The public broadcasting system in the United States suffered a seismic shock last week when Congress eliminated $550 million a year in federal funding for PBS, NPR and local stations across the country.
But public radio listeners and public television viewers have been stepping in to help fill the gap, delivering a surge of donations.
Over the last three months, as the prospect of the cuts intensified, roughly 120,000 new donors have contributed an estimated $20 million in annual value, said Michal Heiplik, the president and chief executive of the Contributor Development Partnership, a firm that analyzes public media fund-raising data. Overall this year, donations to public media are about $70 million higher than last year.
The numbers are encouraging, Mr. Heiplik said, but far from enough to make up for the federal cuts. Scores of stations in the United States could struggle to continue operating without grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a taxpayer-funded company that has long distributed federal money to PBS and NPR member stations.
“It is still early, and we hope the support will continue to grow,” Mr. Heiplik said. “Next few weeks will be telling.”
Some stations have reported a particularly sharp uptick in donations in the days since Congress approved the cuts. Amanda Mountain, the president and chief executive of Rocky Mountain Public Media, a PBS and NPR member network in Colorado, said she received 6,620 donations from Friday to Sunday, including 1,000 from new contributors. One donor gave a $500,000 gift.
At WUNC, an NPR member station in North Carolina, a donation drive raised $155,360. WMNF, an NPR member station in Tampa, Fla., raised more than $280,250. The funding haul was unusually high for both stations.
To help keep the momentum going, Rocky Mountain Public Media has started a $9.7 million campaign to support innovation in technology and local content, Ms. Mountain said. The campaign has already received $1.55 million in contributions, most of it from the network’s board of directors.
“While this is a massive one-time immediate response from our generous community of public media fans, stations can’t plan on this level of increased giving as a permanent strategy to fill the gap,” Ms. Mountain said.
Republicans had been trying to defund public broadcasters in the United States for decades, arguing that programs from NPR and PBS have a liberal bias. Those efforts intensified after President Trump’s inauguration and succeeded last week with narrow votes in the Senate and House that clawed back funding that had been allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Both PBS and NPR addressed the funding cuts with employees on Wednesday. Paula Kerger, the chief executive of PBS, said in a staff meeting in PBS’s Washington headquarters that she had been talking to philanthropic foundations interested in helping local stations continue operating. Katherine Maher, the chief executive of NPR, spoke to employees from the Bay Area, part of a fund-raising trip across California.
In the near term, both NPR and PBS are looking for ways to weather the storm. Ms. Kerger told her staff that federal funding was about 20 percent of PBS’s overall budget and that the network would immediately freeze open positions and pause all unnessesary spending. Ms. Maher told employees that the public radio network would be cautious about hiring, but noted that NPR could not “cut our way to survival.”
There are encouraging signs that the new donors aren’t just making one-time contributions. Mr. Heiplik said fund-raising appeals sent out by stations last Friday, the day funding was cut, got triple the response rate of end-of-year requests, which are generally the highest-performing campaigns. And website traffic is up, as donors become more energized.
“It is great to see the community respond as it shows how much appreciation (and need) there is for public media,” he said in an email. “Now we need this level of support to continue as we reinvent the infrastructure impacted by loss of federal funding.”
Benjamin Mullin reports for The Times on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact him securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or at [email protected].
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