* Speaking of money and news -- post WW II, U.S. radio networks were, by law, singular.  NBC had previously operated multiple networks, with NBC Red and NBC Blue at the forefront; they had to spin off Blue, which became ABC.  ABC started out in fourth place, behind NBC, CBS and Mutual -- Blue network had always been something of a "second string" network for NBC.  By the late 1960s, with radio losing badly to television, ABC came up with a way around the law, becoming not one but four radio news services over the same physical network: they offered different newscasts around the hour, each one suited to a different radio format; Information at the top of the hour, very conventional radio news suitable for middle-of-the road and all-news formats; FM and Entertainment at :15 (or :45, it's been awhile) and half-past the hour, both more relaxed and quiet, and Contemporary, available as a fast-paced two-minute newscast at ten til the hour and a five-minute newscast that ran from :55 to the top of the hour.  If it sounds a little crazy, it was -- but it meant ABC could have as many as four stations in a given town all carrying an ABC newscast, with lovely, paid ABC commercials in each one; and it meant ABC offered specialized news products the other three networks did not.  To my larger point, the actual content of these newscasts was almost identical: news is news, war, famine and natural disaster, and you got largely the same on-the-scene soundbites from all four versions.  The style of delivery differed; the focus varied slightly, especially when it came to celebrity items.