New Hampshire Public Radio and New Hampshire PBS are among the media outlets who will see major cuts to their funding streams following votes in Congress this week to defund public broadcasting.
On a near party-line vote, Republican lawmakers approved a rescission package backed by President Trump that will cut $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB, in turn, awards grants to local stations across the public radio and television network.
For New Hampshire Public Radio, the cuts amount to more than $400,000, or 6% of the station’s annual budget. In a fundraising appeal sent Friday morning, NHPR CEO Jim Schachter said the rescission puts a “permanent gap” in the station’s budget.
“Our short-term response includes cost-cutting, of course; the demand for efficiency is greater than ever,” he said.
New Hampshire PBS receives 18% of its budget — or $1.3 million — in the form of grants from the CPB. Earlier this week, vice president Dawn DeAngelis said the loss of that money won’t be easy to make up, but that the organization is hoping to avoid layoffs or a reduction in local programming.
“We’ve been preparing for this eventuality for a while,” DeAngelis said. “We’ve been communicating with people across the system. So I feel that we’re better prepared to handle it. Will it be difficult? Yes.”
Cuts to ripple across the country
Roughly 2% of NPR’s budget comes through federal funds. For PBS, that share comes to about 15%. Both NPR and PBS also receive additional federal money in the form of payments from member stations that receive government funds.
The reliance on federal funding by local stations varies considerably across the nation. Stations in more rural or remote parts of the country tend to rely far more heavily on federal funding to stay afloat.
While public broadcasting has enjoyed bipartisan support in Washington for decades, Trump has repeatedly accused NPR of political bias. The network has denied those allegations, but was unable to convince the Republican majority in Congress to protect its funding.
Big financial impacts for other New England stations
Regionally, other New England public media organizations say they are still assessing the impact of the funding cuts on their bottom lines.
Boston’s two public media outlets — WBUR and GBH — say they expect to lose millions of dollars from the funding cuts. GBH was set to receive about 8% of its budget — or $18 million — from the CPB in the coming fiscal year. For WBUR, about 3% of its annual budget, or $1.6 million, comes from that source.
But for both news organizations, the financial losses could mount much higher, as both GBH and WBUR take in millions of dollars in sponsorships and syndication fees from other stations that pay to air their programs, including Here and Now, The World, and Frontline. Stations could decide to drop that programming as part of their own cost-cutting efforts.
"This is a painful moment,” said WBUR CEO Margaret Low. “We may be defunded but we feel determined to carry on and continue to serve the city and the country with high-quality journalism.”
Elsewhere in New England, Maine Public says it will lose about 12% of its budget due to the loss of federal funding. And Vermont Public says it gets about 10% of its annual funding from the CPB — or about $2 million a year.
Editor’s note: This story was edited by NHPR's Dan Barrick. No other NHPR staff or management provided input or reviewed the story before publication.
