NPR headquarters in Washington. Photo / Tom Brenner, The Washington Post
NPR headquarters in Washington. Photo / Tom Brenner, The Washington Post
Major philanthropic organisations say they are committing nearly US$37 million ($62m) in emergency funding to keep public media stations afloat in the United States after Congress passed President Donald Trump’s rescissions Bill, which eliminated US$1.1 billion in federal funding from PBS and NPR stations over the next two years.
The names are already ones that might be heard on an underwriting announcement on a local public radio station in the US: the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, plus the Schmidt Family Foundation (co-created by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt) and the Melinda Gates-led group Pivotal Ventures.
A consultancy, Public Media Company, said it launched a “bridge fund” on Tuesday (US time) to aid the most at-risk public radio and TV stations across the country; “stabilise the system” after the federal funding loss; and help public media become more sustainable in the long run. The company will offer “grants, low-interest loans, and advisory services,” it wrote in a news release. Knight said about US$27m from collective foundation support is going to the bridge fund, while a further US$10m from MacArthur will go to directly support organisations, stations and programmes in the public media ecosystem.
Tim Isgitt, Public Media Company’s CEO, said the fund aims to raise US$100m over two years – roughly equivalent to what the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would have provided to the most vulnerable stations. “Mass station failure could lead to other stations failing – a bit of a ripple effect through the system,” Isgitt said.
The Knight Foundation said it is most focused on helping the organisations that derived 30% of their annual budgets or more from federal funding doled out by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which recently announced it is shutting down in the face of defunding. “Local public media stations are trusted community anchors that connect people to vital news, culture and civic life,” Knight Foundation president and CEO Maribel Perez Wadsworth wrote in a statement. “This is an urgent moment that calls for bold action.”
Isgitt said his fundraising goal is US$100m over two years to stave off the full effects of federal defunding, which he said immediately threatens 115 stations serving 43 million people. “They’re all in rural and underserved areas of the country with very little access to philanthropy and other news sources,” he said. “The idea is to move resources to stabilise these at-risk stations, but also to help put them on some sort of pathway to sustainability.”
