The Public Broadcasting Service is not in good shape at the moment, to put it mildly: We’re swiftly coming up on November, when the broadcaster would normally get its life-sustaining infusion of funds from the government-backed Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Except, of course, the CPB has been basically demolished over the last few months; as we’ve previously reported, Congress (at the guidance of the White House) voted to remove more than a billion dollars in public funds from the organization, which funds both local PBS and NPR stations and the overall organization. We’ve already reported on individual PBS broadcasters, like New Jersey’s, preparing to shutter; now, PBS head Paula Krieger has given a new interview to Variety where she reveals just how bleak this is going to get.
Noting that she’s been worried the most about smaller stations—often serving markets where they’re one of the only primary news outlets—Krieger has said her focus of late has been on putting together enough money to give those channels a “glide path,” hopefully one that results in some kind of survival, and not, well, the other standard outcome of a controlled plummet toward the ground.
Here’s Krieger:
Some of the smaller stations are looking at coming together in some sort of shared agreement, which would change the way they operate, but would keep local media in communities around the country. I think that’s a really good model. There are some stations that are looking at merging with an adjacent station and serving a larger market. And then I think there will be some that will find this a bridge too far and will decide not to continue.
One way or another, though, change is coming to public broadcasting, because it’s simply inevitable with that kind of loss of funds. (Krieger says she holds out hope that Congress might someday walk back these cuts, but is honest about the fact that no “white knight” is going to come in and save PBS.) She also expressed some mild frustration at the suggestion that PBS has tried to curtail or edit the creators working under it in order to curry favor with legislators or the executive. (Who went ballistic, in the lead-up to the cuts, to things like local channels airing segments about drag story hours at libraries.) “They’ve already taken away our funding. I think if there was a risk of that, you would have seen it before, which we obviously did not do… I just feel like we have been buffeted through this entire year, and we have not held back from the programs that we put forward.”
Programming-wise, Krieger noted that the reduced funding will, obviously, impact which national PBS programs are tapped to continue, with top priority going to NewsHour. “Obviously, the first priority is PBS NewsHour, because that’s an ongoing news operation where you’re burning through money all the time,” according to Krieger. “And we’re looking at some of the big series where CPB was helpful, like Nova, Nature and Great Performances.” But programs like American Experience are probably screwed, at least in the short-term; the series—which recently caught flack after one of its directors accused PBS of cutting a politically charged Ronald Reagan quote from an episode—is set to go on hiatus once it finishes airing its current Kissinger series.
