The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has helped pay for PBS, NPR, 1,500 local radio and television stations, and programs such as Sesame Street and Finding Your Roots, announced Friday it would shut down after the U.S. government removed its funding.
The organization told staff most positions will end with the fiscal year on September 30. A small transition team will remain until January.
The private nonprofit corporation was founded in 1968 after Congress authorized its formation. It now comes to an end after almost six decades of fueling the production of celebrated educational programming, cultural content, and emergency alerts about natural disasters.
Trump cancels funding
President Donald Trump signed a bill on July 24, canceling about $1.1 billion that had been approved for public broadcasting. The White House claims the public media system is politically biased, and an unnecessary expense, and conservatives have particularly directed their anger at NPR and PBS.
Lawmakers with large rural constituencies voiced concern about what the cuts could mean for some local public stations in their state. They warned that some stations will have to close.
The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday reinforced the policy change by excluding funding for the corporation for the first time in more than 50 years as part of a broader spending bill.
How it started
Congress passed legislation creating the body in 1967. This came several years after Newton Minow, the then-Federal Communications Commission chair, described commercial television as a “vast wasteland” and called for programming in the public interest.
The corporation doesn’t produce programming, and it doesn’t own, operate, or control any public broadcasting stations. The corporation, PBS, and NPR are independent of each other, as are local public television and radio stations.
Rural stations hit hard
Roughly 70 percent of the corporation’s money went directly to 330 PBS and 246 NPR stations across the country. The cuts are expected to weigh most heavily on smaller public media outlets away from big cities, and it’s likely some won’t survive. NPR’s president estimated that as many as 80 NPR stations may close in the following year.
Mississippi Public Broadcasting has already decided to eliminate a streaming channel that airs children’s programming such as ‘Caillou’ and ‘Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood’ 24 hours a day.
Maine’s public media system is looking at a hit of $2.5 million, or about 12 percent of its budget, for the next fiscal year. The state’s rural residents rely heavily on public media for weather updates and disaster alerts.
In Kodiak, Alaska, KMXT estimated the cuts would slice 22 percent from its budget. Public radio stations in the sprawling, heavily rural state often provide not just news but alerts about natural disasters like tsunamis, landslides, and volcanic eruptions.
From Big Bird to war documentaries
‘Sesame Street’ initially aired in 1969. Child viewers, adults, and guest stars alike were instantly hooked. Over the decades, characters from Big Bird to Cookie Monster and Elmo have become household favorites.
Entertainer Carol Burnett appeared on that inaugural episode.
“I would have done anything they wanted me to do,” she said. “I loved being exposed to all that goodness and humor.”
The New York Times reports ‘Sesame Street’ will survive without the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NPR and PBS get a relatively small portion of their annual budget from the corporation, and children’s TV programs are produced independently of those organizations.
Still, the NYT reports the cutbacks could affect the availability of those shows, particularly in pockets of the country without widespread access to broadband internet and mobile data.
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. started the program ‘Finding Your Roots’ in 2006 under the title ‘African American Lives’. He invited prominent Black celebrities and traced their family trees back to slavery. When the paper trail ran out, they would use DNA to see which ethnic group they were from in Africa. Challenged by a viewer to open the show to non-Black celebrities, Gates agreed, and the series was renamed ‘Faces of America’, which had to be changed again after the name was taken.
The show is PBS’s most-watched program on linear TV and the most-streamed non-drama program. Season 10 reached nearly 18 million people across linear and digital platforms and also received its first Emmy nomination.
Grant money from the nonprofit has also funded lesser-known food, history, music, and other shows created by stations across the country.
Documentarian Ken Burns, celebrated for creating the documentaries ‘The Civil War’, ‘Baseball’, and ‘The Vietnam War’, told PBS NewsHour that the corporation accounted for about 20 percent of his films’ budgets. He said he would make it up, but projects receiving 50 percent to 75 percent of their funding from the organization won’t.
The influence of shows
Children’s programming in the 1960s was made up of shows including ‘Captain Kangaroo’, ‘Romper Room’, and the violent skirmishes between ‘Tom & Jerry’. ‘Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood’ mostly taught social skills. PBS also aired programs by ‘Monty Python’ and broadcast shows such as ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘The French Chef’ with Julia Child.
Education professionals and child psychologists designed ‘Sesame Street’ to help low-income and minority students aged between two and five overcome some of the deficiencies they had when entering school. Social scientists had long noted that white and higher-income kids were often better prepared.
One of the most widely cited studies about the impact of ‘Sesame Street’ compared households that got access to the show with those who didn’t. It found that the children exposed to ‘Sesame Street’ were 14 percent more likely to be enrolled in the correct grade level for their age at middle and high school.
Over the years, ‘Finding Your Roots’ showed Natalie Morales discovering she’s related to one of the legendary pirates of the Caribbean, and former ‘Saturday Night Live’ star Andy Samberg finding his biological grandmother and grandfather. It revealed that drag queen RuPaul and Senator Cory Booker are cousins, as are actors Meryl Streep and Eva Longoria.
“The two subliminal messages of ‘Finding Your Roots’, which are needed more urgently today than ever, is that what has made America great is that we’re a nation of immigrants,” said Gates.
“And secondly, at the level of the genome, despite our apparent physical differences, we’re 99.99 percent the same.”
