Leaders of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private agency that has steered federal funding to PBS, NPR and hundreds of public television and radio stations across the country, voted Monday to dissolve the organization that was created in 1967.
CPB had been winding down since Congress acted last summer to defund its operations at the encouragement of President Donald Trump. Its board of directors chose Monday to shutter CPB completely instead of keeping it in existence as a shell.
“CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks,” said Patricia Harrison, the organization’s president and CEO.
Ruby Calvert, head of CPB’s board of directors, said the federal defunding of public media has been devastating.
CPB said it was financially supporting the American Archive of Public Broadcasting in its effort to preserve historic content, and is working with the University of Maryland to maintain its own records.
The CPB exists to allocate government funding to nonprofit public stations (the individual broadcasters in each city) and networks (NPR and PBS). Without government funding, the CPB has no reason to exist.
The public stations and NPR and PBS still exist. They are the ones that actually produce and distribute content. And they’ve always relied some on donations.
PBS and its stations have been roughly 15% funded through the CPB. The rest relies on donations and other income.
NPR doesn’t receive much money directly from the CPB (less than 1% of its budget), but its member stations do, around 13% on average.
So it’s not the end of the world for these stations, but it does represent a reduction in funding that is pretty serious.
Yeah okay, those hit with a 13% reduction have a large hole to fill. Hopefully other donors will come to the party, but in a cost of living crisis, well theres a lot of other pressures.