Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowMajor philanthropic organizations said Monday they are committing nearly $37 million in emergency funding to keep public media stations afloat after Congress passed President Donald Trump’s rescissions bill, which eliminated $1.1 billion in federal funding from PBS and NPR stations over the next two years.
The names are already ones you might hear on an underwriting announcement on your local public radio station: The Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, plus the Schmidt Family Foundation (created by Google co-founder Eric Schmidt) and the Melinda Gates-led group Pivotal Ventures.
A consultancy, Public Media Co., said it launched a “bridge fund” Monday to aid the most at-risk public radio and TV stations across the country, “stabilize the system” in the aftermath of the federal funding loss and help public media become more sustainable in the long run. The company will offer “grants, low-interest loans, and advisory services,” it wrote in a news release.
Knight said about $27 million from collective foundation support is going to the bridge fund, while another $10 million from MacArthur will go to directly support organizations, stations and programs in the public media ecosystem.
Tim Isgitt, Public Media Co.’s CEO, said the fund aims to raise $100 million over two years—roughly equivalent to what the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would have provided to the most vulnerable stations. “Mass station failure could lead to other stations failing—a bit of a ripple effect through the system,” Isgitt said.
The Knight Foundation said it is most focused on helping the organizations that derived 30 percent of their annual budgets or more from federal funding doled out by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which recently announced it is shutting down in the face of defunding. “Local public media stations are trusted community anchors that connect people to vital news, culture and civic life,” Knight Foundation President and CEO Maribel Pérez Wadsworth wrote in a statement. “This is an urgent moment that calls for bold action.”
Isigtt said his fundraising goal is $100 million over two years to stave off the full effects of federal defunding, which he said immediately threaten 115 stations serving 43 million people. “They’re all in rural and underserved areas of the country with very little access to philanthropy and other news sources,” he said. “The idea is to move resources to stabilize these at-risk stations, but also to help put them on some sort of pathway to sustainability.”
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.
Good start! There is enough multi-multi millionaires and billionaires in this country to fund this for a mighty long time.
It’s fine if it stands on its own without a government subsidy.
“Information shouldn’t be disseminated to the public for their benefit. People should have to pay for the privilege of receiving critical info relating to current events and emergencies.” What a terrible argument.
I’m no mathematician, but if they can survive on a measly 37 million. Why were the people of this nation sending them over 1 Billion a year? I looked it up and a billion isn’t a hundred million as many assume. It’s a thousand million. 37 million would seem to get lost in the couch cracks.