Tag Archives: All Things Considered

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The Future of Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) Under Trump? Precarious.

Update: May 2, 2025: President Trump signed an Executive Order on May 1, 2025 stating, “I therefore instruct the CPB Board of Directors (CPB Board) and all executive departments and agencies (agencies) to cease Federal funding for NPR and PBS.” It’s not clear how this order can be implemented since the president has also asked Congress to approve a recission package for there Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has not been acted upon by Congress.

Update: April 14, 2025: The Trump administration said today it would end funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR. It said it would   ask lawmakers to cut more than $9 billion in funding for the Public Broadcasting Service, National Public Radio and foreign aid in the current fiscal year,. The proposal — known as a rescission package — would codify cuts identified by the Department of Government Efficiency an attempt to employ a little-used legislative tactic for reducing spending already approved by Congress.

The White House plans to send the package to Congress on April 28, starting a 45-day period during which the administration can legally withhold the funding. If Congress votes down the plan or does nothing, the administration must release the money back to the intended recipients. The Congressional Institute has written a detailed explanation of how the rescission process works. 

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The Trump administration has made no secret of its hostility to public broadcasting.

Even before the Nov. 2024 election, Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to transform the federal government during the next conservative administration, called for the government to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting(CPB). CPB is a private, nonprofit corporation fully funded by the federal government which is the largest single source of funding for public radio and television. CPB was created by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. (A video on the history of PBS is available at https://shorturl.at/7o1X2.)

CPB funds National Public Radio (NPR), which serves as a national syndicator to a network of more than 1,000 public radio stations in the United States, and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the private, non-profit corporation that distributes programming to public television stations in the United States. 

Mike Gonzalez, a Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation who authored the section on the CPB in Project 2025’s policy guide, argued that both NPR and PBS have a liberal bias and that the “government should not be compelling the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views.” Gonzalez also argued that the federal government cannot afford to spend half a billion dollars “on leftist opinion” each year because it is trillions of dollars in debt.

In an all-caps April 10, 2024 post on Truth Social, his social media platform, candidate Trump wrote: 

Donald J. Trump @realDonald Trump NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM! EDITOR SAID THEY HAVE NO REPUBLICANS, AND IS ONLY USED TO “DAMAGE TRUMP'” THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!

Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025 as a whole in his 2024 campaign, but he has vigorously pursued many of its proposals since becoming president and has appointed many of its authors to key government posts.  

As president, Trump has restated his opposition to funding non-commercial public broadcasting, as has Elon Musk, Trump’s crony.  And because CPB has no ongoing federal funding mechanism, annual Congressional appropriations are required. That opens the door for Trump.

Dick Tofel, the former President of ProPublica, wrote on Substack, “ …they will very likely, sometime this year, have the votes they need to smash the current arrangement. That will occur, I think, in significant part because the current regime does not have the political will to materially cut federal spending and thus feels compelled to cut immaterial spending (federal aid to public broadcasting costs Americans about $1.50 per person) in a performative manner that, they hope, fools their base.”

Tofel’s view is that whether Trump wants to force public stations off the air altogether or just eliminate their national news programming, “the distinction will hardly matter” in communities that can’t afford to mount substantial operations of their own.  Funding cuts at the national level would, he says, most likely mean the loss of shows such as Morning Edition and All Things Considered, the NPR morning and afternoon shows, PBS’ Frontline and PBS News Hour.  In larger, richer (bluer) cities (such as Portland), some parts of local efforts will likely be salvaged, he thinks. 

For fiscal year 2025, Congress appropriated $535 million for CPB. This year, Republicans have introduced multiple bills to defund CPB and on March 25, 2025, a day before the heads of PBS and NPR testified before a House subcommittee, trump said he’d be “honored” to see funding for public broadcasting end.

In a January 16, 2025, message, Rachel Smolkin, OPB ‘s president and CEO, raised the alarm about potential cuts in federal support to her station and others around the country, but took care to note that “Federal support represents a relatively small portion of OPB’s operating budget “. In fiscal year 2023, government grants to OPB totaled $4,679,653 or 9.5% of the station’s $49,370,988 in revenue from contributions.[1]  In most instances, sponsorships are considered charitable contributions by the underwriters.  On OPB’s IRS Form 990, these sponsorships are included in the $49,370,988 reported as contributions and grants. There is also a small amount of sponsorships that meet the definition of advertising, which primarily occur on OPB’s digital platforms.  For FY 23, advertising is included in the program service revenue of $1,381,015 and in unrelated business revenue reported on OPB’s IRS Form 990-T.  

For FY 23, advertising is included in the program service revenue of $1,381,015 and in unrelated business revenue reported on our IRS Form 990-T.  Sponsorships are not otherwise disclosed on the tax filings.  Total revenue was $56,821,607.

Notable Sources of Revenue$Percent of Total Revenue
Contributions$49,370,988            86.9%
Program Services$1,381,015               2.4%
Investment Income$3,446,034               6.1%
Bond Proceeds$0 
Royalties$0 
Rental Property Income$415,851                0.7%
Net Fundraising$0 
Sales of Assets$2,207,719                 3.9%
Net Inventory Sales$0 
                                                                       

Could OPB survive without the federal grants? Probably, but the hit would be hard. 

The impact of any cut in OPB’s programming would be felt particularly by Oregon and Southern Washington’s more educated and higher income populace (71% of OPB’s TV audience, 82% of OPB’s digital audience and 85% of OPB’s radio audience has attended college). The public broadcast audience also typically falls into higher household income categories and have for years, primarily because households that listen to public media tend to have more formal education.

But that is part of the problem. An increasing number of the rest of the population is tuning out.

NPR‘s weekly broadcast audience has been experiencing audience declines, as have NPR’s podcasts, and sponsorship revenue has dipped. And CPB took  a big hit last year when former NPR business editor Uri Berliner posted an essay on the Free Press substack site accusing the organization of adopting a left-wing stance in which “race and identity” were “paramount.”

Earlier this month, the NY Times reported on an NPR document that detailed what would happen if the Treasury stopped cutting checks to CPB. “NPR can weather the funding cut… thanks in part to aggrieved listeners: Executives predict a sudden boom in donations if Congress defunds it, as listeners rush to defend their favorite programs.,” the report said. “But they will likely give more in big-city markets.”

Public television in the United States would likely be in worse shape, the report said, because PBS receives much more of its budget from the federal government.

In a weird sort of way, the collapse of so much of the traditional news media and the rise of one-sided communications might be public broadcasting’s savior. 

Some analysts think things have gotten so bad in a fractured media environment that public broadcasting is more critical. A reason for hope, the Los Angeles Times wrote in March 2025, is that “… the American media landscape is in such poor shape that NPR is more necessary than ever. Across the country, print journalism has imploded. Commercial TV and radio news operations are also in decline. Especially in red states, NPR is sometimes the only source of local news. True, people everywhere now get information from cable channels, random websites or social media, but many still want what NPR offers.” 

With that in mind, the debate over funding for public broadcasting, and OPB’s future, is a reminder that depending on government money for a service can be a trap. That money is always subject to the political winds.  If a free press is dependent on whether a Trump-like personality is in office, more local public support may be vastly preferable.

[1] Figures are from Form 990 which non-profits are required to file annually with the IRS. These CPB grants are included in the Contributions and Grants revenue of $49,370,988 on OPB’s FY 2023 IRS Form 990. CPB grants are not included in government grants on the Form 990 as CPB is a private, nonprofit corporation, not a government agency. 

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Media Malpractice: Reporting on Post-Election Hate

stopthehate

There’s not just fake news out there. There’s also a lot of reporting that’s just plain unreliable and biased, but is accepted uncritically by people because it fits their preconceived expectations and those of their like-minded circle.

Tales of hate incidents, threats and intimidation of minorities abound, with many commentators suggesting there’s a linkage between the incidents and Donald Trump’s election.

Much of the recent debate has relied on data gathered by the Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

On Nov. 29, the SPLC released reports “documenting (emphasis mine) how President-elect Donald Trump’s own words have sparked hate incidents across the country and had a profoundly negative effect on the nation’s schools”. The reports said that in the ten days after the election the SPLC counted 867 incidents of harassment and intimidation.

Most of the incidents cited by the SPLC involved anti-immigrant incidents (136), followed by anti-black (89) and anti-LGBT (43). A “Trump” category (41) referred to incidents where there was no clear defined target, like the vandalism of a “unity” sign in Connecticut, which the SPLC categorized as “pro-Trump vandalism”.

The New York Times jumped on the report, observing that, “Hate Crimes have surged across the country,” linking that assertion to the SPLC ‘s “hate crimes” reports and denouncing Trump for not being more aggressive in “condemning the hate talk and violence being done in his name.”

The New Yorker, citing the SPLC reports, said, “Since Donald Trump won the Presidential election, there has been a dramatic uptick in incidents of racist and xenophobic harassment across the country.”

“Hate, harassment incidents spike since Trump election”, CBS News reported, basing its report largely on SPLC’s data.

Willamette Week picked up the SPLC’s report, running a story headlined, “Report on Post-Election Hate Incidents Shows Oregon at Top of List; New Southern Poverty Law Center info paints alarming picture of Pacific Northwest.”

NPR’s All Things Considered also had a segment on the topic.

“Since Tuesday (Nov. 8), the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, has counted some 250 incidents…. ,” said NPR’s Eyder Peralta. “While they have not verified all of them, they include anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-Muslim messages and, in the case of a Michigan middle school, a lunchroom anti-immigrant taunt – build the wall.”

“I think that the emotions that were unleashed by the Trump campaign’s use of bigotry as a tool to get elected has reached every part of our society, “ said Heidi Beirich, an employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) described as an expert on various forms of extremism. “I think that the emotions that were unleashed by the Trump campaign’s use of bigotry as a tool to get elected has reached every part of our society.”

Because the SPLC is widely recognized as a reputable source, or because many media outlets have taken the easy way out and simply parroted the SPLC’s reports, the media have been awash in reports citing the SPLC data.

There’s one big problem. Media don’t note that the SPLC has not verified the incidents it cites so breathlessly as evidence of a spike in hate crimes..

On its website, the SPLC admits the hate incidents it cites came from news reports, social media, and direct submissions via SPLC’s #ReportHate page. “These incidents, aside from news reports, are largely anecdotal” and “…it was not possible to confirm the veracity of all reports” the SPLC says.

And there’s no way for the public to even read the details of all the reported incidents because the SPLC’s website doesn’t provide access to them.

There may, indeed, have been a recent rise in hate incidents, and the SPLC’s reports make for bone-chilling reading. But the reports don’t “document” hate incidents if the word is taken to mean providing hard evidence.

Hanna Goldfield addressed the critical need for writing to be accurate, even if an alternative version is more “beautiful” or makes a story stronger, in a piece she wrote for the New Yorker. “The conceit that one must choose facts or beauty—even if it’s beauty in the name of “Truth” or a true “idea”—is preposterous,” she said. “A good writer—with the help of a fact-checker and an editor, perhaps—should be able to marry the two, and a writer who refuses to even try is, simply, a hack.”

Reporters should also recognize that data sources are rarely neutral observers. the SPLC, for example, has a position to plead, a message to deliver in order to generate contributions, a desire to be quoted so its influence will be enhanced.

Paul Sperry, a former Washington bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily, also points out that although the SPLC claims to be a nonpartisan civil rights law firm, it receives funding from leftist groups, including ones controlled by billionaire George Soros. And a review of Federal Election Commission records reveals that its board members contributed more than $13,400 to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns.

In summary, there’s a lesson here for current and aspiring reporters. Reporters shouldn’t just accept and promote information that affirms their biases or makes for a story that attracts a lot of clicks.  That’s sloppy reporting that undermines trust in the media, and rightfully so.