Public Stations Receive Budget Warning Signal

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PBS SoCal’s public broadcasting station, KOCE-TV (Channel 50), this week will begin airing its new series “Angeleno,” a seven-part documentary effort exploring multicultural Los Angeles.

The series, narrated by Los Angeles Times columnist and broadcaster Patt Morrison, is just the type of locally focused programming most at risk in the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to arts funding. Under the budget proposed by President Donald Trump, $445 million would be eliminated from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, money that is distributed among 350 member stations nationwide.

More than 60 California radio and TV stations and other organizations receive CPB funding, in amounts ranging from $10,000 to almost $4 million. Some grants go to unexpected places: Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory received $3 million last year for documentary programming, according to the CPB.

“When you look back over the history of CPB funding, there have been times when it has been challenged, but this is one of the most significant times we have ever faced,” said Andrew Russell, chief executive of PBS SoCal. “It’s real. It’s important.”

He said defunding CPB would result in PBS SoCal losing between $2.2 million and $3 million a year, 11 percent to 15 percent of its $20 million annual budget. The rest of the public station’s funding comes from individual donations, foundations, corporations, and content distribution fees.

Russell said the impact could go beyond the stations themselves, as many shows produced for or presented by public broadcasting stations might include community and educational initiatives that attract additional CPB funding.

“When those go away, the funding gap is very significant,” he said. “If these cuts were to happen, the PBS system as we know it would collapse.”

CPB oversees the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio and provides funding to other public and PBS-affiliated stations as well. The proposed cuts also would eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Besides supporting arts organizations, the NEA sometimes provides funds for arts-related initiatives at public stations.

The mid-March budget announcement sparked outrage from PBS and NPR stations nationwide, including KOCE, which serves a six-county area including Los Angeles County, and Santa Monica radio station KCRW-FM (89.9), among others.

“This is the most serious threat to free and open public media we have faced to date,” KCRW President Jennifer Ferro wrote in an open letter to listeners.

KCRW, an NPR member station, has an annual operating budget of $20 million, with $1.2 million coming from CPB each year.

Independent public TV stations, including Burbank public broadcaster KCETLink, operator of KCET-TV (Channel 28), also decried the cuts in Trump’s budget outline, which would eliminate $1.5 million to $2 million from the station’s $20 million annual budget. KCET also receives NEA funding for its Artbound TV programming and digital efforts, including 5 percent of Artbound’s annual $1 million budget, or $50,000.

Downsizing

PBS SoCal’s Russell said public stations in large markets such as Los Angeles, Boston, and New York would probably survive the elimination of CPB funding, although such cuts would likely result in downsizing series production and partnerships as well as potential loss of staff. However, he said it is premature to speculate on those numbers.

“We could imagine there would be public broadcasting stations still operating, but the kinds of programs that they would be able to broadcast would be so much more diminished than what we are able to provide today,” he said.

Russell added the proposed cuts represent a more significant problem for public broadcasting stations in small and rural communities, where the stations might receive as much as 40 percent of their operating budget from CPB.

“Then, really, the dominoes start to fall, because they have to close up the store,” he said.

Can independent fundraising fill the gap? Russell said finding deep-pocketed donors is unlikely in smaller communities that don’t have significant resources to tap.

Michael Riley, chief executive of KCET, said the station is seeing bigger and bigger checks from foundations because of its community initiatives. Those efforts include Artbound and its “Tending the Wild” series, which examines the environmental knowledge of California’s indigenous peoples, in a partnership with an exhibition at the Autry Museum of the American West.

Riley added that the station has seen increased membership support since the presidential election.

PBS SoCal officials said KOCE has raised $500,000 more to date in fiscal year 2017 than it had by the same time last year. KOCE also observed an increase in online contributions after the president’s budget outline became public, but has not yet tallied exact numbers.

Still, Riley called CPB a critical source of funding that allows public stations to meet the educational needs of underserved communities.

The leaders of PBS SoCal, KCETLink, and KCRW are counting on what they observe as strong bipartisan support for public broadcasting as the budget moves through Congress leading to the new fiscal year that will begin Oct. 1.

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