Budget cuts threaten public radio

This Congress, however, is attacking under the cover of the continuing budget resolution, which the House took up this week and which Congress must pass before March 4 to keep the government funded for the remainder of fiscal 2011.

Without the usual hoopla of public debate on the subject, the Republican majority in the House has stated that it intends to excise funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from the continuing resolution, betting that the Democrats will go along in order to keep the government in business.

And should this ploy not succeed, Republicans are determined to use any other legislative means available to achieve this long-standing goal.

While this year’s rationale for cutting CPB’s funding (a vanishingly small percentage of the total federal budget) is couched in the rhetoric of “difficult choices” and “fiscal responsibility,” this is really about ideology.

House Speaker John Boehner made that clear recently when he told The National Review, “It’s reasonable to ask why Congress is spending taxpayers’ money to support a left-wing radio network.”

Yet studies have shown that public radio, far from being a bastion of liberalism, has broad appeal for those in the political middle, and even for many who consider themselves conservative.

When I lived in North Carolina, my next-door neighbor described himself as “only slightly to the left of Attila the Hun.” Yet NPR was the only news source that he considered trustworthy.

To understand the implications of the proposed elimination of CPB better, let’s look in our own back yard. In fiscal 2009, CPB gave WABE an unrestricted Community Service Grant, or CSG, of nearly $700,000, while co-licensed TV station WPBA received about $730,000. These grants, which are allocated on a matching basis, stimulated more than $9 million in community support from listeners, viewers and program underwriters.

WCLK, one of the few stations in the country devoted to the preservation and promotion of jazz, received a CSG of just over $180,000 from CPB in fiscal 2009, nearly 19.5 percent of that struggling station’s total cash revenues.

My background is in public radio, so let me talk about what I know. First of all, it is important to understand how CPB funding works. CPB does not directly fund NPR. The vast majority of CPB funding goes directly to local stations, who spend it on local programming and operations and to acquire programs from NPR, as well as other providers (programs like A Prairie Home Companion, This American Life, Marketplace, and The World, for example, are not NPR programs).

Make no mistake: the elimination of CPB funding will hurt NPR and other producers badly, because it will diminish stations’ ability to pay, but it will hurt local stations far worse. Stations like WCLK, which provide vital services to niche audiences and/or rural communities, will be hardest hit of all. Some almost certainly won’t survive.

This year’s attack on CPB funding is not merely some annual ritual on Capitol Hill. It is a genuine existential threat to CPB and many stations.

Yet there is little that stations themselves can do. So it’s up to us, the listeners, to take matters into our own hands. The only thing a member of Congress fears is the prospect of losing the next election. If constituents care deeply about public broadcasting, members need to know.

If you are one of the nearly 600,000 listeners in metro Atlanta who depend on public radio each week, the time to act is now. The future of this precious medium is in our hands.

Kim Hodgson of Atlanta served on the board of directors of National Public Radio from 1994 to 2000; he was chairman from 1996 to 2000.