Who pays for public media?

Public media funding makes up less than 0.001% of the federal budget, and calls to defund it have existed essentially since the creation of the CBP in 1967. However, the history of public media is much longer, and more complicated, than the creation of Sesame Street or NPR. We revisit our episode from last year about how the government funds public media, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and how that money is spent. We also talk about free press, and the firewall that prevents politicians and the government from controlling the flow of public information and educational programming. Since the episode first came out in July, 2024, President Trump has re-entered office, and has taken a number of steps to discredit and disassemble the free press, including public media. Trump has called for the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, to investigate NPR and other public media organizations for their use of corporate support. He also recently announced that he had fired three members of the CPB’s five-member board, something the CPB has said he does not have the authority to do, in a lawsuit they filed against his administration. And finally, alongside calling for Congress to defund the CPB, he issued an executive order telling the CPB to halt all funding to public media, which, as you’ll learn more about in the episode, is the kind of political directive that the CPB was created to prevent in the first place. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now streaming on Paramount Plus. I'm Dexter Morgan. I've been killing killers for half my life. It gets to you. You're having a midlife crisis. I'm not ready for this. He's back. I'm older. I'm wiser. And sharper than ever. Things are gonna get messy. But if I can't believe in myself, I can't believe in anything. Dexter Resurrection. New season now streaming on the Paramount Plus Premium Plan.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Glimmer, the new eau de parfum by Estee Lauder. An amber floral fragrance with a gourmand twist with notes of Macaron Rose Accord, Amber Embrace Accord, and shimmering patchouli. A glimmer is a small, unexpected moment of joy that shifts your energy and how you feel. A scent to be felt, remembered, and shared. Discover more at estee lauder.com. What makes you glimmer?

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a Berry Chantilly Cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  Hi, this is Christina from Civics 101 here. I just wanted to drop in to give you a little update before you listen to this episode about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. We made this episode last year, and it set out to answer a couple of questions. First, why does the federal government set aside taxpayer dollars for public media? And second, what is public media in the first place? Here's what's changed since that episode came out. President Trump has re-entered office and has taken a number of steps to discredit and disassemble the free press, including public media. Now, calls to defund public media are nothing new. They've been around since, basically, the creation of a funding model to direct taxpayer dollars to public media organizations through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Over four decades ago.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  However, I wanted to mention a couple of things that President Trump is doing that are new and that we do not specifically address in that episode. First, Trump has called for the FCC, that's the Federal Communications Commission, to investigate NPR and other public media organizations for their use of corporate support. He also recently announced that he had fired three members of the CPB's five-member board, something the CPB has said he does not have the authority to do in a lawsuit they filed against his administration. And finally, alongside calling for Congress to defund public media, he recently issued an executive order telling the CPB to halt all funding to public media, which, as you'll learn about in the episode, is the kind of political directive that the CPB was created

• 2:57Speaker 03

  to prevent in the first place. Thanks for listening.

• 3:01Hannah McCarthy?

  Go for it.

• 3:12Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 3:14Nick Capodice?

  I'm Nick Capodice.

• 3:15Hannah McCarthy?

  I am Rebecca Lavoie.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  And I'm Christina Phillips.

• 3:18Hannah McCarthy?

  Christina, why did you gather all of us here today?

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Well, as you remember, we were recently in Washington DC. And while we were there, I decided to go talk to some people who are, I would say, our closest connection to the federal government. And I say "our" meaning this podcast, the radio station we work at, which is to say that I went to the offices of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

• 3:43Nick Capodice?

  Ooh.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  Yes. They distribute government funding to public media organizations like ours. And there are several reasons I did this interview. One, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created by the federal government, which naturally makes it a civics topic. Two, its history and function are embedded in this very democratic idea of a free press that, to quote the Supreme Court in 1971, "serves the governed, not the governors." And three, because the idea of the government using taxpayer dollars to fund public media Is a political issue.

• 4:20Speaker 06

  It is.

• 4:21Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, it's super political. I mean, there are plenty of politicians and voters alike who do not necessarily think that the government should give taxpayer dollars to public media organizations, especially if those organizations are not covering certain issues the way that perhaps they feel those issues should be covered.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Usually with an episode that I work on, I'll interview people, I'll write a script for you to record. And this time, I wanted to break the format because I feel like it's worth talking through this as a group because unlike other topics, we're going to be talking about ourselves. And I think that it would be weird to do a traditional episode where we explain a subject that is essentially about our work without acknowledging that.

• 5:02Nick Capodice?

  To that end, can we start with just sort of a big old disclaimer?

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:06Nick Capodice?

  Okay, everybody, hi, I'm Nick. Civics 101 is a show made at a public media organization, NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. And to be clear, NHPR gets money from the federal government through the Corporation for Public Broadcast.

• 5:25Hannah McCarthy?

  A small amount of money. So basically, like what Nick is saying is that some tax dollars go to helping our station run, and we receive those dollars in the form of a grant.

• 5:35Nick Capodice?

  And to be very clear, when Civics 101 first started, way back in 2017, we got an additional grant on top of like NHPR's station grant from the CPP to fund the creation of this, this show. And then we got another grant, I think a year later or two years later, to continue funding the show. But that was a while back.

• 5:55Speaker 06

  And we're no longer running on CPP money with this show as of today. So we're no longer a grant-funded show from the CPP, to be clear, except for the grant that our station gets, a tiny portion of our budget.

• 6:11Hannah McCarthy?

  And we're here to talk about the government's role in public media, specifically in relation to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, right? I think it would be disingenuous to imply that we do not have some professional stake in government policies having to do with public media. Like, do all of us here love and value public media and want to keep our jobs and want our work to be trusted and useful for our listeners? Yes, we do. Like, so that is our perspective.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. Yeah. And also, the perspective of the person I talked to for this episode from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Maybe one day with technology. This is Anne Brockman. She's the Senior Vice President of External Affairs at the CPB. And basically, her job is to spend every day on the Hill, talking to legislators about how public media works and why it matters.

• 7:07Speaker 07

  We try to get to the Hill every single day to talk to members or their staff. And we really bring in a couple pieces of paper. One is the amount of money from CPB to all the stations in their state or district. And then we have what we call a state story. So here's all the things that CPB support enables services-wise or content creation in the state, so they can really see the value of the appropriation locally, serving their constituents.

• 7:36Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay. So, does this sound like any other kind of job that you're familiar with?

• 7:41Nick Capodice?

  Yeah. So, my question was, is she registered as a lobbyist? Or is that, is it not lobbying, what she's doing?

• 7:47Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah. Do you want to just define what a lobbyist is, and then I can tell you why she's not?

• 7:51Nick Capodice?

  Oh, fascinating, of course. So, a lobbyist is somebody who spends a certain amount of time, and I think also a certain amount of money, talking to people in Washington DC, talking to politicians, to not necessarily convince them to do what they want, but just to provide them with as much information as possible to benefit their industry that they represent. One thing that kind of shocked me from another episode that I did is that lobbyists... Don't change your mind. They just provide information. They help you write a bill. They help you get something through legislation that usually never happens. So a lot of members of Congress really depend on lobbyists. And lobbyists will tell you that their right to lobby is enshrined in the Constitution, in the First Amendment.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:33Nick Capodice?

  So lobbyists are fascinating, but I'm desperate to know why she's not a lobbyist, even though that's what she's doing.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the difference here is that, so her salary and the salary of her colleague, who go to the Hill, that comes out of CPB funding, and that funding comes from the government. They are not paid by any sort of outside interest. They, like, our station couldn't donate a bunch of money to the CPB to help the CPB advocate on our behalf, or on behalf of public media.

• 9:02Speaker 07

  Sometimes we'll go up and we'll host briefings with congressional caucuses. There's a Congressional Public Broadcasting Caucus, the Congressional Rural Caucus, the Congressional Firefighting Caucus, public safety caucuses, because public media touches all these different aspects of our nation. And so it's a lot of educating. We are allowed to do technical advice. So sometimes a committee, when they're writing or drafting legislation, they will reach out to CPB and say, how would this impact public broadcasting or CPB? And in that regard, we do have a statutory recognized role to engage with and provide feedback.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  And I do feel like, we've been saying this phrase, "public media, public broadcasting" a lot, and that definition didn't really come from nowhere. And so we're going to talk about all the things a station would have to do to get the CPB funding later. But is there any sort of definition, like, how would you guys define the difference between public media and, say, commercial media?

• 10:03Speaker 06

  Well, for one, public media is, generally speaking, a not-for-profit organization.

• 10:09Speaker 06

  That isn't funded by commercial interest, nor does it exist to make a profit at the end of the year on its balance sheet. So that's a big, important component of it. And public media has to abide by certain federal communications guidelines in order to retain its status as, quote, "public media." So those are some of the fundamentals.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the key thing here is that public media is not serving any sort of investors or stakeholders. I think there are three words that I see kind of all over government regulation that I want you to keep in mind when we talk about public media, and those are non-commercial, informational, and educational. And that you see a lot, especially in regulations from the FCC, which is the Federal Communications Commission, which is the agency that regulates radio, television, wire, satellite, now cable communications. And despite the fact that the FCC was created in the 1930s, Congress didn't actually establish the CPB until 1967, which I think is kind of interesting. And I want to talk a little bit about the history of how we got from there to here. And so I think the first thing

• 11:15Speaker 03

  that stood out to me is that the FCC decided back in the 1940s to reserve certain frequencies on radio broadcast for this public programming. So specifically, you're listening to an FM radio, you know, you can usually find a public radio station in like the lower end.

• 11:31Speaker 06

  Down at the bottom or down at the top?

• 11:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  Most people who are listening to this are going to hear ads.

• 11:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Right?

• 11:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  So I think we have to talk about why Civics 101 and tons of other public media podcasts do run commercial ads.

• 11:50Speaker 06

  Right.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  We have to talk about it.

• 11:52Speaker 06

  Not all public radio podcasts run ads, to be clear. It's a choice that we've made here at New Hampshire Public Radio as part of our business model. What you hear on public radio stations, when you hear companies mention, those are not advertisements. It's called corporate underwriting. And essentially, the difference between those messages and advertisements is that they are not allowed to have, quote, "calls to action," and they're not allowed to have value statements in them, such as, "so-and-so law firm is the very best law firm at doing wills and estates," or whatever. They're not allowed to have those kinds of value statements, and they're not allowed to say things like, Go to our website in order to get a sale on blank. So that would be a call to action.

• 12:37Speaker 06

  Those ads are not allowed to do that. What you hear instead is so and so law firm is proud to support this public radio station and its journalism since 1985. For more information, go to so and so law firm.com. Like, that is what-

• 12:50Nick Capodice?

  If you want, you know, you don't have to.

• 12:52Speaker 06

  It's not a value statement and it's not a call to action. So that is what is allowed and it's basically, it's being sold to the company as you are supporting our work and your brand is associated with our work. So it's sort of being sold like an ad, but it does not present like an ad. That's an FCC rule. On-demand audio made by public radio stations is not bound by the same FCC rules as our broadcast. So we are allowed to monetize our on-demand or podcast audio with ads. We're allowed to and it does not fall within those guidelines. So here at NHPR and at some other stations, we have made the decision that in order to be able to do what we do, we are operating in a commercial

• 13:34Speaker 06

  podcast space that we should participate in an economy that allows us to make a little bit of money, such as to fund some of what we do through commercial advertisement. So that's why you hear ads on our podcast.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  Okay, so that's commercials not okay on public radio or television broadcast unless they're following those rules you just laid out, Rebecca. And one other thing I'll mention is that on broadcast and on-demand, we do not endorse political candidates or run any political advertising of any kind.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Now, back to the history. The FCC has codified into law the difference between public broadcasting and commercial media, and it has set aside space on the radio dial for public broadcasting, specifically that non-commercial, educational, informational programming. And then a little thing called television came along.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  By the 1950s, more than half of Americans have TVs in their home. We've got I Love Lucy, Bonanza, The Tonight Show. We've got commercials.

• 14:43Speaker 08

  Why do salads taste so much better with Best Foods Real Mayonnaise? Because of Best Foods' superb ingredients.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  And we've got the Chair of the FCC, Newton Minow, calling the television landscape "a vast wasteland."

• 14:57Speaker 09

  Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  So then, in 1952, the FCC sets aside certain television channels for non-commercial educational television. And one thing that Ann talked a lot about was, the idea was to have television channels that children could watch, that families could watch. Like, there's something that you can kind of set on and not worry about it.

• 15:35Speaker 07

  And Chairman Minow at the time was instrumental in really pushing and advocating for educational television. In 1962, Congress recognized educational television, but we're still five years before the Public Broadcasting Act came along. But they said, yeah, there should be this thing for expanding educational television. So they set aside about $32 million in matching funds to really help construct these new stations across America. They more than doubled the number of educational stations from about 80 to about 190.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  And this is when we start seeing the kind of programming that defines public media today. We've got the documentaries, the national educational shows, including the first American broadcasting of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, the kind of programs that you think of when you think of PBS nowadays.

• 16:30Speaker 06

  There are a lot of local programming.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 16:32Speaker 06

  A ton of local, like, puppet programming and, like, local hosts doing, like, interactive stuff with kids and stuff like that.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  So eventually, we get to 1967. This is when the federal government passed the Public Broadcasting Act, which establishes this government appropriation for public broadcasting.

• 16:53Speaker 07

  So specifically, the Public Broadcasting Act authorized the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And we are a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan corporation. And our purpose really is to facilitate the development of a public telecommunications system, providing universal access to programs of high quality, diversity, creativity, excellence, innovation, but also with a really strict adherence to objectivity and balance.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  And shortly after the CPB was created, it established NPR and PBS, National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. These are independent, nonprofit media organizations that are not in any way owned or operated by the government. They have their own newsrooms. They make their own national programming that then can be purchased and distributed by local public media stations. And NPR and PBS are not the only nationally focused public media organizations that do this. But I do think of this as kind of like the consolidation and rebranding of some of those big existing national public media institutions that were already in place before the CPB was created.

• 18:02Speaker 06

  But they don't exclusively get their funding from the CPB anymore, right?

• 18:04Speaker 03

  No.

• 18:05Speaker 06

  They also raise money through philanthropy, other grants.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Yes. NPR, for example, they say that they get less than 1% of their operational funding from CPB. It's a little bit more complicated. We'll talk about that. So I asked Anne how much money the CPB gets and how that money is spent, how it's distributed amongst stations. And this is what she said.

• 18:24Speaker 07

  Currently, and fiscally, year 2024, our appropriation is $525 million. CPB is capped at 5% for administrative costs, which is our building rent or salaries, just basic, you know, operational expenses. Congress says we have to spend at least 6% on system support. And in that, we pay for all the music royalties, copyright licensing fees, research on behalf of the system. Most of our funding, more than 70% of our funds, go right out the door to all the stations across the country, 1,500 locally owned and operated. And so, stations can decide how best to use them to support their community.

• 19:06Speaker 07

  That could be local content creation, educational outreach, local journalism and news, or to buy national content as well. Congress does provide CPB with a separate appropriation, $60 million each year, to provide for the satellites, the fiber in the ground, to distribute all this content. Our stations also, most people don't know, are part of our nation's public alert and warning system. And so, when a alert, you know, we think about it, we get it on our cellphones today. But how did that alert get to your cellphone? And it's through public media's satellites in the sky and the transmitters on the ground as well, sending that to your local service provider.

• 19:50Speaker 07

  We've also been major investors in early childhood education programs, both for the broadcasts, but all the streaming and the games than where kids are these days. And those shows, I would say, they're not inexpensive to make.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  I think this is something that's really important. There was a lot of debate about the government's role in this media that it was now funding. There's a difference between government-run media and public media, which we alluded to earlier. There's this idea that, like, if you're funding this media, like, will you have ownership of it? So I'm wondering, can someone give me a definition of government-run media?

• 20:31Hannah McCarthy?

  So government-run media, I think, pretty broadly, you could say, is considered any media that is owned and operated by, or extraordinarily influenced and controlled by, the federal government. I think that the sort of insidious, scary, embedded element of that is government-run media is almost de facto propaganda. Government-run media is basically a government arm, right? And the government's going to represent itself within its best interests, right?

• 21:02Nick Capodice?

  So when we did our episode on is America the freest, you know, the freest country in the world, we talked about the freedom of the press. I learned about some countries that do have state-controlled or government-controlled media, and what's interesting is it's always the radio. The radio is the form of media that the government always tries to control because it's free, and because it's cheap, and it's most accessible. You can be working and listening to a radio. You can't be working, maybe, and watching a TV at the same time.

• 21:28Speaker 07

  Very simply, CPB has no role in content or editorial decision-making. And Congress was very clear, and it was a big, intense debate during the making of the Public Broadcasting Act. You know, someone asked during the '67 debate, "How can the federal government provide a source of funds to pay part of the cost of educational broadcasting and not control the final product?" And their answer to that was CPB. Congress said that one of the fundamental reasons for establishing the corporation is to remove the programming activity from governmental supervision. So CPB was set up to be that heat shield, that firewall.

• 22:11Speaker 07

  We do have the objectivity and balance requirements within the act, but at the same time, we are told, we cannot get involved in any editorial decision-making or control of stations or content. So there's tension between those two requirements.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  Now, just because CPB does not get involved in any editorial decision-making, that doesn't mean it has no oversight on what kind of programming it funds at all. The CPB is required to maintain this objectivity and balance requirement that Anne referenced, which basically means that it sets strategic goals for public media and lays out the kind of projects it will fund, and keeps an eye on how public media organizations that get funding are living up to those goals. And those goals are set and overseen by CPB management and a board of nine people appointed by the president, approved by Congress, that's required to have no more than five people from the same political party. They're made up of people who work in public media or have some sort of media background.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  And Anne gave me a summary of some of those strategic goals right now.

• 23:16Speaker 07

  They came up, working with CPB management, with the three Ds: digital, diversity, and dialogue. And the three Ds guide CPB's investments in all of our grant-making. And digital is the innovation, making sure we're reaching Americans on every platform and how they want to consume content, and just being more cutting-edge. Diversity: age, geographic, viewpoint, gender, ability, disability, race, ethnicity. And then dialogue: how are we engaging with our community?

• 23:50Speaker 03

  Thoughts?

• 23:51Nick Capodice?

  Can I relate to you all, you know, the process from which our show got started?

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I would love that, yeah.

• 23:58Nick Capodice?

  So I was one of three people who went to Washington DC to talk about Civics 101. And this was in order to like, secure further funding to make sure the show could exist. The people from the CPB that I met with and two others met with, they did say, you know, "This is the kind of thing that would get support." You know, "This is the kind of program, but you have to defend it. You have to like, say what you're gonna do as a show, and then we will decide whether or not that meets all our criteria." But initially, you can say there's no editorial process, but we were advised, like, this is what's gonna fly and this is what's not. But, once that was done, to a much broader point, since I've started working on the

• 24:40Nick Capodice?

  show, I have not once, for a second, had anybody communicate with me to be like, hey, you still doing XYZ, or like, you know, you following up with blah, blah, blah. Like, it's our show, we make it, and nobody tells us anything.

• 24:51Hannah McCarthy?

  Right. Yeah, and I would like, I want to talk about this a little bit, if I may. Like, so this idea of, okay, so the CPB is being described as like this firewall between the government and the public radio station, and I think also, like, there is a firewall between the CPB and the radio station itself, right? So, the like, the driving force of that is the understanding, like, that the proliferation of information to the American people is a very powerful thing, and that if the government is allowed to control that, that is not the free flow of information, truth, and the press, right? And so, what I think is kind of remarkable about the creation of the CPB is that it's

• 25:33Hannah McCarthy?

  one of these instances of American history in which it's like, there's something very ideological about it. Writing down in a law that, yes, we're going to support the free press, because the free flow of information that is not influenced by the government, by anyone in charge, is really, really important, because, Nick, you know, you're describing this experience of not being influenced, not being told what to say and what not to say. The whole democratic project, right? Like, what keeps happening in America is that the government tells us we have something, and so we say, we have this, this is ours, right? You told us we have it, and like, I defy you to show me a journalist who does not firmly believe in that, right? Like-

• 26:19Hannah McCarthy?

  There's nobody on staff here. There's no like, and I know Rebecca, our executive producer, stands behind this very much. Like, the protection that the media feels over the ability to find the truth and report the truth without anyone telling them they can't.

• 26:33Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 26:34Hannah McCarthy?

  Is so vital to us that the stink that we would make, right?

• 26:39Nick Capodice?

  Yeah.

• 26:40Hannah McCarthy?

  Like, you would hear about it because we're reporters. Like, it would be in the news. And you do, on occasion, come across a story where a reporter's like, "I didn't like this, and I'm going to put it in the news." You know, like, I'm going to make sure the American people know if anyone tries to influence me.

• 26:55Nick Capodice?

  Can you even imagine if any journalist that we know and work with, like, got an email from the Corporation Public Radio Cast and was like, "Hey, can you make sure to cover this story?" Like, it would be like Watergate. Like, nobody would shut up about it.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  Well, actually, I do have an example of a time when the CPB did try to weaken that firewall or sort of stepped over that firewall. Is anyone familiar with this? It was in the early 2000s.

• 27:27Speaker 06

  Ringing a bell. Keep going.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  Okay, so Kenneth Tomlinson was the chairman of the CPB board in the early 2000s. He was appointed in 2003 by George W. Bush, and he was pretty outspoken about the fact that he found certain programming on NPR and PBS to be too liberal. And so, without permission, he used over $10,000 in CPB funds to commission a conservative consultant to write reports about partisan bias on public media programs, including a show called Now with Bill Moyers on PBS and The Diane Ream Show, which was a public radio program. And one thing that this consultant was doing was tracking things like how often the president was criticized

• 28:11Speaker 03

  on the show, for example. And then the other thing he did is that he pushed for counter-programming to Bill Moyers on PBS in the form of a talk show with conservative columnists from The Wall Street Journal. So, two big problems here. He used CPB funds without permission to hire a consultant with a political agenda to study programs to determine whether or not they had political agendas. And then he tried to have an editorial role in PBS by telling them what kind of programs they should have, down to the specific hosts he wanted in the seats. And he did end up resigning from the board after he was investigated by CPB's inspector

• 28:51Speaker 03

  general. So that is one example of how the idea of non-partisanship and a strict firewall isn't always impervious to political influence, and then how that played out.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  And after a quick break, we're going to talk about what stations like ours must do to get funding from the federal government and how that money is used. We'll also talk about the difference between us and NPR, because yes, we are different.

• 29:32Nick Capodice?

  There is nothing quite like having stuff in your closet that you love and you know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that feeling. And this holiday season, Quince is where I'm finding those pieces. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and it is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories that cut out the middleman, so you get luxury quality pieces without the luxury price tag. As this lovely fall is winding to a close and we slouch into winter, I wish

• 30:12Nick Capodice?

  more than anything, someone had gifted me a yak wool hoodie. I'm dead serious. It's good enough for the yak. I mean, it works really well for the yak, right? It would work for me. And it looks hot. So give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK as well. And last thing, when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Civics 101. It's the best way to support the show. All right.

• 30:52Nick Capodice?

  Have any of you out there ever Googled your own name, like actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing, there are companies called data brokers, whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over, so your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once, and they keep working in the background.

• 31:37Nick Capodice?

  You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 31:57Speaker 10

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 31:59Speaker 11

  It's me, the

• 32:00Speaker 10

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 32:02Speaker 11

  We don't need the jingle twice.

• 32:03Speaker 10

  What about a third time?

• 32:05Speaker 11

  Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights, and rental cars.

• 32:12Speaker 10

  Seems like they decided.

• 32:14Speaker 11

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.

• 32:18Speaker 10

  Time to read the timeline.

• 32:20Speaker 11

  Fine. No one deals more deals than

• 32:22Speaker 10

  Priceline.

• 32:23Speaker 11

  Please stop.

• 32:23Speaker 10

  Priceline.

• 32:24Speaker 11

  Touche.

• 32:25Speaker 10

  Priceline.

• 32:29Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, we're back. This is Civics 101 from New Hampshire Public Radio. I am Hannah McCarthy. I'm here in the studio today with Nick Capodice, Rebecca Lavoie, Christina Phillips, of course. And Christina, you are walking us right now through how public media works. And you're going to tell us what a place like us, like NHPR, needs to do to receive government money.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. And first, I want to answer one of the biggest questions any of us gets at any time when we say we work at NHPR, which is, are we NPR? Do you work for NPR? Do you know Terry Gross? Do you know?

• 33:05Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah. Terry Gross doesn't work for NPR.

• 33:07Nick Capodice?

  He works for WHYY.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  Which is another member station. Is anyone, does anyone want to take a crack at the, like, what is NHPR compared to NPR? How are we connected?

• 33:15Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, I answer this question all the time.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 33:17Hannah McCarthy?

  So.

• 33:18Speaker 06

  NPR is essentially a big vendor of ours. I mean, that's the best way to describe it. They're not like a parent company. We are an independent nonprofit. We buy programming from NPR to license and play on our airways. So basically, we are buying programming from NPR, All Things Considered, Morning Edition, you know, other programs. And we sort of have a co-branding agreement with them, a licensing co-branding agreement. But we pay them for that. Like, we pay them a big pile of change for that. So they're basically like a giant vendor for us. It's sort of how it works. And we have a, like, a loose relationship with them.

• 33:59Speaker 06

  And, you know, station leadership, our station leader is not at this point in this position, but station heads like ours are actually on the board of NPR. So they actually have a little bit of control of, like, how NPR operates and so forth. But yeah, we're actually independent, but associated with, by content.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I will say that the big thing there is that we have our own newsroom. We've got our own journalists. We make our own stuff. And we can also purchase programming from other affiliate stations like ours. They're called member stations.

• 34:30Speaker 06

  And, and other networks. We purchase programming from APM, PRX, which is another independent nonprofit. There's other organizations like that from which you can buy programming. WHYY distributes Fresh Air. There's other distributors, other networks, that actually sell stuff to stations like ours as well.

• 34:52Speaker 06

  Music swell, next time.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  I want to talk through some of the things that you need to do in order to qualify for CPB funding. So you could be a public media organization and still not qualify for CPB funding. There's, like, an additional layer of things you need to do in order to, like, get that money. And so there are half a dozen big ones. We already said a couple, which... You have to be a nonprofit or affiliated with a university school or even a local government. And then another thing that we alluded to is that we cannot run political advertisements or endorse political candidate. So unlike, you know, the New York Times being like, we have endorsed whoever for president. None of that. And we will never run like a political ad. Right.

• 35:37Nick Capodice?

  It's so weird when I listen to other radio stations, you're just driving around and all of a sudden it's like a presidential candidate being like, vote for me, Donald Trump. Like, whoa, this doesn't happen on the radio. It sure does.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  It says a lot about your listening habits. You're like, wait a minute.

• 35:53Speaker 07

  You also have to have a certain number of employees. You have to have for certain stations, a community advisory board in your community.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  It has to report its finances transparently to the public. In our case, our nonprofit 990, like there's other forms that we share basically saying like, here's where all our money is going. You can look at those all the time. I love looking at nonprofit 990s. They're like one of my favorite things. It has to be overseen by a board of directors that are invested in the community that the programming is serving and don't own a profit from their board service. So NHPR's board has a mix of people who are living in New Hampshire. The board is beholden to the public that this station is serving. And then the other thing that I thought was interesting is that in order to get CPB funding, you have to have money in the bank already.

• 36:42Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 36:50Speaker 07

  For a public television station, for example, you have to have at least $800,000 in private, non-federal support, which means viewers like you. It means local foundations, local businesses, maybe state support.

• 37:06Speaker 07

  Because CPB has determined over the years that you need at least $800,000 to offer a really strong public broadcasting service for public television. Public radio, we also have certain minimums you have to have financially. So the most is $300,000 if you're a larger station. If you're a rural station, minority station, it's $100,000.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  The CPB is not just going to go out and be like, I think there should be a public radio station here. We're just going to dump a bunch of money and hire people. Like, there has to be somebody in a place with some capital saying, we want to start a station. Or we're already a station. We're doing all these things you need us to do.

• 37:46Nick Capodice?

  That makes sense. You know, you don't want to back a bad pony or anything like

• 37:50Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. Yeah.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  As I had mentioned earlier, NPR has reported that it only gets about 1% of its budget from the CPB. And it's also worth pointing out that there are a lot of incentives and tax breaks on the federal, state, and local level for public broadcasting, public media. I say that because the idea of public media only existing because of this government funding through the CPB, it's not a complete picture. Right. And the idea of the government creating a space for public broadcasting has existed for a really long time, way before the government was like, okay, we're allocating this money to these stations. Right.

• 38:30Nick Capodice?

  Let me just ask, a station like ours, NHPR, what percentage of our budget is money that comes from the CPB?

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Do you guys have a guess? No.

• 38:40Nick Capodice?

  I have a guess. You go guess.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  I've looked it up. Okay, so it's 6.3% for the fiscal year of 2023. Yeah, it's surprisingly low. Yeah. And if you wanted to, by the way, go to nhr.org, or you can just Google NHPR 990. You can look at our 990s and it will break down how much money we got from federal grants. So it's more than half a million dollars. And I know that that's about what we pay NPR for our programming. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I could look it up and do it. It's a pretty close match. Like, it's, it's a lot.

• 39:12Speaker 03

  Hi, hello. Christina from the future breaking in here. So, listen, I went back and looked this up, and in the last fiscal year, that's July 2022 through June 2023, we actually spent more money buying content from NPR than we got from the CPB. I'm rounding here for simplicity's sake, but we got $580,000 from the CPB. That's money from taxpayers, the federal government through the CPB, and we spent around $739,000 on NPR programming. Overall, we spent about $900,000 on what's called affiliate program acquisition fees. That includes the NPR programming and then also programming we purchased from other public media organizations. But yeah, most of the money we spent acquiring national programming

• 39:57Speaker 03

  went directly to NPR, and it was more money than we got from the CPB. And that programming includes national and international news that you hear in the morning and the evening throughout the day from shows like Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition.

• 40:18Speaker 03

  The other thing is I'll say is I asked Ann, the average public television station gets 18% of its funding from the CPB. The average public radio station gets about 8%. But rural stations, including tribal stations, might get 80, 90, 100% of their budget from the CPB.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  And the last thing is that a public media organization does not have to be affiliated with NPR or PBS in order to get funding from the CPB.

• 40:43Speaker 07

  You know, people think that to get CPB money, you have to be a PBS member, you have to be a NPR member. And that's not the case. There's nothing in the Public Broadcasting Act that says CPB can only give dollars to those stations who belong. We have about a handful of public television stations. I call them hyper-local, meaning they're not PBS members, but they do independent programming, local programming. And on the NPR side, about a third of our stations are not NPR member stations, but they're doing music and content, music programming, and jazz, and classical, and local talk. Some tribal stations are keeping their local native languages alive. We have one tribal station that's 100% and it's also a sole, sole service station,

• 41:28Speaker 07

  meaning there's no other broadcaster within a 50-mile radius of that station. And so rural stations typically are about 19% of a rural station's budget. And more than half of all of our rural grantees, which is about 135 stations, rely on CPB for at least 25% of their revenue. And we have 50 rural stations, many on Native American reservations, who rely on CPB funding for at least 50% of their revenue. And rural stations have more challenges as well. I mean, they have more infrastructure to maintain and operate over a larger geographic area with fewer viewers or listeners there to help financially support the station.

• 42:12Speaker 07

  And if it weren't for CPB and the federal investment, those Americans would not have access to news or informational, educational content, or even cultural programming.

• 42:25Speaker 03

  We'll be right back.

• 42:32Speaker 03

  This is Civics 101 from New Hampshire Public Radio. And today, we are talking about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and how public media is funded. But now we need to get to the thing, the political thing. Are you ready for the political thing? Yeah. Okay.

• 42:48Speaker 12

  From 480 million to zero. That's the Trump administration's budget proposal for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the organization.

• 42:56Speaker 13

  The GOP sponsor of the bill says a government, trillions of dollars in debt, should not pay for, quote, "non-essential services."

• 43:03Speaker 14

  Indiana Congressman Jim Banks among a growing list of conservative lawmakers to push to defund NPR with a new bill that would outright block federal funding for the news organization, accusing Congress of spending taxpayer money on, quote, "low-grade propaganda."

• 43:23Speaker 03

  So there was a piece of legislation that was introduced from Representative Jim Banks, he's a Republican from Indiana, called the Defund NPR Act. And so this is, I think, interesting because it gets back to that idea of NPR only getting quote unquote 1% or less from the CPB, but then actually getting a lot of money from stations like ours that use the money that we earn and get in grants to buy their programming. The demand in that is that no federal funds may directly or indirectly be made available to use or support an organization named in subsection B, in subsection B it was NPR,

• 44:03Speaker 03

  including the payment of dues or the purchase of programming from such an organization by a public broadcast station using federal funds received by such stations. So that's a little bit confusing. Essentially, what they're saying is that NPR cannot get funding from the federal government and anyone that gets money from the federal government is not allowed to use federal funds to buy NPR programming.

• 44:25Nick Capodice?

  Wow.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:27Nick Capodice?

  You know what's interesting? I've heard in my whole life, ever since I was a kid, this call to defund NPR and PBS too at times. What I think is kind of funny is that everybody who is in the camp of let's defund it always says the same thing, which is, well, we can't because they're just going to say you're going after Cookie Monster and Big Bird. And wow, we can't do that. That some people look at the acquisition and creation of Sesame Street as like a nefarious way to make sure that you never lose funding from the government.

• 44:56Speaker 15

  Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, Dennis Kozlowski, criminals, gluttons of greed, and the evil genius who towered over them, one man has the guts to speak his name.

• 45:07Speaker 08

  Big Bird, Big Bird, Big Bird.

• 45:09Speaker 11

  It's me, Big Bird.

• 45:10Speaker 15

  Big, yellow, a menace to our economy. Mitt Romney knows it's not Wall Street you have to worry about, it's Sesame Street. I'm going to stop the subsidy to PBS. Mitt Romney, taking on our enemies no matter where they nest.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  And I will say, I did go and look through the funding history of the CPB over years. And there are certainly years where you see the funding appropriation not go up for a while or maybe go down a little bit. The CPB has never been defunded, but there have been fluctuations that you can kind of trace across eras of Congress, most typically when there is a Republican-led Congress. That just seems to be how it is.

• 45:52Hannah McCarthy?

  So one thing that I've always heard is that one of the reasons why these bills ultimately fail is that even conservative lawmakers ultimately who come from very rural districts know that their constituency would be very upset if public media were to go away because in some places that's the media. Like, public media is the TV because there's no broadband, there's no other stuff. That's the media. So that's something that I have heard every time this conversation happens.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't have a straight answer on that, but one thing I will say I think is interesting, and maybe it's just my gut instinct, is that public media is sort of super entrenched already. For example, the CPB works with FEMA and has received funding from FEMA to help implement emergency broadcast infrastructure across the United States. This is an essential service, and the CPB is essential in helping to build and maintain that kind of infrastructure. Now, that bill that Jim Banks proposed wouldn't necessarily impact that kind of funding, but it's still a good reminder that federal funding for public broadcasting goes far beyond funding individual media organizations like NPR.

• 47:06Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, but like, very, very importantly, right? If we go back to the reason that NPR exists, if we think about the original idea behind the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, behind national public radio, the idea is to bring in that fire-walled, like, closest thing to the truth that you can, national news, to all of these communities around the country, right? And so if you say you can no longer acquire, and not only can you no longer acquire, but like, the institution does not exist that has the most money, has bureaus all around the world, is able to pay for reporters absolutely everywhere, and

• 47:47Hannah McCarthy?

  gather national and international news in a way that a local radio station is not capable of doing, what that would mean is that these communities no longer have access to this non-commercial, national and international news. You know, I know that there are a lot of people out there who want something different, right? And who are in like, total support of that. I'm just saying that that's what it means, right? Like, that you lose that access.

• 48:22Nick Capodice?

  Quick question, Christina. How much money does the CPB get every year? Like, how much of my taxes are going towards the CPB?

• 48:31Speaker 07

  Funding for CPB each year is less than a cup of black, a large cup of black coffee at McDonald's per person per year. And I think a lot of Americans, they will say, oh, my gosh, we're paying so much money for our nation's public media service. I'm like, actually, if you go to McDonald's, you get a better bargain with all the services you're getting from CPB.

• 48:56Nick Capodice?

  I have final thoughts, but I've talked too much. So let someone else.

• 48:58Speaker 06

  No, thanks. I don't have any final. You can leave me some of that.

• 49:01Nick Capodice?

  Yeah? Let me just say to anybody out there, we, you know, the five of us in this room work at a public radio station. So trust me when I say this, in terms of like, what is objective? Christina, before you worked with us, what show did you work on?

• 49:17Speaker 03

  The Exchange.

• 49:18Nick Capodice?

  What's The Exchange?

• 49:19Speaker 03

  It was a live call-in news talk program.

• 49:22Nick Capodice?

  Okay, and you worked on that show for a while, and you helped book guests on that show. Let me just give you a hypothetical. Let's say you had a guest on in the morning who was going to talk about climate change and how like a glacier is melting and people are gonna... What, who, someone's gonna come up to you and say, who should the other guest be on the show?

• 49:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, if we were, it would be, you know, well, what other perspectives do we need to bring in? And if it's not going to be the expert in the room, we have open phones.

• 49:47Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, so we at public radio stations, more than anyone, self-police to try to find objectivity, to make sure that we're giving it a fair shake. I think sometimes to a fault.

• 49:59Speaker 06

  That's right. And I will say, working with the two of you, sometimes you worry too much about the perception of bias when you're just telling the truth. And this is a editorial conversation we have all the time. And I'm like, guys, just let your truth flag fly.

• 50:15Nick Capodice?

  Oh, did you have to use a flag?

• 50:18Hannah McCarthy?

  I also, I just want to say really quick, because like this conversation about like objectivity versus subjectivity. And I will just say, I am speaking only for myself, Hannah McCarthy, the individual, not for Civics 101, and like, not for this station. Objectivity does not exist. Like, no human being is capable of it. Like, that would be so interesting if we were. Like, I would love to do a story about it. I'll just say, for me, what I am doing on a daily basis is genuinely trying to find the closest thing to the truth, which, by the way, is a lot harder than it seems. Yep. Because we talk to a lot of people who have different perspectives, who are scholars, who are politicians, etc., who are like, either intentionally or not representing their

• 51:03Hannah McCarthy?

  own bias, their own subjectivity. And so, sometimes we try to triangulate, or sometimes we just like, read everything we possibly can. Often, the closest thing we can get to the truth is like, finding the law. And then like, saying like, "Okay, so like, the law says this, and if that person says this and it conflicts with the law, then we like, we know which one is true, because one thing is like, written down, right, by Congress." But my point is just like, it's less that we believe that we are like, wholly capable of presenting objectivity. I don't think it's possible. But every single day of our

• 51:42Hannah McCarthy?

  lives is committed fully to trying not to listen to the parts of ourselves that are subjective, and trying to seek out the closest thing to the truth and give that to people. Because like, my subjectivity doesn't help you. Like, my personal perspective does not help you at all. The truth will help you. Do what you will with the truth. Apply your subjectivity to the truth. I will just try to find it and give it to you. And...

• 52:10Speaker 06

  I would say we love getting part of our funding from an organization that, you know, doesn't interfere. But we also would do what we would do without it. Let's be real.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, and to Hannah's point about trying every day to get as close to the truth as we possibly can, I'll just say there's absolutely an argument that the federal government should not give money to public media organizations. You, listener, may feel that way. You may have felt that way before you listened to this episode. And whether you come down on the side of, yes, the federal government should pay for public media, or no, it shouldn't, if this episode helped you feel more informed in that opinion, if you learned something, then I've kind of done my job, right?

• 52:55Speaker 06

  That is it, right?

• 52:56Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 53:03Speaker 03

  This episode was produced by me, Christina Phillips, and edited by our executive producer, Rebecca Lavoy, with help from our hosts, Nick Cappadicei and Hannah McCarthy, and our summer intern, Catherine Hurley. Catherine, we are so happy to have you here. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 53:43Speaker 16

  Did you know that if your spouse goes missing and you don't tell anyone, that's not necessarily a crime? That surprising fact is at the heart of the brand-new season of Bear Brook, the critically acclaimed true crime podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio. I'm your host, Jason Moon. In this season, Bear Brook investigates another New Hampshire mystery. A Christmas tree farmer with dementia vanishes. His wife never reports him missing. Can he still be found? Don't miss it. Follow Bear Brook wherever you get your podcasts.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  Now streaming on Paramount+. I'm Dexter Morgan. I've been killing killers for half my life. It gets to you. You're having a midlife crisis. I'm not ready for that. He's back. I'm older. I'm wiser.

• 54:28Speaker 15

  And sharper than ever.

• 54:30Speaker 00

  Things are gonna get messy. But if I can't believe in myself, I can't believe in anything.

• 54:37Speaker 15

  Dexter Resurrection. New season now streaming on the Paramount Plus Premium Plan.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Glimmer, the new Eau de Parfum by Estee Lauder. An amber floral fragrance with a gourmand twist with notes of macaron rose accord, amber embrace accord, and shimmering patchouli. A glimmer is a small, unexpected moment of joy that shifts your energy and how you feel. A scent to be felt, remembered, and shared. Discover more at estee lauder.com. What makes you glimmer?