PBS and NPR: Still here

One year after President Trump signed the bill rescinding all federal funding for PBS and NPR, neither the greatest fears of public media fans nor the greatest hopes of public media detractors have come true.

“They’re sort of gone now, I guess,” Trump said in January. “I heard they’re closed up.”

But the public radio networks are actually faring better than expected. Despite layoffs and other cost-cutting moves, NPR and PBS are covering dozens of news stories a day and streaming all sorts of entertainment, just like before. Local stations are launching podcasts and newsletters to reach people in new places.

Station executives credit a burst of philanthropy caused by the GOP’s funding cut. “Stations saw record giving, with some even raising enough to cover the loss of federal funding,” Current’s Tyler Falk reported yesterday.

In Alaska, for example, where there were serious fears that rural stations would go off the air altogether, Alaska Public Media has gained thousands of new members. “Still, there is more work to do to secure a sustainable future,” the outfit’s website says.

The Public Media Bridge Fund has helped vulnerable stations with grants, loans and coaches to figure out “sustainable” ways forward. Some stations have been merging and finding other ways to work together.

As Falk wrote, “a boom in fundraising after a crisis often precedes a big decline when donors move on to the next emergency.” So stations are now working to retain those donors and add new revenue streams. His story is full of fantastic detail about how that’s happening.

In this terrific story timed to the one-year anniversary of the federal funding cut, NPR’s David Folkenflik surveyed the public media landscape and found urgency, hope and anxiety at stations: Urgency “because change is being forced upon them.” Hope “because listeners, viewers and philanthropists stepped up.” Anxiety “because station executives do not know how long that support will last.”

Folkenflik noted that some predictions have not come to pass, like the talk about “local stations dropping NPR and PBS programs and affiliations. In the year since, that’s played out in only a handful of places.” For instance, “in Alabama and Mississippi, state-subsidized networks threatened to drop programs. That hasn’t happened, so far.”

He also pointed out that the relative stability of the system, one year later, “would appear to confirm the position of some conservative critics who say people who value public media can pay for it themselves.”

That said, “the outlook remains highly uncertain,” as CNN alum Rachel Smolkin, Oregon Public Broadcasting’s CEO, told supporters in a recent letter. Smolkin wrote, “federal funding cuts aren’t the only challenge we face. Local journalism is in crisis, and newspapers that once were the bedrock for trusted information face steep job losses and even closures. AI has introduced new complexities for connecting people with factual, original reporting.”

So, apologies if this sounds cliché, but a lot depends on “viewers like you.”

“News consumers will have the last say on public media’s future,” NPR public editor Kelly McBride wrote last week.

Her column described a number of ongoing challenges, including state-level funding cuts.

“Public pressure can clearly influence the way states and universities support public media,” McBride wrote. “But the biggest impact people can have is by consuming the news and other content that public media creates. For their part, NPR and the member stations must continue their solid work and also find ways to compel listeners and readers to seek it out.”

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins brushed off Trump’s recent attacks during a chat with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” last night.

“I was not surprised when he insulted me,” Collins said, noting that it “happens pretty regularly inside the Oval Office.” Last Friday’s dinner, she added, was simply “a bigger venue where it was happening.”

“It’s really not about me, and I don’t want it to be about my reaction,” Collins told Stewart. “And so I think if you let it become about that, then it becomes a back and forth between the two of us. And instead, I think it’s more effective to remind people in those moments when he is insulting me or when he is criticizing me about the question I asked; or the reporting that I did that he was so angry about in this moment; and the fact that I got an award for it really bothered him, clearly. And so I just think in those moments, it’s important to put the reminder back on the work, on the question, and on the non-answers that we get.”

Bravo. Watch the full segment here.

>> Stewart also lambasted the WHCD itself, calling it a “perverse bargain” and an “act of submission.” Bill Carter recapped it all for LateNighter…

In the Southern District of Florida, US Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Aytch Lett has handed down a written order stating that Trump’s trust “will be compelled to provide financial documents from his businesses” to the BBC as part of the discovery process in Trump v. BBC, Deadline’s Ted Johnson reports.

*You’ll recall that we wrote about this situation last week. Now we wait to see if and how Trump appeals.

Elsewhere in Florida, Steven Merryday, the judge overseeing Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, “has deferred ruling on the newspaper’s request to toss the case, and instead is allowing Trump to revise his complaint,” Bloomberg’s Erik Larson reports.

Trump, of course, hyped this as a victory, writing on Truth Social that the NYT had “failed again in their desperate attempt to have our powerful Defamation Lawsuit against them dropped.”

Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander reality-checked that: “The judge simply gives him yet another chance to draft a complaint that demonstrates any legal merit. The President has had this chance twice previously and failed each time.”

CNN’s Holmes Lybrand writes: The Atlantic has asked a federal judge in DC to dismiss the lawsuit brought by FBI Director Kash Patel over an article by Sarah Fitzpatrick that alleged, among other things, Patel “alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.”

In a Monday filing, The Atlantic’s attorneys argued that Patel’s $250 million defamation suit should be thrown out because he “does not, and cannot, state a viable defamation claim.” Editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg said The Atlantic is also seeking permission to obtain documents and take depositions from the FBI and DOJ. “If Director Patel did not want to face this process, he should not have filed this suit,” he said in a statement.

The outlet accused Patel of using the lawsuit to punish critical reporting. “These tactics strike at the very foundation of the First Amendment, which was adopted to prevent powerful government officials — like Director Patel — from controlling the public narrative by ‘punish[ing] the dissemination of material that is embarrassing to the powers-that-be,’” its lawyers wrote, quoting a concurring opinion in the Supreme Court’s landmark Pentagon Papers case…

In a companywide memo yesterday, David Ellison “sought to project confidence that his $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery will — eventually — cross the finish line,” Variety’s Todd Spangler reported. He ended the memo with a rallying cry: “Let’s go!”

Spangler and Michael Schneider also reported that “privately,” some top executives at Warner Bros are rooting for the state AGs. I’d say this quote from an anonymous company insider sounds accurate: Across WBD, “people are in different head spaces” about the Paramount merger…

“BuzzFeed will lay off approximately 180 employees across BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Tasty in the first major restructuring since Byron Allen took control of the digital media company earlier this year,” TheWrap’s A.J. Katz reports.

That’s more than a third of the staff, the NYT’s Ben Mullin notes. “For context: Before today’s cuts, it had north of 500 employees. Three years ago, it had more than double that.”

I’m on the lookout for the Amazon delivery truck to arrive with “Biological War,” the new book by Annie Jacobsen, whose “Nuclear War” in 2024 became a bestseller.

Also getting rave reviews today: “All That’s Unseen: An Appalachian Memoir” by Emilee Hackney. Ten years after JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” “we finally have an Appalachian memoir worthy of its origins,” Jamie Quatro wrote for the NYT.

Plus, Michael Grynbaum’s “Empire of the Elite” is out in paperback with fresh reporting on Anna Wintour and Vogue…

>> Executives at Bloomberg “have been having preliminary talks with investment bankers about a potential IPO or other transaction,” Liz Hoffman reports. (Semafor)

>> French broadcaster Canal+ “has signed a five-year agreement to invest $1.11 billion in French and European cinema starting in 2028, its largest ever commitment to the industry it clashed with just weeks ago.” (Reuters)

>> ABC News is launching a $2.99-a-month podcast subscription offering for “20/20 True Crime+.” (Variety)

Yesterday’s huge streaming news: “NBCUniversal’s Peacock is officially landing on YouTube,” CNBC’s Lillian Rizzo wrote, with all of Peacock’s content “included in YouTube Premium subscriptions in the U.S. starting early next year.”

M.G. Siegler said it looks like a “hackquisition” of sorts, “like YouTube de facto bought Peacock and is now tying it into their offering.” The tie-up “will naturally move YouTube into more direct competition with Netflix, shocking no one… YouTube will now get premium shows and movies but without having to directly commission them.”

OpenAI’s ChatGPT “is now refusing requests to generate text that directly mimics the style of famous authors,” ArsTechnica’s Kyle Orland reports, noting that when prompted, the chatbot “instead offers a response that draws on the ‘broad qualities’ of those authors ‘while remaining distinct in its own voice,’ for example.”

The finding follows July analysis from No Latency that “found the same behavior for living authors but found ChatGPT complied with style-copying requests for deceased authors,” Orland writes. You can read more on that here…

This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.