Community media organizations and rural serving stations in the Northwest reeling from federal cuts

Public broadcasters large and small have been reacting to the unprecedented Congressional vote to pull already-approved funding for public media. In Oregon and Washington, public radio stations face an array of challenges, depending on their size and resources. Some radio stations play nationally-produced NPR content, but not all. Many are squarely focused on covering their local community news with locally produced programs. Tribal stations, rural stations, student-driven stations and classical music stations are among those hardest hit.

Joining us to tell us more are KMUN Station Manager Susan Peterson in Astoria; Northwest Public Broadcasting’s Director of Audience and Programming Sueann Ramella in Pullman, WA; KWSO‘s Sue Matters on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation; and KLCC reporter Zac Ziegler in Eugene.

OPB is among the public media organizations affected by the rescission cuts.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. As you have likely heard by now, OPB is dealing with the fallout from the unprecedented congressional vote to pull already-approved funding for public media. But OPB is far from alone. Some public broadcasters all across the country are facing an existential threat. Tribal, rural, student-driven and classical music stations are among those that are hardest hit.

We’re going to hear from four Northwest stations right now to get a sense for what is happening. We start with Northwest Public Broadcasting [NWPB], which is based in Pullman, Washington. Sueann Ramella is the director of audience and programming there. Welcome to the show.

Sueann Ramella: Thanks for having me.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for your broadcast area and your general programming?

Ramella: NWPB broadcasts everywhere except in the heart of Seattle and Spokane. We focus mostly on rural areas, particularly in Eastern Washington. We have TV and radio, PBS and NPR. We’re what they call a university licensee, where Washington State University’s Board of Regents holds our broadcasting license, but we’re editorially independent.

Miller: How much federal funding did you lose, will you lose because of this rescission?

Ramella: Current number is at 20%. It’s about $2 million, and it’s painful.

Miller: Twenty percent of your budget comes from CPB.

Ramella: Yeah, since I’ve been at this organization for two decades, it has fluctuated from year to year. It’s anywhere from 6% to 14%, but I do believe after the pandemic we’ve increased to 20%.

Miller: Just to put that in perspective, OPB listeners may have been hearing that right now, for us, it’s about 9%. So that’s obviously … it’s more than double. What does that money go towards?

Ramella: Most of it is in the form of grants. They don’t have the exact percentages. TV is not cheap to run or to function. Radio is a bit cheaper to do, but I don’t have the exact zeros and dollars behind that. All I know is quite a bit of grant funding goes to our PBS station.

And then there’s the support services that you receive. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which disseminates the funding to member stations and organizations, also negotiates music rights on behalf of stations and some back-end connectivity – the way we receive and broadcast our programming. That’s all on squishy ground. While we say we are losing about 20% or $2 million, that includes those support services.

Miller: What are your plans right now for how to move forward?

Ramella: Well, other than a lot of eating my feelings and drinking at night, the plan moving forward is to try to serve our public as much as possible. And I gotta tell you, I would really love a crystal ball. The immediate thing we have control over is our literal budget, line items in our budget. And I’ve been telling folks, there’s no printing money.

Nobody is going traveling. Nobody is leaving the station. We are on like a spouse has lost a job kind of home economic mode. That means I have to take a look at the programs that both our TV and radio services offer, and find out what’s the best that we can afford that most of the public would want to hear.

Miller: What have you heard from your listeners, from the public, from the community in the last week?

Ramella: Well, 90% of the people writing in are very supportive. They value what public media does for them in their community, so they’re giving donations. Some of them are giving for the first time, which is fantastic. Because I think everybody in public broadcasting realizes that for the amount of audience that we serve, we have a fraction of the number that is people who actually are donors … which is why federal funding is so important to many, many stations. It’s literally subsidizing trusted, educational, highly researched content, to keep the American people informed. That’s not cheap to do. So what we’re hearing from them is: “We want to give. Here’s my money. I hope for the best.” That’s great.

But I do hear from 10% or so who are quite frankly mean. And they seem to forget that in order to have a public good, the public needs to participate in that in the form of their tax dollars or they’re literally out of pocket. They really believe we are the voice box of the Democratic party. And I’m here to tell you and your listeners right now: Democrats aren’t that smart. They don’t know how to use public broadcasting as their voice box. But, the Republicans know how to cut it.

So, what does the public want? Do they want to be informed with trusted information that isn’t backed by a major corporation? Or do they want to be spoon-fed information that has no backing or integrity behind it? We’ll wait and see. That’s what my station’s waiting for. By October, we will know how many donors listen to NWPB and are willing to give out of their freaking Social Security allowances, is what we’re facing. People will give what they can, so we’ll base our programming based on what comes through the door from now until then.

Miller: Sueann Ramella, thanks very much.

Ramella: Thank you.

Miller: That’s Sueann Ramella, director of audience and programming for Northwest Public Broadcasting, which is based in Pullman.

To get a sense for the effects of Congress’s recent vote to claw back $1 billion in federal funding, Sue Matters joins us now. She is a station manager of KWSO on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. Sue, great to have you on the show.

Sue Matters: Appreciate being asked.

Miller: What do you air on KWSO?

Matters: Well, we’re kind of a public radio station that doesn’t especially sound like a public radio station, except once in a while. We have a variety of music, different kinds of music, but we sound fairly mainstream and almost commercial. Then we specialize our local content, like our information, our public affairs and whatnot, in short form. We have a lot of public service announcements, a lot of two to three minute programs. We do a couple news magazines weekly that are three to five minutes in length every day, multiple times a day. So, sort of short-form local content and repetition is what we do, with a bunch of music in between.

Although most of the time we’re playing a variety of new music and old music, contemporary music, we also have day parts where we’re playing drum music, like powwow drum music. So that’s probably our most unique thing, musically anyway. Then we are top-of-the-hour NPR news in the morning, we have our own local newscasts as well. And we run two hours of “All Things Considered.” That’s probably the most mainstream we sound, from 4:00 to 6:00 in the afternoon.

Miller: You also have Tribal language and culture segments.

Matters: We do. We have an hourly, like a language lesson. It’s pretty short, one to two minutes. There’s three distinct languages, for this is a confederation of three Tribes: The Warm Springs, the Wasco, the Paiute. So it’s three distinct languages, three distinct cultural identities. Those rotate, hopefully equally, for the languages. We also have some hour-length culture/history programming on the weekends.

Miller: How much do you rely on federal funding?

Matters: On average – and it’s different every year depending on if we’ve gotten extra money from somewhere – we are looking at probably about a 40% cut for CPB for our general operations.

Miller: That is a staggering amount. What does that mean going forward?

Matters: I mean, today I’m trying to be more optimistic. These interviews that we’ve been doing started off pretty doom-and-gloom for me, but then the realization as I started to work through what our spending’s been and where I can maybe get some money from, I think the Tribe is gonna step up and give us a pretty good bridge to the future.

I have a couple staff positions that are funded by CPB and that directly correlates with the local content, the local programming we create, so that’s my priority. There’s some national programming [like] “Native America Calling,” a flagship show for the Native Voice One network that comes across the public radio satellite system. It’s a daily talk show that we have run since it began in the ‘90s. I don’t know that they know what their future is. I’m sure they get CPB funding, but if that is available, we’ll wanna hang on to that.

I’d love to keep NPR news. Then it’s also just thinking about things like our radio stations are basically a computer. We probably want to keep that service contract in place for when things might go wrong. And we have a contract engineer. Certainly things are gonna continue to break. There’s some things that are gonna be absolutely must keep, so I need to come up with that dollar amount to go ask the Tribe if they can help us out. Fortunately for us in this timing is the Tribes operate on a calendar year, so I have until … Well, we’re in budget season right now for next year, so the timing is right for me to figure this out. By the end of the year, hopefully we’ll know

Miller: When the rescission package was being debated in Congress, some Republicans expressed concerns about what passing it, what cutting this money would mean for Tribal stations in their districts or in their states. And there was talk of some kind of future deal or carve-out that would reduce the cuts specifically for Tribal stations. But I haven’t heard too much about that since it did pass, since this cut was made. Where does that stand?

Matters: No one really knows. A week ago there was a meeting of the Tribal stations with an organization called Native Public Media. She had reached out to, I think it was Senator Rounds from South Dakota had said he did some sort of deal, but he had never responded. So, no one really knows. And honestly, backroom deals with this administration, certainly I’d be happy to have some money, but I can’t really see that that’s something that’s gonna be sustained moving forward if it ever even happens, so nobody knows anything about it.

Miller: Sue, thanks very much, and good luck.

Matters: Thank you.

Miller: That’s Sue Matters. She’s a station manager of KWSO on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.

Susan Peterson joins us now. She is the station manager of KMUN in Astoria. Susan, welcome.

Susan Peterson: Thanks. Thanks for having KMUN on your program today.

Miller: I’m thrilled to have you on. How much does KMUN rely on federal funding?

Peterson: In the past couple of years, or a few years, we’ve gotten about 20% of our annual budget from CPB.

Miller: What options are you looking at right now, with one out of every five current dollars being erased overnight?

Peterson: Well, we’re looking first at our most expensive programming from outside. We frame KMUN as a community radio station, “KMUN-nity,” so looking at programs like NPR programming from NPR and stuff is really our first line …

Miller: … Meaning, saving money by not paying dues to NPR to carry shows like “Morning Edition” or “All Things Considered?”

Peterson: Right.

Miller: In favor of what? I mean, if those are expensive shows for you to cover … Am I right also that folks could hear those through OPB in the Astoria area?

Peterson: Right.

Miller: So there’s an existing market for that, I guess, which gives you a more local lane. What might you do instead, [since] those do make up a good chunk of the hours of the day, currently?

Peterson: Well, “lane” is a great word. Our staff, our program director and our two people in our newsroom, have come up with a great idea for replacing “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” It’d be more regional and local news. We already put in about 17 minutes to that news hour, plus the ship report. We’re now going to be doing morning and evening, so there’s just about half an hour’s worth of news gathered from different places like the Northwest News Network and things like that, to fill those hours.

Miller: Creating local news, obviously, can be expensive, though, as well. Will you be hiring anybody new to create more local content or doing that with existing staff?

Peterson: Oh, Dave, nobody can hire anybody at this time. We’re lucky. For all the years I’ve been at KMUN, for 15 years, we have partnered with our local news media, all of our newspapers in our region. We serve five counties out here on the coast and they all have little newspapers. We all have newspapers and we all share content. It’s really great. So yeah, we have that as well as the Northwest News Network, which we already rely heavily on.

Miller: My understanding is that you recently had a kind of block party in the community. It’s a fascinating time to have a party. I assume this had already been scheduled, but what was the vibe there?

Peterson: We didn’t put it together in two days, that’s for sure. I thought maybe you came to the party, which would have been great.

Miller: I wasn’t there, but I’m curious what it was like and what you heard from the community.

Peterson: Well, two years ago, when it was our 40th birthday, we had a block party that was just fabulous and people have been hounding us to do it again. So about the first of the year we started planning it. And even though the timing looked like it was going to come right down to the rescission vote and the party, we just decided, we’re going to have the party anyway.

And yes, I had quite a few conversations with people about the rescission, about how devastating it is, how challenging it is. I did get handed a few checks, which was very nice. And now we’re digging in and getting started on making up that loss to find more donation dollars.

Miller: Susan, thanks very much.

Peterson: Oh, thank you.

Miller: That’s Susan Peterson, station manager of KMUN in Astoria.

We’re going to end this tour of public media stations in the Northwest with KLCC in Eugene. Zac Ziegler is a reporter there. Welcome to the show.

Zac Ziegler: Thanks for having me, Dave.

Miller: Zac, how much does KLCC rely on federal funds?

Ziegler: Our general manager’s been out there talking a lot about this lately with other media outlets. We’re kind of similar to OPB, we’re around 10% this coming year. That means we’re going to lose about $350,000 in money and that doesn’t include the other benefits we get from CPB.

Miller: Do you have a sense for how the station is going to try to fill that hole?

Ziegler: You know, Jim, our general manager, has been really up front talking a lot about how we can fundraise out of this. We have great community support here. It’s something that, as the newest hire to the organization, I’m very happy to hear that there’s a lot of goodwill towards the station in the area and a fair amount of confidence that our listeners will step up.

Miller: Two other stations in Eugene that you’ve been reporting on could be even harder hit by these cuts and are more reliant on federal funding. Let’s take them one by one. One of them is KRVM, which is licensed by the local 4J School District and has a lot of student involvement. What did they say when you spoke to them?

Ziegler: I spoke to their general manager and there’s a lot of concern there. Like so many outlets that are attached to some sort of an educational outlet – be it a university or community college like we are – for them, they lost a fair chunk of that support and had to be basically self-sufficient, according to the school district. And they had about 20% of their money coming from CPB dollars, which is a pretty notable concern. They, too, remain pretty hopeful that their listener base will step up. But they are thinking about things, like they have an AM frequency [and] its future may be a little up in the air. They do think that their community will step up because it has in the past.

Miller: And what about KWAX, a classical station licensed for the University of Oregon. How might these cuts impact their programming?

Ziegler: When I talked with their general manager, there was that, “hopefully people will step up,” kind of emphasis. But on their website, there’s also a statement that talks about what they might lose in this. They might have to go away from some of their smaller repeaters or translators in rural communities, where there may not be much offered. They might have to power down some during the overnight hours was another thing that was talked about. Concerns about keeping that emergency alert system up and going throughout the whole time in places where maybe they’re one of the few media outlets.

Miller: Zac, thanks very much.

Ziegler: Thank you.

Miller: That’s Zac Ziegler, reporter at KLCC. There are links to all the stations that we talked to – Northwest Public Broadcasting, KWSO and KMUN – on our website, opb.org, along with information about how to contribute to OPB.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.