FILE – Paula Kerger, President and CEO at PBS, speaks at the executive session during the PBS Winter 2020 TCA Press Tour at The Langham Huntington, Pasadena, Jan. 10, 2020, in Pasadena, Calif. (Photo by Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP, File)
2020 Invision
Public media, including the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), finds itself in uncharted waters in the aftermath of the almost complete shutdown of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) on October 1. In the face of a series of this and other precedent-setting existential crises since the advent of the second Trump Administration, PBS isn’t going away. Its President and CEO Paula Kerger told me that PBS is committed not just to continuing its fight but to building a meaningful future.
Who’s who in public media?
A little taxonomy might be in order here among the alphabet soup of CPB, PBS, NPR, and more. The federal government created the CPB in the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act to promote educational, non-profit, and free-to-the-public television and radio. This was only a few years after the famous speech by the FCC’s then-Chairman Newton Minow who castigated the “vast wasteland” of commercial TV (I guess not a Lucy fan). As President Lyndon Johnson said at the time of the bill signing: “While we work every day to produce new goods and to create new wealth, we want most of all to enrich man’s spirit. That is the purpose of this act.” Just a little different from the current federal government rhetoric, isn’t it?
The PBS came along in 1970 to fund programming for public TV and radio stations around the country. PBS doesn’t own any stations – it acts instead as a vital content and funding partner. National Public Radio (NPR) is focused solely on radio and mostly on news. And NPR similarly is a critical news provider to public radio stations around the country. Your local PBS and NPR stations are independent, some owned by state and local governments, some by educational institutions, others by non-profit entities.
Time for a spoiler alert: I’m not an objective observer of PBS or public media more broadly. Growing up in greater Boston, you couldn’t help but be influenced by WGBH (now GBH), probably the single most impactful producer of public TV content in U.S. history. GBH has educated, informed, and entertained audiences with programming in each of the areas PBS President Kerger sees as central to the PBS mission: kids (Zoom, Arthur); science (NOVA); news (Frontline and PBS NewsHour); and history (American Experience). They are far from alone in the PBS universe (Sesame Street anyone?). I’ve been a part of public media funding battles on Capitol Hill myself – fighting to preserve funding – and served under or with colleagues who have led those fights or served as a part of the PBS leadership.
The CPB/PBS budget battle and public response
Despite genuine passion and interest from lawmakers over the last 50 years, and a consistent level of public support, CPB has never drawn a big public investment. At its demise CPB accounted for only 0.007% of the federal budget (that is not a typo), and PBS and NPR have only derived a relatively small part of their funding from CPB, and in fact both depend on contributions from the stations that carry their programming.
Despite its diminutive size, CPB funding has long punched above its weight in impact. It has helped spur billions of donations from individuals, corporations, and foundations. Of the 175 local public TV station licensees in the U.S. roughly a quarter receive 30% of their funding from the federal government. Similarly, of more than 1000 public radio stations, between 25-30% receive more than 30% of their funding from the federal government.
The last year has seen a brutal cascade of blows to public media, from rescission of funding previously authorized by Congress to the end of CPB funding to relentless and hostile investigations from Capitol Hill and the FCC. But PBS’s Kerger took pains to assure me and all within shouting distance that “we’re not dead, and we’re not going anywhere.” When asked about the mood at PBS today, Kerger told me she has found it “unbelievably gratifying to see how many millions of people weighed in on the fight,” marveling at gestures towards PBS such as gift cards sent from high school and college grads and children sending in their allowance money as donations.
Kerger highlighted for me a “pep rally” that she attended in Fargo, ND on behalf of North Dakota Public Broadcasting to demonstrate the breadth and depth of affection for PBS nationwide. After an evening event attended by several hundred people, including the Governor and Mayor, Kerger left the next day on a 6:00 AM flight. She could not believe that early morning how many people she met, from taxi drivers to security personnel to a flight attendant who had all been present at the previous evening’s event and shared their own perspectives on how important PBS and their local stations were to them. The tentacles of public media in communities – and Fargo is a stand-in for many more – are broad and deep.
What will define the future of PBS?
Of course, warm feelings can only take you so far and PBS faces real-world financial worries that Kerger must navigate. First Kerger noted that “the answer for us isn’t a billionaire” but a multi-front approach to sustainability. She emphasized that PBS is not giving up the fight to restore federal funding, which includes ongoing litigation, and probably more importantly what Kerger sees as growing recognition – even among some Republicans – about the crisis at many local stations and consequently the need to revisit the complete funding cut-off.
Beyond that DC-focus, Kerger is seeking to broaden partnerships to bolster PBS’s future. PBS has strong relationships with media partners such as Amazon Prime Video and YouTube which continue to stream PBS programming to millions of viewers. PBS is exploring industry partnerships for educational games as well. Kerger is working with the new Public Media Bridge Fund, an organization dedicated to “securing local public television and radio service for the communities most at-risk of losing it” through a coalition of philanthropic organizations. And Kerger told me that “social media has been great source to push out information to parents not just for promotion but with content including creative ideas to do with kids.” All of this helps build and maintain the PBS connection to “viewers like you” including the pipeline of vital individual contributions.
When it comes to producing and delivering content in its priority categories of kids, news, science and history, Kerger told me that “there is a strong pipeline [that includes] the documentary series, The American Revolution from Ken Burns and his team; Al Roker’s kids series Weather Hunters; a new nature series about the vulnerable walrus population; and a reimagining of the Fred Friendly seminars with [former President of NBC News] Andy Lack and [constitutional law professor] Aaron Tang.” Kerger acknowledged the need to stretch out the PBS distribution schedule given the present funding environment, but the rich creativity at work here helps undergird the PBS social media campaign: #defundednotdefeated.