Weakened US public broadcasters will fight for their lives in 2025

This time could be different. Republicans’ focus on the media has never been remotely this intense. While PBS has found some success on YouTube, NPR’s incomplete digital transformation, declining radio listenership, and high-profile political stumbles have left it weaker than ever. Now there’s greater concern among public radio figures than there has been in years about the future of NPR and public radio broadly.

The threats also come at a moment when NPR and its member stations also face commercial rivals like The New York Times, Spotify, and other audio giants, who have challenged and in many cases weakened their longtime hold on listeners. And the differences between NPR and its member stations over the direction of public radio, and how best each can tackle changes to user behavior that have sucked audio audiences into podcasting, have made the path forward even less clear.

Republicans have been trying unsuccessfully to defund public media for much of its existence. When Richard Nixon wanted to halve the CPB’s budget in 1969, Fred Rogers (of Neighborhood fame) convinced a congressional committee on the spot to reverse the proposed cuts. Newt Gingrich pushed in 1995 to slash funding to public media when he was speaker of the House, as did George W. Bush every year he was in office and Trump during his first term. A narrow Republican majority in the House means even a single Republican defection from the defund cause would be fatal, while fighting defunding efforts has proved to be one of public media’s most time-tested skills.

But the business-as-usual attitude towards Republican threats ignores the strength of the current wave of conservative backlash to public media, and the weaker positions of many of even the most powerful NPR stations. In previous eras, these stations loomed large as the No. 1 option for listeners looking for news in their area. But in recent years, public radio has shed a third of its audience, which, like that of linear television, is increasingly old.

NPR’s chief political foes in previous eras acknowledged that public radio had good programming and served an important purpose, arguing instead that it was simply a waste of money. Their opposition wasn’t necessarily political.

This generation of defunders also believe the moment has changed. In an interview with me this week, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) cited the much publicized accusations of internal liberal bias by former NPR staffer Uri Berliner as a reason he believed NPR should not receive government funding. But he also argued that the changing media landscape meant that his constituents no longer saw much of a need for public radio.

“Time marches on, people are consuming their media very differently now than when Newt Gingrich was the speaker,” Perry said. And NPR has “completely showed itself to be an unnecessary — and quite honestly, because of the bias, the complete bias, self-admitted — a very inflammatory expenditure, for which many taxpayers feel there is not only little to no value, but a detrimental value.”

PBS CEO Paula Kerger since 2006 has used her connections with establishment Republicans to convince an increasingly conservative Congress that public local television stations deserve funding — even if their grip, too, has been weakened in recent years by changes in the media landscape. The growth of children’s programming online and the loss of broadcast rights of nearly universally beloved (and politically helpful) Sesame Street in 2016 to HBO have prompted conservative members to question what they’re still funding.

“One of the most popular parts of the public broadcasting portion, the TV portion, Sesame Street, was sold off,” Perry said. “It’s an acknowledgement that he world is changing.”

The incoming Republican-led Congress and White House — emboldened by their empowerment of alternative media — appear as serious as ever to follow through on their threat. This year alone, there were three different bills aimed at eliminating funding for NPR and CPB, and members such as Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.), who sponsored one of the bills, said they will be reintroduced again in the next congress.

“Not a dime of taxpayer dollars should be forced to go to these organizations,” Tenney told Semafor.

Public media still has a few strong cards to play. NPR and the CPB employ government affairs officials who have a 50-year-old successful lobbying playbook that they will run again in the spring. NPR has often leaned on rural Republicans whose constituents have fewer options for local news than their urban counterparts, or pressured members from swingy districts, whose more moderate voters still flip the dial to NPR on occasion.

But even if NPR and its peers beat back the looming political threats, the energy they will expend will continue to distract from a larger structural problem facing public radio. NPR and many of its member stations have continued to struggle to build a lifeline to the digital future, which could bring in new audiences and new sponsorship dollars.

NPR has had some successes in adapting its radio programming to digital audiences, most notably Up First, an abbreviated morning newscast that made Apple’s list of most listened-to podcasts this year, and its Tiny Desk Concert series, which has made the NPR Music account one of the most popular music channels on YouTube. But higher-ups within the organization and within public radio have looked with alarm at the rise of more nimble podcast competitors, chief among them The New York Times, which over the last decade took many of the lessons of public radio and built a series of audio shows that have eclipsed many flagship NPR programs. The Daily, the most popular news podcast in the country, now runs over the air on many public radio stations.

NPR has also failed to fully monetize both podcasts and its additional digital assets. In 2022, NPR hired former 21st Century Fox and Dreamworks executive Gordon Synn, saying that the move would “help us go where NPR has never gone before” with new content opportunities and negotiated partnerships and IP deals. Synn was also tasked with building out a bigger business around NPR’s series like Tiny Desk, which he was attempting to expand into an international franchise before he left. But earlier this fall, the organization quietly parted ways with Synn and some of his team.

Last year, NPR canceled four podcasts amid broader cuts aimed at closing a $30 million budget gap, and has since weighed offloading the dead podcasts to its for-profit audio competitors. Other efforts have gone nowhere. NPR and the member stations poured significant funds into Consider This, its attempt to replicate Up First with an afternoon news podcast pegged to a feature story from one of its non-D.C. affiliates. But that process proved to be too cumbersome, costly, and distracting for many member stations.

In my conversations with current and former NPR staff and higher-ups at member stations, some blamed the lack of more serious digital progress on the old-guard radio personalities who continue to prioritize traditional radio broadcasting over digital. Others blamed NPR’s corporate structure and dissonance between member stations and D.C.

Local radio stations are generally responsible for their own funding, which they raise through membership drives and sponsorships, and get a chunk of money from the CPB. They pay dues to NPR for the rights to broadcast its flagship programs, such as Morning Edition and All Things Considered. NPR’s organizational structure means that while the member stations pay dues to the NPR mothership in return for content, those stations’ leaders also sit on its board, giving them some sway over the larger organization.

NPR and some of the public radio stations have been at odds over how to confront the digital future and how to manage their relationship. Some stations were alarmed when National Public Media, the entity that sells ads for many NPR podcasts, began selling geotargeted ads on national podcasts, which stations saw as a threat to their local sponsorship dollars.

Some member stations have done well and attempted to craft their own unique brand independent of NPR. Oregon Public Radio, for example, built its own non-NPR website, and doesn’t even mention the association on its homepage.

But over the past several years, many of the biggest member stations themselves have faced fundraising challenges that have forced them to abandon many digital aspirations. WNYC has cut much of its podcast business, laid off staff, and deemphasized its digital news site, Gothamist. As Semafor first reported earlier this year, New York Public Radio CEO LaFontaine Oliver said candidly in a memo to employees, “Without swift action, we will soon face significant questions about our ability to continue to serve New York.” WAMU shuttered its local site DCist earlier this year, and both KCRW and LAist in Los Angeles laid off staff and cut podcasts this year. In March, San Francisco’s KQED cut 34 jobs and offered buyouts, citing a budget crunch.

Former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller told Semafor she was alarmed by public radio’s current slate of challenges and struggles to adapt to podcasting. She argued that the current organizational structure is antiquated, as some member stations still see NPR’s own content as a threat to their own relationship with their listeners.

“The challenge is: If NPR was going to put out podcasts, that would be bypassing the stations, right?” she said. “So this is probably, in my view, the single biggest source of slowness to be able to really launch meaningful podcasts, because you cannot bypass the stations. It’s a challenge, and it has really impeded innovation.”