On May 1st President Trump issued an executive order aimed at ending government funding for PBS and NPR. New Mexico PBS gets $1.7 million annually in federal funding or about 18% of its budget. NMPBS General Manager Franz Joachim spoke with New Mexico in Focus correspondent Gwyneth Doland about what potential funding cuts mean for his station and the entire public media network.
FRANZ JOACHIM: Losing 18% of any business's revenue is going to be pretty hard to take. The real issue is the smaller stations in most states, particularly Western and rural states, where that percentage of their operating budget is quite a bit higher. It's as high as 40% in some cases. In television stations and radio stations, it runs the gamut. But I know there are stations in New Mexico that are existing almost 100%, say 98%, on that federal appropriation. And these are communities that do not have the population or the dollars in that population to support public media through, you know, just philanthropic individual giving. There's not an opportunity to sell underwriting space -- ads, if you will -- because there's just not enough population to warrant that. Public Media's goal is to serve all of these unserved and underserved populations, and the only way to do that is through some means of funding, beyond the philanthropic.
NEW MEXICO IN FOCUS: This federal funding has been contentious for decades. Why not just, say, get rid of it. And, you know, go out for philanthropic funding. Double down on underwriting. Keep hustling for money on the TV?
JOACHIM: Per capita, we receive more dollars from members in New Mexico than just about any other station in the country. So I'm not sure where else we go. Philanthropic through corporate donations -- that is nice when it's working, when the economy is good and the message fits. But because of the nature of public television and the restrictions that are placed on us in terms of what is called advertising, we're not allowed to do what other stations, what commercial stations are allowed to do. We're not allowed to use the same language, we're not allowed to use the same visuals. We're much more restricted in how we do it, and that's much less of an incentive for advertisers to use us for advertising. So indeed, most of the corporate donations we get are genuinely philanthropic donations, where we are required by law to tell everybody that we're receiving these donations, and the way we do that is through these underwriting spots. If you notice the language is something like “Brought to you in part by viewers like you. And by the way, this company has been supporting public media for 45 years.” They're not saying, “Come on down and buy stuff.” They're saying, “We support public media.” It's a very different message, and it's a philanthropic message, but it's also not a message that is going to lend to a lot of advertising dollars.
NMIF: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is this thing that Congress created, and the money kind of flows through. But can you just talk us through how that works?
JOACHIM: Certainly. So the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created by an act of Congress in 1967 and they were created as a private, independent corporation that would receive federal appropriations from Congress, and then they would distribute those funds to public television and public radio stations around the country. They also act as a firewall so that Congress and the White House and any other arm of the federal government can't insert themselves into the process and basically affect the funding or hold the funding based on things that that particular administration or that particular Congress feels might be important in the moment.
NMIF: And that's exactly what appears to be happening. Now, the White House said on social media that NPR and PBS, quote, “receive millions from taxpayers to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as news.” So I think it's important to note that we're not sure exactly what's going to happen now, because there are some barriers in Trump's way. First, legal experts say the President just doesn't have the authority to undo the budget that Congress made. And second, the Supreme Court has ruled that the government can't make federal funding contingent on stations editorial decisions, but it's still a very real threat and a very real possibility. I understand that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting sued Trump over his move to fire three of the five board members, and I think it's fair to assume that there will be lawsuits over this recent move, but it could still happen. So what are you doing now to prepare for the possibility of those cuts?
JOACHIM: So we do have some savings in place to keep us whole for the time being, but it's really again, less about us as an individual station and more about the network. It's okay to be a public television station, but if there's no PBS feeding us programming, if you're not getting “Nature” or “NOVA” from PBS, that's not something we're going to be able to create by ourselves. So the whole system starts to break down when all the pieces start to disappear. So if New Mexico PBS survives, and I expect that we will, at least for a while, that doesn't mean that other stations are going to survive and that we're not going to be beholden to picking up the services that they are now dropping and filling in those gaps and spending more of our time and more of our money on more things with less to work from. So it's really more about the system honestly than it is about an individual station.