Congress recently voted to cut roughly $1 billion in funding for public broadcasting across the country — money that lawmakers had already approved earlier this year. NHPR, like many local stations across the country, will be impacted by the cuts.
NHPR Morning Edition host Rick Ganley spoke with NHPR President and CEO Jim Schachter about what these cuts mean for the station’s future.
Transcript
First, how much of NHPR's funding comes from federal sources?
We get about 6% of our funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That's now going to go away. I would expect that it will go away forever. But what we know is that it will at least go away for the immediate time being, beginning October 1st. For us, that direct hit is this year going to be something over $400,000, and in a typical year — a full year — it rises up to about $540,000, and then you start adding on top of that.
There are all kinds of services that we've gotten and have been paid for indirectly by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by federal support. When you add it all together — the direct, the indirect costs and the amount it's going to cost us to make up the difference in fundraising — it's about an $850,000 hit in a full year. That's like 13% of our revenues.
So very significant. What will that loss mean for NHPR's programming and operations on a day to day basis?
Right now, there's a lot we don't know. But from our plans for the current year — our fiscal year runs July to June — for this fiscal year we intend for there to be no difference in what anybody experiences as a consumer of NHPR News, on the radio, on the internet, our podcasts. We are going to make up the difference through fundraising and through trying to trim the budget in ways that the public doesn't experience.
Future years, we're going to have to figure it out. My goal as the leader of the organization is that we sustain our services as people love them and experience them. We're going to need people's help to do that, though.
What about the future for NHPR if these funds are not restored? What would NHPR need to do to become self-sustaining?
We've got to close that gap. We have to raise more money. We have to find new ways to earn people's support. We have to find every kind of efficiency. I have said, since I got this job just under six years ago, that we should be spending as much of our money as possible on journalism and other programming and on the fundraising to support that, and that every other cost ought to be squeezed as tight as can be. And I think everybody in the public media system is going to be exploring how those efficiencies can be accomplished.
And we're going to have to get more relevant every day. If we can grow our audience, we can close the gap — if we can train people to do things that they haven't been used to. For example, we have just under a half million people every month who listen to our podcasts. If each of them donated $20 a year, that's $10 million a year. Our whole budget is $10 million a year. So we have to figure out how to get those people to support the work that they value.
If this loss of federal funds is permanent, I've got to ask you directly: Are we looking at layoffs at NHPR?
We have no layoffs contemplated today. If we can close the funding gap, we will have no layoffs in the future. In fact, we're looking to invest. We have to adapt. We have to be changing to keep up with how people consume media, where people seek out information and news. So we are intending this year, despite these cuts, to add a number of positions that will allow us to be more relevant and a more effective organization, and we're sticking to our plans.
A repeated criticism of public radio and NPR, specifically, has come from the president and other Republicans, and occasionally even from within NPR itself, that NPR — I'm talking about National Public Radio — has a liberal bias to its news coverage. When you look at NHPR's newsroom, do you see any of that criticism being deserved?
I don't. If I saw it, I would say something about it. I'm in constant dialogue with our news director about our coverage, with our on-demand director about our podcasts. And I know that each of them and the editors with whom they work are very, very conscious of wanting to be straightforward, open minded, curious, challenging of the status quo.
I get calls and letters lots and lots of times from people who talk about this concern, but then don't cite the individual cases of it. Anybody who writes to me and says that they see bias in our journalism. I write back and say, "Come meet with me, talk with me. Let's look at this together. Let's point it out and if there are issues, will address them." And I really get very few takers on that offer.
You're talking to other station managers and people throughout the public radio system in the country [who are] very involved with this. What are they telling you? How are various stations handling this moment?
There's such a range of impacts. There are stations — and this is what we said all through the campaign against the defunding in Congress — there are stations that rely 50% or more on federal funding for their operations. There just aren't enough people, and there isn't enough local money, to support a local NPR affiliate. And those people are in immense pain and looking at drastic cuts and loss of service, largely in rural areas. But even in some of the biggest stations which make national programing that you hear, say on NHPR. So there's a lot of pain.
There's also a tremendous amount of resilience. People love what we do. People rely on it. And I have to restrain myself from being too optimistic, because I don't want to get out of sync with people who are feeling the pain in the community here at NHPR. But I think that the future is ours to take, honestly. And I see a lot of that spirit in the system as well. Although there's a lot of shaking heads.
