What is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or the CPB? How does it all work? And why is it SO political?
In this episode, senior producer Christina Phillips explains it all. She first spoke with the CPB's Anne Brachman, and then did a deep dive to learn more.
In the episode, Christina mentions 2024 legislation called the Defund NPR Act. You can read that bill right here. Since we taped the episode, there's a new effort afoot to defund the CPB. More on that here.
Transcript
Christina Phillips: Go for it.
Hannah McCarthy: This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy, I'm.
Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice
Rebecca Lavoie: I am Rebecca Lavoie.
Christina Phillips: And I'm Christina Phillips.
Hannah McCarthy: And we're doing something a little different today instead of Hannah Mansplains senior producer Christina Phillips is going to explain stuff to us today.
Rebecca Lavoie: A Philaplain.
Nick Capodice: A what Splain,
Rebecca Lavoie: Philaplain, Christina Phillips. She's gonna Philsplain Splain.
Christina Phillips: I don't know how I feel about that. Doesn't work. Mhm.
Hannah McCarthy: We'll keep working. We'll work it out.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. It sounds like something like a waterway. Like a spill. Get it by the Phil Splain.
Hannah McCarthy: Uh, Christina, why did you gather all of us here today?
Christina Phillips: Um, well, as you remember, we were recently in Washington, DC, and while we were there, I decided to go talk to some people who are, I would say, our closest connection to the federal government. And I say our meaning, this podcast, the radio station we work at, which is to say that I went to the offices of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Yes, they distribute government funding to public media organizations like ours. And there are several reasons I did this interview. One, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created by the federal government, which naturally makes it a civics topic. Two its history and function are embedded in this very democratic idea of a free press that, to quote the Supreme Court in 1971, serves the governed, not the governors. And three, because the idea of the government using taxpayer dollars to fund public media is a political issue.
Hannah McCarthy: It is. Yeah, it's super political. I mean, there are plenty of politicians and voters alike who do not necessarily think that the government should give taxpayer dollars to public media organizations, especially if those organizations are not covering certain issues the way that perhaps they feel those issues should be covered.
Christina Phillips: Usually with an episode that I work on, I'll interview people, I'll write a script for you to record. And this time I wanted to break the format, because I feel like it's worth talking through this as a group because unlike other topics, we're going to be talking about ourselves. And I think that it would be weird to do a traditional episode where we explain a subject that is essentially about our work without acknowledging that.
Nick Capodice: To that end, can we start with just sort of a big old disclaimer? Christina. Okay, everybody. Hi, I'm Nick. Uh Civics 101 is a show made at a public media organization, NPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. And to be clear, NHPR gets money from the federal government through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Rebecca Lavoie: A small amount of money.
Hannah McCarthy: So basically, like what Nick is saying is that some tax dollars go to helping our station run, and we receive those dollars in the form of a grant.
Nick Capodice: And to be very clear, when Civics 101 first started way back in 2017, we got an additional grant on top of, like NHPR's station grant from the CPB to fund the creation of this, this show. And then we got another grant, I think a year later or two years later to continue funding the show. But that was a while back.
Rebecca Lavoie: And we're no longer running on CPB money with this show as of today. So we're no longer a grant-funded show from the CPB, to be clear. Except for the grant that our station gets - the tiny portion of our budget.
Hannah McCarthy: And we're here to talk about the government's role in public media, specifically in relation to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Right. I think it would be disingenuous to imply that we do not have some professional stake in government policies having to do with public media, like, do all of us here love and value public media and want to keep our jobs and want our work to be trusted and useful for our listeners? Yes we do. Like so that is our perspective.
Christina Phillips: Yeah. And and also the perspective of the person I talked to for this episode from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Anne Brachman: Maybe one day with technology.
Christina Phillips: This is Anne Brachman. She's the senior vice president of external affairs at the CPB. And basically her job is to spend every day on the Hill talking to legislators about how public media works and why it matters.
Anne Brachman: We try to get to the Hill every single day to talk to members or their staff, and we really bring in a couple pieces of paper. One is the amount of money from CPB to all the stations in their state or district. And then we have what we call a state story. So here's all the things that CPB support enables services wise or content creation in the state. So they can really see the value of the appropriation locally serving their constituents. Okay.
Christina Phillips: So I'm wondering, um, does this sound like any other kind of job that you're familiar with?
Nick Capodice: Yeah. So my question was, is she registered as a lobbyist or is that is it not lobbying? What she's doing?
Christina Phillips: Yeah. Do you want to just define what a lobbyist is? And then I can tell you why she's not.
Nick Capodice: Oh, fascinating. Of course. So a lobbyist is somebody who spends a certain amount of time, and I think also a certain amount of money talking to people in Washington, DC, talking to politicians to not necessarily convince them to do what they want, but just to provide them with as much information as possible to benefit their industry that they represent. One thing that kind of shocked me from another episode that I did is that lobbyists don't change your mind. They just provide information. They help you write a bill. They help you get something through legislation that usually never happens. So a lot of members of Congress really depend on lobbyists. And lobbyists will tell you that they are right to lobby is enshrined in the Constitution in the First Amendment. Yeah. So lobbyists are fascinating, but I'm desperate to know why she's not a lobbyist even though that's what she's doing.
Christina Phillips: Yeah. So the difference here is that so her salary and the salary of her colleague who go to the Hill that comes out of CPB funding and that funding comes from the government, they are not paid by any sort of outside interest. They, like our station, couldn't donate a bunch of money to the CPB to help the CPB advocate on our behalf or on behalf of public media.
Anne Brachman: Sometimes we'll go up and we'll host briefings with congressional caucuses. There's a Congressional Public Broadcasting Caucus, the Congressional Rural Caucus, the Congressional Fire Fighting Caucus, public safety caucuses, because public media touches all these different aspects of our nation. And so it's a lot of educating. We are allowed to do technical advice. So sometimes a committee, when they're writing or drafting legislation, they will reach out to CPB and say, how would this impact public broadcasting or CPB. And in that regard, we do have a statutory recognized role to engage with and provide feedback.
Christina Phillips: And I do feel like we've been saying this phrase, public media, public broadcasting a lot. And that definition didn't really come from nowhere. And so we're going to talk about all the things a station would have to do to get the CPB funding later. But is there any sort of definition, like how would you guys define the difference between public media and, say, commercial media?
Rebecca Lavoie: Well, for one, public media is, generally speaking, a not-for-profit organization that isn't funded by commercial interests, nor does it exist to make a profit at the end of the year on its balance sheet. So that's a big, important component of it. And public media has to abide by certain federal communications guidelines in order to retain its status as, quote, public media. So those are those are some of the fundamentals. Yeah.
Christina Phillips: I think the the key thing here is that public media is not serving any sort of investors or stakeholders. I think there are three words that I see kind of all over government regulation that I want you to keep in mind when we talk about public media. And those are noncommercial, informational and educational. And that you see a lot, especially in regulations from the FCC, which is the Federal Communications Commission, which is the agency that regulates radio, television, wire, satellite and now cable communications. And despite the fact that the FCC was created in the 1930s, Congress didn't actually establish the CPB until 1967, which I think is kind of interesting. And I want to talk a little bit about the history of how we got from there to here. And so I think the first thing that stood out to me is that the FCC decided back in the 1940s to reserve certain frequencies on radio broadcast for this public programming. So specifically, you're listening to an FM radio, you know, you can usually find a public radio station in like the lower end.
Rebecca Lavoie: Or down at the top.
Christina Phillips: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Hannah McCarthy: Most people who are listening to this are going to hear ads.
Christina Phillips: Yeah.
Rebecca Lavoie: Right. Yeah.
Hannah McCarthy: So we I think we have to talk about why Civics 101 and tons of other public media podcasts do run commercial ads. We have to talk about it.
Rebecca Lavoie: Not all public radio podcasts run ads. To be clear, it's a choice that we've made here at New Hampshire Public Radio as part of our business model. What you hear on public radio stations, when you hear companies mentioned, those are not advertisements. It's called corporate underwriting. And essentially the difference between those messages and advertisements is that they are not allowed to have, quote, calls to action, and they're not allowed to have value statements in them, such as so and so. Law firm is the very best law firm at doing wills and estates or whatever. They're not allowed to have those kinds of value statements, and they're not allowed to say things like, go to our website in order to get a sale on blank. So those that would be a call to action. Those ads are not allowed to do that. Well, you hear instead is so and so. Law firm is proud to support this public radio station and its journalism since 1985. Uh, for more information go to so and so law firm.com.
Nick Capodice: That is if you want - you know you don't have to.
Rebecca Lavoie: It's not a value statement and it's not a call to action. So that is what is allowed. And it's basically um, it's being sold to the company as you are supporting our work and your brand is associated with our work. So it's sort of being sold like an ad, but it does not present like an ad. That's an FCC rule on demand. Audio made by public radio stations is not bound by the same FCC rules as our broadcast. So we are allowed to monetize our on-demand or podcast audio with ads. We're allowed to and it does not fall within those guidelines. So here at NPR and at some other stations, we have made the decision that in order to be able to do what we do, we are operating in a commercial podcast space, that we should participate in an economy that allows us to make a little bit of money just to fund some of what we do through commercial advertisements. So that's why you hear ads on our podcast.
Christina Phillips: Okay, so that's commercials not okay on public radio or television broadcast unless they're following those rules you just laid out, Rebecca. And one other thing I'll mention is that on broadcast and on-demand, we do not endorse political candidates or run any political advertising of any kind. Now, back to the history the FCC has codified into law the difference between public broadcasting and commercial media, and it has set aside space on the radio dial for public broadcasting, specifically that noncommercial, educational informational programming. And then a little thing called television came along.
Archive: The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
Christina Phillips: By the 1950s, more than half of Americans have TVs in their home. We've got I Love Lucy, Bonanza, The Tonight Show. We've got commercials.
Archive: Salads tastes so much better with Best Foods, real mayonnaise because of best foods, superb ingredients.
Christina Phillips: And we've got the chair of the FCC, Newton Minow, calling the television landscape a vast wasteland.
Archive: Keep your eyes blue to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder.
Christina Phillips: Then in 1952, the FCC sets aside certain television channels for noncommercial educational television. And one thing that Anne talked a lot about was the idea was to have television channels that children could watch, that families could watch, like there's something that you can kind of set on and not worry about it.
Anne Brachman: And Chairman Minow at the time was instrumental in really pushing and advocating for educational television. In 1962, Congress recognized educational television. But we're still five years before the Public Broadcasting Act came along. But they said, yeah, there should be this thing for expanding educational television. So they set aside about $32 million in matching funds to really help construct these new stations across America. They more than doubled the number of educational stations from about 80 to about 190.
Christina Phillips: And this is when we start seeing the kind of programming that defines public media. Today. We've got the documentaries, the national educational shows, including the first American broadcasting of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, the kind of programs that you think of when you think of PBS nowadays.
Rebecca Lavoie: These are a lot of local programming, a ton of local like puppet programming and like local hosts doing like interactive stuff with kids and stuff like that. Right?
Christina Phillips: Yeah, yeah. And I'm actually this is just a random trivia question. Do any of, you know, the longest continually running television show in America? It is not public media, is it?
Rebecca Lavoie: General Hospital?
Nick Capodice: Is it a soap opera or is it like.
Christina Phillips: It's not a soap opera? It's not.
Nick Capodice: But it's not public media.
Christina Phillips: No, it's not public media.
Hannah McCarthy: Is it that weird show?
Christina Phillips: Probably not.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay. Never mind. Okay.
Nick Capodice: A news show, like 60 minutes.
Christina Phillips: It's Meet the Press. It's not C-Span, it's. It's Meet the Press on NBC.
Archive: Welcome to Sunday. It's Meet the Press. From NBC News in Washington, the longest-running show in television history. This is Meet the Press with Kristen Welker.
Christina Phillips: That was started in 1947, and CBS Evening News was a close second in 1948. But that has like over 16,000 episodes, whereas Meet the Press only has 3600. So eventually we get to 1967. This is when the federal government passed the Public Broadcasting Act, which establishes this government appropriation for public broadcasting.
Anne Brachman: So specifically, the Public Broadcasting Act authorized the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And we are a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan corporation. And our purpose really is to facilitate the development of a public telecommunications system, providing universal access to programs of high quality diversity, creativity, excellence, innovation, um, but also with a really strict adherence to objectivity and balance.
Christina Phillips: And shortly after the CPB was created, it established NPR and PBS, National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. These are independent nonprofit media organizations that are not in any way owned or operated by the government. Um, they have their own newsrooms. They make their own national programming that then can be purchased and distributed by local public media stations. And NPR and PBS are not the only nationally focused public media organizations that do this. But I do think of this as kind of like the consolidation and rebranding of some of those big existing national public media institutions that were already in place before the CPB was created.
Rebecca Lavoie: But they don't exclusively get their funding from the CPB anymore, right? No. They also raise money through philanthropy, other grants. Yes.
Christina Phillips: NPR, for example, they say that they get less than 1% of their operational funding from CPB. It's a little bit more complicated. We'll talk about that. So I asked Anne how much money the CPB gets and how that money is spent, how it's distributed among stations. And this is what she said.
Anne Brachman: Currently in fiscal year 2024, our appropriation is $525 million. CPB is capped at 5% for our administrative costs, which is our building rent or salaries. Um, just basic, you know, operational expenses. Uh, Congress says we have to spend at least 6% on system support, and in that we pay for all the music, royalties, copyright, licensing fees, research on behalf of the system. Most of our funding, more than 70% of our funds go right out the door to all the stations across the country 1500 locally owned and operated, and so stations can decide how best to use them to support their community. Um, that could be local content creation, educational outreach, local journalism and news, or to buy national content as well. Congress does provide CPB with a separate appropriation $60 million each year to provide for the satellites, the fiber and the ground to distribute all this content. Our stations also most people don't know are part of our nation's public alert and warning system. Um, and so when a alert, you know, we think about it, we get it on our cell phones today. But how did that alert get to your cell phone? And it's through public media's, um, satellites in the sky and the transmitters on the ground as well, sending that to your local service provider. We've also been major investors in early childhood education programs, both for the broadcast, but all the streaming and the games and where kids are these days and those shows, I would say they're not inexpensive to make.
Christina Phillips: I think this is something that's really important. There was a lot of debate about the government's role in this media that it was now funding. There's a difference between government run media and public media, which we alluded to earlier. There's there's this idea that like, if you're funding this media, like will you have ownership of it? Um, so I'm wondering, can can someone give me a definition of government-run media?
Hannah McCarthy: So government-run media, I think pretty broadly, you could say is considered any media that is owned and operated by or extraordinarily influenced and controlled by the federal government. I think that the sort of insidious, scary embedded element of that is government run media is almost de facto propaganda. Government-run media is basically a government arm, right. And the government's going to represent itself within its best interests. Right?
Nick Capodice: So when we did our episode on Is America the freest, you know, the freest country in the world? We talked about the freedom of the press. I learned about some countries that do have state-controlled or government-controlled media. And what's interesting is it's always the radio. The radio is the form of media that the government always tries to control, because it's free and because it's cheap and it's most accessible. Like you can be working and listening to a radio. You can't be working maybe in watching a TV at the same time.
Anne Brachman: CPB has no role in content or editorial decision making. And Congress was very clear, and it was a big, intense debate during the making of the Public Broadcasting Act. You know, someone asked during the 67 debate, how can the federal government provide a source of funds to pay part of the cost of educational broadcasting and not control the final product? And their answer to that was CPB. Congress said that one of the fundamental reasons for establishing the corporation is to remove the programming activity from governmental supervision. So CPB was set up to be that heat shield, that firewall. We do have the objectivity and balance requirements within the act, but at the same time, we are told we cannot get involved in any editorial decision-making or control of stations or content. So there's tension between those two requirements.
Christina Phillips: Now, just because CPB does not get involved in any editorial decision-making, that doesn't mean it has no oversight on what kind of programming IT funds at all. The CPB is required to maintain this objectivity and balance requirement that Anne referenced, which basically means that it sets strategic goals for public media and lays out the kind of projects it will fund, and keeps an eye on how public media organizations that get funding are living up to those goals. And those goals are set and overseen by CPB management and a board of nine people appointed by the president, approved by Congress. That's required to have no more than five people from the same political party. They're made up of people who work in public media or have some sort of media background. And Anne gave me a summary of some of those strategic goals right now.
Anne Brachman: They came up working with CPB management with the Three D's Digital Diversity and Dialog, and the Three D's Guide. CPB's investments in all of our grant-making and digital is the innovation, making sure we're reaching Americans on every platform and how they want to consume content and, um, just being more cutting edge, diversity, age, geographic viewpoint, gender, ability, disability, race, ethnicity and then dialog. How are we engaging with our community?
Christina Phillips: Thoughts?
Nick Capodice: Can I relate to you all? You know, the process from which our show got started? Absolutely. I would love that. Yeah. So I was one of three people who went to Washington, D.C. to talk about Civics 101. And this was in order to like, secure further funding to make sure the show could exist. The people from the CPB that I met with and two others met with, they did say, you know, this is the kind of thing that would get support. You know, this is the kind of program, but you have to defend it. You have to like, say what you're going to do as a show, and then we will decide whether or not that meets all our criteria. But initially you can say there's no, you know, editorial process. But we were advised like, this is what's going to fly and this is what's not. But once that was done to a much broader point, since I've started working on the show, I have not once for a second had anybody communicate with me to be like, hey, you're still doing X, y, Z, or like, you know, are you following up with blah blah blah? Like, it's our show, we make it and nobody tells us anything, right?
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. And I like I want to talk about this a little bit if I may like. So this idea of okay, so the CPB is being described as like this firewall between the government and the public radio station. And I think also like there is a firewall between the CPB and the radio station itself. Right. So the like the driving force of that is the understanding that the proliferation of information to the American people is a very powerful thing, and that if the government is allowed to control that, that is not the free flow of information, truth and the press. Right. And so what I think is kind of remarkable about the creation of the CPB is that it's one of these instances of American history in which it's like there's something very ideological about it, writing down a law that, yes, we're going to support the free press because the free flow of information that is not influenced by the government, by anyone in charge is really, really important. Because, Nick, you know, you're describing this experience of not being influenced, not being told what to say and what not to say.
Hannah McCarthy: The whole democratic project. Right? Like what keeps happening in America is that the government tells us we have something. And so we say we have this, this is ours, right? You told us we have it. And like I defy you to show me a journalist who does not firmly believe in that. Right. Like there's nobody on staff here. There's no like. And I know Rebecca, our executive producer, stands behind this very much like the protection that the media yields over the ability to find the truth and report the truth without anyone telling them they can't. That's right, is so vital to us that the stink that we would make, right? Yeah. Like, yeah. Like the you would hear about it because we're reporters. Like it would be in the news and you do on occasion come across a story where reporters like, I didn't like this and I'm going to put it in the news, you know, like I'm going to make sure the American people know if anyone tries to influence me.
Christina Phillips: This is a conversation that's literally happening around us right now. We have an NPR media reporter who shared, like recently, David Folkenflik, about an experience he had with an executive at The Washington Post who was trying to pressure him to not do a story that would make him look bad. And David Folkenflik is like, okay, no, this happened to me. This is an experience I had, um, where this person was compromising the ethics of journalism, and I'm not okay with it.
Archive: So you're saying that in a conversation that wasn't off the record, he made a quid pro quo offer to you. Drop your story that I don't like, and I will give you a story, an exclusive interview that I do like. Is that it?
Archive: To misquote The Godfather, he gave me an offer I had to refuse. Okay.
Archive: And you did refuse this. You went ahead with the...
Nick Capodice: Can you even imagine if any journalist that we know and work with, like, got an email from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was like, hey, can you make sure to cover this story? Like, it would be like Watergate? Like nobody would shut up about it.
Christina Phillips: Well, actually, I do have an example of a time when the CPB did try to weaken that firewall or sort of stepped over that firewall. Is anyone familiar with this? It was in the early 2000.
Rebecca Lavoie: Rang a bell. Keep going.
Christina Phillips: Okay, so Kenneth Tomlinson was the chairman of the CPB board in the early 2000. He was appointed in 2003 by George W Bush. And he was pretty outspoken about the fact that he found certain programming on NPR and PBS, uh, to be too liberal. And so without permission, he used over $10,000 in CPB funds to commission a conservative consultant to write reports about Partizan bias on public media programs, including a show called now with Bill Moyers on PBS and The Diane Rehm Show, which was a public radio program. And one thing that this consultant was doing was tracking things like how often the president was criticized on the show, for example. And then the other thing he did is that he pushed for Counter-programming to Bill Moyers on PBS in the form of a talk show with conservative columnists from The Wall Street Journal. So two big problems here. He used CPB funds without permission to hire a consultant with a political agenda to study programs to determine whether or not they had political agendas. And then he tried to have an editorial role in PBS by telling them what kind of programs they should have, down to the specific hosts he wanted in the seats. And he did end up resigning from the board after he was investigated by CPB's inspector general. So that is one example of how the idea of nonpartisanship and a strict firewall isn't always impervious to political influence, and then how that played out. And after a quick break, we're going to talk about what stations like ours must do to get funding from the federal government and how that money is used. We'll also talk about the difference between us and NPR, because yes, we are different.
Hannah McCarthy: All right, we're back. This is Civics 101 from New Hampshire Public Radio. I am Hannah McCarthy. I'm here in the studio today with Nick Capodice, Rebecca Lavoie, Christina Phillips, of course, and Catherine Hurley, who is joining us for the summer. And we are delighted to have. And Christina, you are walking us right now through how public media works, and you're going to tell us what a place like us, like NPR needs to do to receive government money.
Christina Phillips: Yeah. And first, I want to answer one of the biggest questions any of us gets at any time. Um, when we say we work at NPR, which is are we NPR? Do you work for NPR? Do you know Terry Gross?
Rebecca Lavoie: Terry Gross doesn't work for NPR?
Nick Capodice: No, no, WHYY.
Christina Phillips: Another member station, is anyone does anyone want to take a crack at the like what is NHPR compared to NPR? How are we connected?
Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah, I answer this question all the time. Okay. Uh, so NPR is essentially a big vendor of ours. I mean, that's the best way to describe it. They're not like a parent company. We are an independent nonprofit. We buy programming from NPR to license and play on our airwaves. So basically we are buying programming from NPR, All Things Considered, uh, Morning Edition, you know, other programs, and we sort of have a co-branding agreement with them, a licensing co-branding agreement, but we pay them for that. Like we pay them a big pile of change for that. So they're basically like a giant vendor for us. It's sort of how it works. And we have a like a loose relationship with them. And, you know, station leadership, our station leader is not at this point in this position, but station heads like ours are actually on the board of NPR. So they actually have a little bit of control of like how NPR operates and so forth. But yeah, now we're actually independent but associated with buy content. Yeah.
Christina Phillips: And I will say that the big thing there is that we have our own newsroom, we've got our own journalists, we make our own stuff, and we can also purchase programming from other affiliate stations like ours. They're called member stations.
Rebecca Lavoie: And other networks. We purchase programming from APM, PRX, which is another independent nonprofit. There's other organizations like that from which you can buy programming. Wdiy distributes Fresh Air. There's other distributors, other networks that actually sell stuff to stations like ours as well.
Rebecca Lavoie: Music swell. Next topic.
Christina Phillips: I want to talk through some of the things that you need to do in order to qualify for CPB funding. So you could be a public media organization and still not qualify for CPB funding. There's like an additional layer of things you need to do in order to like get that money. And so there are half a dozen big ones. We already set a couple, which you have to be a nonprofit or affiliated with a university school or even a local government. And then another thing that we alluded to is that we cannot run political advertisements or endorse political candidates. So unlike, you know, The New York Times being like, we have endorsed whoever for president, none of that. And we will never run like a political ad, right?
Nick Capodice: It's so weird when I listen to other radio stations, you just driving around and all of a sudden it's like a presidential candidate being like, vote for me, Donald Trump. Like what? This doesn't happen on the radio. Yeah sure does.
Christina Phillips: It says a lot about your listening habits that you're like, wait a minute.
Anne Brachman: You also have to have a certain number of employees. You have to have for certain stations, a community advisory board in your community.
Christina Phillips: It has to report its finances transparently to the public, in our case, our nonprofit 990. Like there's other forms that we share basically saying like, here's where all our money is going. You can look at those all the time. I love looking at nonprofit 990. So like one of my favorite things, um, it has to be overseen by a board of directors that are invested in the community that the programming is serving and don't own or profit from their board service. So NPR's board has a mix of people who are living in New Hampshire. The board is beholden to the public that this station is serving. And then the other thing that I thought was interesting is that in order to get CPB funding, you have to have money in the bank already.
Panel: Hmm mhm hmm hmm hmm hmm.
Anne Brachman: For a public television station, for example, you have to have at least $800,000 in private, non, um, federal support, which means viewers like you, it means local foundations, local businesses, maybe state support, because CPB is determined over the years that you need at least $800,000 to offer a really strong public broadcasting service for public television, um, public radio. We also have certain minimums you have to have financially. So the most is $300,000 if you're a larger station, if you're a rural station minority station, it's $100,000.
Christina Phillips: The CPB is not just going to go out and be like, I think there should be a public radio station here. We're just going to dump a bunch of money and hire people. Like, there has to be somebody in a place with some capital saying, we want to start a station or we're already a station. We're doing all these things you need us to do.
Nick Capodice: That makes sense. You know, you don't want to back a bad pony. That's right, that's right. Yeah, yeah.
Christina Phillips: As I had mentioned earlier, NPR has reported that it only gets about 1% of its budget from the CPB. But that's also acknowledging that NPR, a lot of its budget comes from money that stations like ours spend to purchase NPR programming. So NPR would not get a lot of its money if there weren't stations like us who get funding from the government to buy NPR. programming is sort of the circle. And it's also worth pointing out that there are a lot of incentives and tax breaks on the federal, state and local level for public broadcasting, public media. I say that because the idea of public media only existing because of this government funding through the CPB, it's not a complete picture. And the idea of the government creating a space for public broadcasting has existed for a really long time, way before the government was like, okay, we're allocating this money to these stations, right?
Rebecca Lavoie: Can I just clarify something? So what you just basically said is NPR claims don't get less than 1% of its funding from the CPB. However, a station like ours that gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to NPR every year, no small portion of that is from the grant we get from the CPB. So we're essentially giving the money we got from the CPB back to NPR. So they actually get a lot of CPB funding just from other stations.
Christina Phillips: Yes. And this I think, is relevant when we talk about some of the legislation that has been proposed to defund CPB or defund NPR.
Rebecca Lavoie: Got it.
Nick Capodice: Let me just ask. A station like ours. NHPR. What percentage of our budget is money that comes from the CPB?
Christina Phillips: Do you guys have a guess?
Hannah McCarthy: I've looked it up.
Christina Phillips: Okay, so it's 6.3% for the fiscal year of 2023.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, it's like surprisingly low.
Christina Phillips: Yeah. And if you wanted to by the way, go to Nhpr.org. Or you can just Google NHPR 990. You can look at our 990 and it will break down how much money we got from federal grants.
Rebecca Lavoie: So it's it's more than half a million dollars. And I know that that's about what we pay NPR for our programming?
Christina Phillips: Yeah. Yeah. I mean I could look it up and do a it's a pretty close match. Like it's it's a lot.
Christina Phillips: Hello Christina from the future breaking in here. So listen I went back and looked this up. And in the last fiscal year that's July 2022 through June 2023, we actually spent more money buying content from NPR than we got from the CPB. I'm rounding here for simplicity's sake, but we got $580,000 from the CPB. That's money from taxpayers, the federal government through the CPB, and we spent around $739,000 on NPR programming. Overall, we spent about $900,000 on what's called affiliate program acquisition fees. That includes the NPR programming and then also programming we purchased from other public media organizations. But yeah, most of the money we spent acquiring national programming went directly to NPR, and it was more money than we got from the CPB. And that programming includes national and international news that you hear in the morning, in the evening, throughout the day, from shows like Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition.
Christina Phillips: The other thing is, I'll say is I asked Anne. The average public television station gets 18% of its funding from the CPB. The average public radio station gets about 8%, but rural stations, including tribal stations, might get 80, 90, 100% of their budget from the CPB. In the last thing is that a public media organization does not have to be affiliated with NPR or PBS in order to get funding from the CPB.
Anne Brachman: You know, people think that to get CPB money, you have to be a PBS member. You have to be a PBS NPR member. And that's not the case. There's nothing in the Public Broadcasting Act that says CPB can only give dollars to those stations who belong. We have about a handful of public television stations. I call them hyperlocal, meaning they're not PBS members, but they do independent programming, local programming. And on the NPR side, about a third of our stations are not, you know, NPR member stations, but they're doing music and content, you know, music programming and jazz and classical and local talk. Some tribal stations are keeping their local native languages alive. We have one tribal station that's 100%, and it's also a soul soul service station, meaning there's no other broadcaster within a 50 mile radius of that station. And so rural stations, typically, um, are about 19% of a rural station's budget and more than half of all of our rural grantees, which is about 135 stations, rely on CPB for at least 25% of their revenue. And we have 50 rural stations, many on Native American reservations, who rely on CPB funding for at least 50% of their revenue. And rural stations have more challenges as well. I mean, they have more infrastructure to maintain and operate over a larger geographic area with fewer viewers or listeners there to help financially support the station. And if it weren't for CPB and the federal investment, those Americans would not have access to news or informational educational content or even cultural programming.
Christina Phillips: So now we need to get to the thing. The political thing. Are you ready for the political thing? Yeah. Okay.
Archive: From 480 million to 0, that's the Trump administration's budget proposal for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the organization behind the GOP.
Archive: Sponsor of the bill says a government trillions of dollars in debt should not pay for non-essential services. Indiana Congressman Jim Banks, among a growing list of conservative lawmakers to push to defund NPR with a new bill that would outright block federal funding for the news organization, accusing Congress of spending taxpayer money on, quote, low-grade propaganda.
Christina Phillips: So there was a piece of legislation that was introduced during this legislative calendar from Representative Jim Banks. He's a Republican from Indiana called the defund NPR act. And.
Rebecca Lavoie: Okay.
Christina Phillips: And so this is, I think, interesting because it gets back to that idea of like NPR only getting quote unquote, 1% or less from the CPB, but then actually getting a lot of money from stations like ours that use the money that we earn and get in grants to buy their programming. The demand in that bill, which is has been introduced, is that no federal funds may directly or indirectly be made available to use or support an organization named in subsection B. In subsection B, it was NPR, um, including the payment of dues or the purchase of programming from such an organization by a public broadcast station using federal funds received by such station. So that's a little bit confusing. Essentially, what they're saying is that NPR cannot get funding from the federal government, and anyone that gets money from the federal government is not allowed to use federal funds to buy NPR programming.
Rebecca Lavoie: Wow.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. You know what's interesting, I've heard in my whole life, ever since I was a kid, this call to defund NPR and PBS, too, at times, what I think is kind of funny is that everybody who is in the camp of let's defund it always says the same thing, which is, well, we can't because they're just going to say, you're going after Cookie Monster and Big Bird and wow, we can't do that. You know that some people look at the acquisition and creation of Sesame Street as like, a nefarious way to make sure that you never lose funding from the government.
Archive: Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, Dennis Kozlowski, criminals, gluttons of greed, and the evil genius who towered over them. One man has the guts to speak his name. Big bird. Big bird, big bird. It's me, big bird. Big yellow, a menace to our economy. Mitt Romney knows it's not Wall Street you have to worry about. It's Sesame Street. I'm going to stop the subsidy to PBS. Mitt Romney taking on our enemies no matter where they nest.
Christina Phillips: And I will say, I did go and look through the funding history of the CPB, like over years. And there are certainly years where you see the funding appropriation, like, not go up for a while or maybe go down a little bit and it is apportioned. Is that the word like appropriated appropriated um two years in advance. So CPB funding for, you know, 2026 I guess would be decided in the 2024 year. The CPB has never been defunded, but there have been fluctuations that you can kind of trace across eras of Congress, most typically when there is a Republican-led Congress. That just seems to be how it is.
Rebecca Lavoie: So one thing that I've always heard is that one of the reasons why these bills ultimately fail is that even conservative lawmakers ultimately, who come from very rural districts, know that their constituency would be very upset if public media were to go away, because in some places that's the media, like public media is the TV because there's no broadband, there's no other stuff. That's the media. So that that's something that I have heard every time this conversation happens.
Christina Phillips: Yeah, I don't have a straight answer on that. But one thing I will say I think is interesting and maybe it's just my gut instinct, um, is that public media is sort of super entrenched already. Uh, for example, the CPB works with FEMA and has received funding from FEMA to help implement emergency broadcast infrastructure across the United States, which, if you've seen the news lately, about 911 systems going down for several hours in Massachusetts or patchy emergency service communications all over the country in the past few years, this is an essential service, and the CPB is essential in helping to build and maintain that kind of infrastructure. Now, that bill that Jim Banks proposed wouldn't necessarily impact that kind of funding, but it's still a good reminder that federal funding for public broadcasting goes far beyond funding individual media organizations like NPR and all of those individual public stations. The 1500 plus out there, with the exception of just a few, don't get most or even half or even a quarter of their money from the federal government.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay. But very, very importantly, right. If we go back to the reason that NPR exists, if we think about the original idea behind the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, behind National Public Radio, the idea is to bring in that firewalled like closest thing to the truth that you can national news to all of these communities around the country. Right. And so if you say you can no longer acquire and not only can you no longer acquire, but like the institution does not exist, that has the most money, has bureaus all around the world, is able to pay for reporters absolutely everywhere and gather national and international news in a way that a local radio station is not capable of doing. What that would mean is that these communities no longer have access to this noncommercial, national and international news. You know, I know that there are a lot of people out there who want something different, right? And who are in total support of that. I'm just saying that that's what it means, right? Like that you lose that access.
Rebecca Lavoie: Hmm.
Nick Capodice: Quick question, Christina, how much money does the CPB get every year? Like how much of my taxes are going towards the CPB?
Anne Brachman: Funding for CPB each year is less than a cup of black, a large cup of black coffee at McDonald's per person per year. And I think a lot of Americans, they will say, oh my gosh, we're paying so much money for our nation's public media service. I'm like, actually, if you go to McDonald's, you get a better bargain with all the services you're getting from CPB.
Nick Capodice: I have final thoughts, but I've talked too much lately, so I'll let someone else talk.
Christina Phillips: So I don't have any final...you can.
Rebecca Lavoie: You can sum it up.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, yeah. Let me just say to anybody out there we, you know, the five of us in this room work at a public radio station. So trust me when I say this in terms of, like, what is objective? Christina, before you worked with us, what show did you work on?
Christina Phillips: The Exchange.
Nick Capodice: What's the Exchange?
Christina Phillips: It was a live call-in news talk program.
Nick Capodice: Okay. And you worked on that show for a while, and you helped book guests on that show? Um, let me just give you a hypothetical. Let's say you had a guest on in the morning who was going to talk about climate change and how, like, a glacier is melting and people are going to what, someone's going to come up to you and say, who should the other guest be on the show?
Christina Phillips: Yeah. If we were, it would be, you know, well, what other perspectives do we need to bring in? And if it's not going to be the expert in the room, we have open phones.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. So we at public radio stations, more than anyone self-police to try to find objectivity, to make sure that we're giving it a fair shake. I think sometimes to a fault.
Rebecca Lavoie: That's right. And I will say working with the two of you, sometimes you worry too much about the perception of bias when you're just telling the truth.
Nick Capodice: Yeah.
Rebecca Lavoie: And this is a kind of editorial conversation we have all the time. And I'm like, guys, just let your truth flag fly.
Nick Capodice: Oh, did you have to use a flag?
Hannah McCarthy: And I also I just want to say really quick because like this conversation about like objectivity versus subjectivity. And I will just I am speaking only for myself. Hannah McCarthy, the individual, not for Civics 101 and like not for this station. Objectivity does not exist like no human being is capable of it. Like that would be so interesting if we were like, I would love to do a story about. I'll just say for me, what I am doing on a daily basis is genuinely trying to find the closest thing to the truth, which, by the way, is a lot harder than it seems because we talked to a lot of people who have different perspectives, who are scholars, who are politicians, etc., who are like either intentionally or not, representing their own bias, their own subjectivity. And so sometimes we try to triangulate or sometimes we just like, read everything we possibly can. Often the closest thing we can get to the truth is like finding the law and like saying like, okay, so like the law says this, and if that person says this and it conflicts with the law, then we like we know which one is true because one thing is like written down, right? Um, by Congress. But my point is just like it's it's less that we believe that we are like, like wholly capable of presenting objectivity. I don't think it's possible, but every single day of our lives is committed fully to trying not to listen to the parts of ourselves that are subjective, and trying to seek out the closest thing to the truth and give that to people. Because, like, my subjectivity doesn't help you. Like my personal perspective does not help you at all. The truth will help you do what you will with the truth. Apply your subjectivity to the to the truth. I will just try to find it and give it to you.
Rebecca Lavoie: I think it's important to understand too, that you don't always like the truth, right?
Hannah McCarthy: No you don't.
Rebecca Lavoie: And I would say we love getting part of our funding from an organization that, you know, doesn't interfere, but we also would do what we would do without it. Let's be real.
Christina Phillips: Yeah. And to Hannah's point about trying every day to get as close to the truth as we possibly can, um, I'll just say there's absolutely an argument that the federal government should not give money to public media organizations. You listener may feel that way. You may have felt that way before you listened to this episode. And whether you come down on the side of yes, the federal government should pay for public media or no, it shouldn't. If this episode helped you feel more informed in that opinion. If you learn something, then I've kind of done my job right.
Hannah McCarthy: That is it, right?
Rebecca Lavoie: That's it, that's it.
Christina Phillips: Hey, it's me again. Just me and this good 'ol microphone alone by myself. Here are our credits.
Christina Phillips: This episode was produced by me, Christina Phillips, and edited by our executive producer Rebecca Lavoie, with help from our host Nick Capodice and Hannah McCarthy and our summer intern, Catherine Hurley. Catherine, we are so happy to have you here. And, uh, by the way, since we recorded this episode, originally, there has been more legislation introduced to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. You can find links to more information about all of this legislation in our show. Notes. Music in this episode from Epidemic Sound and Chris Zabriskie Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public radio. I'm out.
