Why a philanthopic effort to bolster public broadcasting may harm local news outlets
Major philanthropies are stepping up to offset some of the cuts to public television and radio, Benjamin Mullin reports in The New York Times (gift link). But will it be enough? And what possible downstream effects might there be on local news organizations that also depend heavily on foundation money?
As we all know, the Republican Congress, acting at the behest of Donald Trump, eliminated funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting earlier this summer. The CPB, a semi-independent agency, had been set to spend $500 million over the next two years.
PBS and NPR receive most of their funding from grants and donations by, well, viewers and listeners like you, but their member stations — especially in less affluent and rural areas — are more dependent on government funding. Both national networks have been cutting their budgets in an attempt to help their member stations survive.
According to Mullin, foundations such as Knight, MacArthur, Ford and others have come up with an emergency $26.5 million to keep those stations afloat with a goal of reaching $50 million this year. “We believe it’s crucial to have a concerted, coordinated effort to make sure that the stations that most critically need these funds right now have a pathway to get them,” Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, the president and chief executive of the Knight Foundation, was quoted as saying.
But $50 million is not $500 million, and it’s unclear how much additional funding will be provided. Former ProPublica president Richard J. Tofel, now a consultant, cast a sideways glance at the Times story in a post on Bluesky, observing that the $50 million is already down from a goal of $100 million. (Tofel also wrote a smart post for his newsletter last month about the need for public media executives to think more creatively about how to thrive without government funding.)
What this story omits is that the target for this fund was originally $100 million, now halved. And that by raising $50 million once it somehow seeks to “bridge” the loss of $250 million every year.www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/b…
— Richard Tofel (@dicktofel.bsky.social) 2025-08-19T10:22:53.966Z
Moreover, these same foundations provide a lot of support to local news organizations other than public television and radio stations, which tend to be more regional in their focus than truly local. The Knight, MacArthur and Ford foundations, for instance, are all involved in Press Forward, an initiative that has raised $500 million to support local news, and they have invested in community journalism in other ways as well.
Local news is especially sparse in exactly the same places that are underserved by public broadcasting — in urban communities of color and in rural areas. There are only so many philanthropic dollars out there, and the folks making decisions on where to allocate it are going to face hard choices over whether they should prioritize public broadcasting or community journalism. Or, for that matter, anti-poverty agencies, public health or any of the other worthy programs that Trump and his minions are slashing and burning.
Just last week, Stephanie Sy of the “PBS NewsHour” reported on the closure of 23 local news organizations in five states owned by the News Media Corp. chain. Nearly all of these outlets were located in rural areas; fortunately, news executives in Wyoming stepped up to save eight of them, according to Rebecca Huntington of WyoFile.
Local news publishers would be the first to tell you that the promise of national money is largely unrealized, and that what really matters is to develop community-based sources of funding such as voluntary donations or subscriptions, advertising, events and grants from philanthropic agencies closer to home. National money through initiatives such as the Institute for Nonprofit News’ NewsMatch program should be looked at as a supplement, not a primary source of revenue.
Then, too, there are policy ideas such as tax credits, which have failed repeatedly at the national level but which are being tried in several states, including New York and Illinois.
The dream of extracting money from tech giants for repurposing their journalism, especially Google and Meta, refuses to die. In Editor & Publisher, Gretchen Peck reports on how it’s going in Canada, where funds are starting to flow from Google but where Meta has pulled all news content rather than pay. That has led to a surge of misinformation on Facebook and other Meta-owned platforms, Leyland Cecco reported in The Guardian.
What all this means is that Trump’s perverse war on public media is probably going to harm not just radio and television stations but community journalism organizations as well. Still, that shouldn’t stop local news publishers and policymakers from exploring all possible alternatives. Big Philanthropy is not going to save them.