Kliff Kuehl, president and CEO, Kansas City PBS (photo by Brad Austin)
The impact is widespread, acutely affecting the budgets of Kansas City PBS, KCUR, KKFI and KPR and threatening the elimination of smaller outlets
Everybody knew it was coming.
And when it did, when the U.S. House and Senate gave President Donald Trump what he had wanted for years by defunding public television and radio, broadcasters in Missouri and Kansas knew it was time to hustle. Statements went up on websites, some stations went immediately into emergency fund drives, and broadcasters decried the loss of already approved revenue.
Kansas City PBS (formerly called KCPT, Channel 19) posted a statement on the station’s website the morning of July 18.
“Despite widespread bipartisan public opposition, the Senate has voted to uphold the House’s bill rescinding funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB),” the message began. “As a result, Kansas City PBS along with more than 1,500 public media stations nationwide, now faces a historic challenge following the decision by Congress and the President to eliminate all previously approved federal funding for public broadcasting.”
The process began in May when Trump issued one of his 171 or so executive orders killing existing and future funding for the CPB. Then the GOP’s majority in the U.S. House passed a bill doing exactly that. The Senate followed the House lead. The deal was done.
“Kansas City PBS now faces a 13% annual budget shortfall that will not be replaced without immediate and sustained community support,” the statement continued. “While larger stations may be able to weather the storm, many smaller and rural stations are expected to shut down entirely, leaving communities without access to local news, emergency alerts, and educational programming.”
That 13% translates to $1.7 million. And the Bridge (KTBG), a Kansas City PBS National Public Radio affiliate, will lose $100,000 of its budget.
“We are going to do everything we can to limit impact on our listeners and viewers,” Kliff Kuehl, president and CEO of Kansas City PBS, said in an interview. “We have cut expenses where we can. We cut back on travel. We eliminated the printed program guide which some people are not going to be happy with… You might see a little less local programming. Out of the gate, the plan is to do as much of what we normally do as possible. And we have some emergency funding (we) set aside last year… The changes we’ve made should limit the damage.”
Kuehl said the GOP’s lockstep opposition to public broadcast funding is something relatively new. It was rarely a problem when Missouri’s U.S. senators were Claire McCaskill, a moderate Democrat, and Roy Blunt, a reasonable Republican.
Now, of course, Missouri is represented in the Senate by two Trump-era Republicans: Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, both of whom follow Trump’s wishes almost without exception.
“Oftentimes the House would cut the budget, and the Senate would put it back,” Kuehl said. “People now find it a lot harder to cross the aisle.”
Sarah Morris, general manager of KCUR-FM, said the cuts “are going to have a huge effect on us. The immediate impact is about $500,000 of annual funding that we had budgeted to receive this year is now gone. That supported both KCUR and Classical KC.”
Classical KC, which programs classical music, is KCUR’s sister station.
“You know, that’s actual cash money that comes out of our stations’ coffers,” Morris said. “By statute, it all goes toward programming.”
Not-for-profit broadcast stations receive public support as donations and memberships, but Morris said the broader public — the countless people who tune in without ever making a donation — need to stop taking public radio for granted.
“They don’t really care because it’s always there,” she said. “You turn on your radio and it’s like magic. But it’s not magic.”
What if in two years the Democrats could retake the House, where the GOP holds a slim majority? Could some of the funding be restored?
“That’s a logical assumption but my core belief is that once this money has come out of that federal budget, it’s unlikely to ever be put back in,” Morris said. “That will be true regardless.”
She said a crucial loss could be the small-market public radio stations across Missouri and Kansas.
“Most of the major metro stations are going to have to survive and find a way to move forward,” Morris said. “But it’s a much starker picture for small, rural stations. We’re going to have to redesign the system, but it won’t look like it did 50 years ago.”
NPR itself is funded by revenue from stations, big and small, across the country, according to Morris. Stations like KCUR-FM.
“The vast majority of their revenue comes from stations like ours,” she said. “A small station in our area, like High Plains Public Radio in western Kansas, is not paying as much for their programming as we are. But nonetheless, if those tiny stations go away then there’s a lot less money to pay for the programming.
The morning the news broke that public radio had been defunded by Washington, Morris said, KCUR began asking the public to donate.
“We went right on the air (that) morning and we started asking the community for help,” she said. “Eighty-five percent of our funding comes from people in this community. We’re saying, ‘Can you help us bridge that gap?’ People are really responding. A lot of people want to do a little more. That’s been really heart-warming.”
Now all public broadcasters are in new, uncharted territory. Never before has the federal government eliminated all funding for public radio and TV.
“This has never happened in the history of public broadcasting since 1967 (the year Congress established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting),” Morris said. “There have been times along the way when there have been discussions about cutting, but Congress always came back. They have always backed away from (eliminating funding).”
Until now.
KKFI-FM is the city’s community radio station that serves listeners a variety of music and information programming with mainly volunteer hosts. KKFI also broadcasts the syndicated news-and-opinion show “Democracy Now!” Monday through Friday.
In an open letter on the station’s website, Kelly Dougherty, director of development and communications, made an impassioned argument for the survival of small not-for-profit stations.
“This isn’t about whether you think a show is too ‘left’ or too ‘right.’ It’s about the bigger picture. Hundreds of rural radio stations, no matter their political leaning or what kind of content they broadcast, will simply vanish,” Dougherty wrote. “This goes far beyond KKFI. Community radio stations provide music for everyone. They provide access, whether someone has internet or can afford to pay for it.”
Dougherty wrote that KKFI expects a loss of $170,000 in the next two years.
“That’s about 10 percent of our budget,” she continued. “The immediate impact is clear, but the full effect these cuts will have on our community and KKFI will only truly be known with time.”
At Kansas Public Radio in Lawrence, a plea for continued listener support filled its website after a Republican majority in Congress voted to “claw back” two years of previously approved federal funding for public broadcasters.
“This will result in a loss of approximately $244,000 for KPR for each fiscal year,” according to a statement on the KPR website. “KPR staff are now focused on protecting the flow of information, and the programming you rely on.”
KANU-FM in Lawrence anchors a network of smaller stations across Kansas.
Feloniz Lovato-Winston, director of KPR, said the cuts amount to 10 percent of the broadcast service budget.
“Like a lot of nonprofit radio stations, we run a tight ship,” Lovato-Winston said. “Seventy-eight percent of our budget comes from listeners.”
She added that KPR had prepared contingency plans.
“We were encouraging our listeners to reach out to lawmakers,” she said. “I think everybody has been planning for the worst and hoping for the best. I don’t think there’s a syndicated program we’re thinking of dropping right now. It could affect some of our local programming, but we won’t make that decision until we see how the public responds.”
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting — the umbrella organization that funds both National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service — announced on Aug. 1 that it had begun winding down operations after President Donald Trump signed a bill that clawed back $1.1 billion of already approved funding. As reported by NPR, the majority of staff positions at the CPB will be eliminated by Sept. 30. A small number of employees would remain until January. The move will impact NPR and PBS stations across the country, including those in Missouri and Kansas.
